This wasn’t the article I intended to write today. I intended to write my long overdue Realms of Cthulu review, since I played Savage Worlds with Sean Preston and Sean Patrick Fannon at Con On The Cob and now feel familiar enough  with Savage Worlds to review it. But Martin’s article got me thinking, which is always a mixed blessing, and I got this one big question ...

Playing roleplaying games (often called "gaming") is a lifelong hobby for me. I started gaming when I was 10, and am still gaming regularly more than 20 years later. Without exaggeration, I can say that many of the best aspects of my life can be traced back to gaming. (If you'd like some background on me, check out my personal website.) This article is about the positive ways that ...

When you get right down to it, what is an RPG? It's an engine for making interesting decisions. When your players are playing in your campaign, at the most basic level they're doing one of two things: making decisions, or having stuff happen to their characters. Stuff happening to their characters is by far the less interesting of the two -- it's the decision-making that really matters. Game Mechanics and ...

This is the fourth and final article in this series -- the home stretch. My definition of "roleplaying-intensive" is in Part 1, along with tips 1-3; tips 4-6 are in Part 2 and tips 7-9 are in Part 3.) 10. Driftable Mechanics (This topic was suggested by Gnome Stew reader Irda Ranger -- excellent suggestion, IR.) "Drift" just means taking an element -- usually a mechanic -- from one RPG and ...

(The first three steps, and my definition of "roleplaying-intensive," are in Part 1; tips 4-6 are in Part 2.) 7. Make Good on Your Promises By this point, you've made two promises to your players, one explicit and one implicit: Here's the kind of game I'm going to run. This is the explicit promise you made in in step three, when you pitched a roleplaying-intensive campaign to your players. The follow-through ...

When I started up my current Mage: The Awakening chronicle, I made a conscious decision to not use battle maps. When combat or exploration comes up, I doodle sloppy maps on the huge white board in our game room, and adjust them on the fly. Signposts Could I have used battle maps instead? Sure -- but I wanted to put up a signpost for my players that says, "This aspect ...

(The first three steps -- and my definition of "roleplaying-intensive" -- are in the first post in this series.) 4. Choose Your System Wisely Suggested by the Stew's own Patrick Benson in the comments on the first roleplaying-intensive game post, picking a system that reinforces the kind of game you want to run is critical. Some games are just better suited to a focus on roleplaying than others -- despite all ...

There are probably as many ways to define "roleplaying-intensive" as there are gamers, but for talking purposes here's the definition I use: A game in which mechanics take a backseat to character interaction, where all (or nearly all) in-game decisions are purely character-driven and where most (or all) in-game conversation happens in-character. I've been running a Mage: The Awakening chronicle since October of 2007, and from the outset I ...