Award-Winning GMing Advice
Gnome Stew won the silver ENnie Award for Best Blog in
2011 and
2010 -- thank you for your support! Online since 2008, we've published
1,109 articles packed with GMing tips and advice, as well as
two books for GMs. Our
top 30 articles make a great starting point for new readers.
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Pixedragon asked about several things that often tangle together into a big knot: mysteries, clues, and the GM's spotlight versus the player's flashlights. It also ties into the thrashing that often develops in a Sandbox setting. Here's what was asked: Hiya, I have a question concerning GMing, and it’s something I’ve noticed with other GM’s and in my own game.
We tend to play rather RP-heavy games so it’s ...
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 ...
A few weeks ago I was in a bit of a pickle (how the heck did that phrase come about?). I was supposed to start a new adventure for my WitchCraft game in an hour and I had nothing prepped for it but the vaguest of outlines (more like a mission statement and a couple of notes). Real life had gotten in the way over the last few ...
Janna at Dungeonmastering recently wrote up an interesting article about running non-linear games. They're a neat and slightly under-explored concept, so I thought I'd bring in other people's discussions and see what we can figure out. They are commonly discussed using a variety of names... sandbox play is another common example.
Core Concept
In one sentence: In a sandbox game, you wander around and do what you want instead of ...
“Or: How to draw aggro on a GMing blog”
One of the Holy Grails of gaming is the “sandbox game”, where there is no overarching meta-plot, or even individual plot arcs, but where the characters are put into a world that is both realistic and autonomous, and allowed to interact in that world however they see fit. To a True Believer of the Way of the Sandbox, everything else ...
