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.
"I check Gnome Stew every day." -- Monte Cook
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I sat there at the gaming table, waiting to actually game. We’d started an hour ago, and after all of the usual bullshitting around, looking up youtube videos, and sharing jokes, we’d finally gotten into it. A brief encounter that set us on our path and the Game Master had to look up some info. While we waited, one of the other players started asking advice about leveling ...
A while back my group got to the end of a campaign I was running and I was 4 steps beyond GM burnout. Deciding that no one wanted to pick up a new campaign of a couple of months, and deciding that we didn’t want to do a string of one shots, we bandied about many ideas for what we wanted to do. Finally, someone suggested we take ...
First Time GM is a series of articles dedicated to the newly-minted game master, making his or her first tentative die rolls behind the screen. Today’s article deals with establishing the ground rules of the game, and of the group itself. This is commonly referred to as the Social Contract, but I prefer the term Game Charter. What? More Rules? Over the years, a gaming group ...
We've all been there: The game is going gangbusters, but it's getting late. People have work or school in the morning, and you have to stop soon -- even though the adventure isn't over.
Before my baby daughter Lark was in the picture, I was up for gaming until two or three in the morning on Saturday nights. I could sleep in the next day without any worries, so ...
I forget... are we playing Saving Private Ryan, Doc Savage, or Dragonball Z today?
"I want to shoot him with my trusty .45, blowing him back through the door and into the room. In the chaos, I'm going to dive in the room after him, tumble behind the couch, and come up in a ready position."
"I'm going to run up the bamboo, jump off at thirty feet, bounce off ...
(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 ...
(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 ...
In the world of RPG's there are several classic RPG arguments that float around on various RPG blogs, message boards, and even raise their head in seminars at gaming conventions. I like to call these arguments, "spam arguments" because they are as original as the Nigerian 419 email message, and are just about as pointless. In hopes to have some kind of exorcism or cleansing ritual for ...
One of the most important and least-discussed elements in a successful game is a shared set of assumptions about how and why the game is played. But many gaming groups want to jump straight to "the fun stuff" without making sure that everyone shares the same definition of "fun" (or even the same definition of "stuff"). A few minutes or even hours spent ensuring that ...
