Posts Tagged by plots
| September 21, 2012 | Posted by Phil Vecchione |
I like to have personal plots in my campaigns; plots that focus on a single PC at a time. I like to weave the scenes for these personal plots (or stories) into the overall fabric of the game, and typically have a “round” of personal stories come up between adventures/missions. This stretches out the personal plot over a longer period of time (see The Carter Way). Sometimes coming up with a personal story for every player is easy, and sometimes a bit harder. Looking for…
| July 13, 2012 | Posted by Phil Vecchione |
I am madly in love with Kickstarter, and have been backing a number of projects since I discovered it last year. Earlier this year, I backed a very interesting project called Story Forge; a tarot-like set of cards for creating plot ideas and character backgrounds (genius!). This week, I got my deck of Story Forge cards and was dying to try them out. Overview and Review I will let the creator of Story Forge give you the full details on the cards and all their uses.…
| May 24, 2011 | Posted by Patrick Benson |
Today I am going to describe two ways of structuring your plots. One of these methods is bad and the other is good, but you need to understand both in order to see the value of one over the other. plot: Also called storyline. the plan, scheme, or main story of a literary or dramatic work, as a play, novel, or short story. (As defined by Dictionary.Reference.com.) All RPGs have a plot, in that all RPGs are telling a story of some type. Even your…
| May 25, 2010 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
Last week, I posted the first preview from the Stew’s soon-to-be-released book, Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters. The sci-fi plots chapter has come back from layout, so without further blathering, here’s the second sample: Eureka sample PDF #2. This time around, you’ll see a different group of authors — all of the gnomes contributed 55 plots apiece to Eureka, give or take a plot or two. You’ll also see the tools we’ve included to make these plots crazy-easy to use in your…
| November 3, 2009 | Posted by Patrick Benson |
As a player I recently experienced two opposite approaches to how a game master can react to the players’ input during a session. One GM made sure to incorporate what the PCs did into the game, and the other made sure to keep the plot on track with what he had prepared. I am not going to go into the details, but guess which game sucked? Game Master, Not Script Writer A lot of GMs plot their sessions along a story arc which is fine.…
| August 25, 2009 | Posted by Patrick Benson |
I hear people brag about their sandbox games. About how the players can have their PCs interact with the world in an unrestricted manner. How the gameworld is not bogged down with a plot that railroads the players, but instead the PCs encounter unique self-contained events that the PCs may investigate further or walk away from at any time. Every time I have played in a campaign advertised as a sandbox game the game itself was as boring as plain oatmeal. Yeah the PCs could…
| June 10, 2008 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
When it comes to your campaign, if you come across something you like — an idea, a character from a novel you’re reading, a cool scene from a movie — steal it and use it in your game. Period. There is absolutely no reason to be bashful about shamelessly borrowing and stealing elements from any source under the sun. If you like it and you think your players will like it, make it your own. This process is fun, saves you prep time and can…
