Posts Tagged by story
| August 23, 2012 | Posted by Patrick Benson |
I am back from another great Gen Con, and I wanted to share with everyone one of the highlights for me this year. No, I am not going to talk about the ENnies (although that was super cool). I was in Sean Patrick Fannon’s “Savage Saturday Night” game again this year. I very much enjoy his Shaintar setting for Savage Worlds, he enjoys my ridiculous characters, and it has become a bit of tradition now that if he is running a Shaintar game that I…
| June 15, 2012 | Posted by John Arcadian |
Recently, Emma Coats – a storyboard artist at Pixar – tweeted a bunch of tips for telling good narratives. They’ve gotten collected into a list of 22 story basics (she has more if you check out her twitter) and they’ve exploded all over the internet. kirkdent even suggested it over on our Suggestion Pot. The tips are great for any type of narrative, and we’re all big fans of learning things about roleplaying from other mediums. So here is Emma’s list, with some analysis and…
| June 14, 2012 | Posted by John Arcadian |
Recently, Emma Coats – a storyboard artist at Pixar – tweeted a bunch of tips for telling good narratives. They’ve gotten collected into a list of 22 story basics (she has more if you check out her twitter) and they’ve exploded all over the internet. kirkdent even suggested it over on our Suggestion Pot. The tips are great for any type of narrative, and we’re all big fans of learning things about roleplaying from other mediums. So here is Emma’s list, with some analysis and…
| April 13, 2012 | Posted by Patrick Benson |
Sometimes you have to wing it, but the secret to improvising is that you have a set of plans and formulas that you can follow whenever you need to do so. This is a trick that I have used when a plot is not capturing my players’ attention, or if I am asked to run a game on short notice. It came from my wife’s following of the television show Glee, and her favorite musical numbers from the show which are the mashups where two…
| July 7, 2010 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
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 even in fairly specific strokes) early on is a great approach. It keeps you focused…
| June 21, 2010 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
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 I’d like to write a GMing article about this volume, which is subtitled “Tools & Techniques.”…
| January 28, 2010 | Posted by Matthew J. Neagley |
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 is the parallel story, a story that runs adjacent to, but never touches the players’ story. A…
