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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"If you aren’t reading Gnome Stew, you’re missing out." -- Wolfgang Baur
When you're running a longer campaign, there's always a danger that the story arcs you had in mind at the outset won't be the best option as you progress through the arc of the campaign itself.
This is often a good thing: Static, predetermined stories can be awesome, but they can also feel static and predetermined to your players -- not so good.
Planning things out in broad strokes (or ...
Despite the well-known enmity between gnomes and kobolds -- AKA scaly halflings -- the Stew hearts Kobold Quarterly. Why? Because it rocks.
KQ is the brainchild of Wolfgang Baur, one of the most famous game designers around, and among the many other irons he has in the fire he publishes the Kobold Guide to Game Design series. Volume III came out in print last Friday, and Wolfgang asked if ...
As a GM, you have access to a lot of information the players never see. This can be mutually frustrating, because you have ideas and concepts you never get to illustrate, and the players may have holes in their picture of the game world that they would like to understand. One of the less common techniques for giving the players a broader view of the world you’ve created ...
A lot of my gaming friends and I are into gaming as a storytelling experience. I tend to talk about improving games and focusing on the story at the table. That is how a lot of my games go. However, some of the recent books I’ve been reading, some of the movies I’ve recently seen, and some of the games I’ve run in and played ...
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 ...
(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 ...
