Posts Tagged by time
| July 24, 2012 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
I recently got to play two sessions of Marvel Heroic Roleplay (which rocks — it captures the feel of supers better than any other RPG I’ve played, including FASERIP Marvel; see Don’s recent article for more in that vein) and I used a trick to speed up my turns that I thought was worth sharing. While I was a player in this game, not the GM, the trick applies equally to GMs — and to games other than MHR. And it’s super-simple: Just color code…
| June 21, 2012 | Posted by Guest Author |
Today’s guest article was written by John Fredericks, and addresses a topic every GM bumps up against periodically: time, and not having enough of it to do everything you want to do during a session. Thanks, John! Ever played in a session that just would not end? Maybe the GM just couldn’t bring things to a close, and you had work the next morning. At that point, you really didn’t care about the fourth owlbear. Or maybe it was a convention and you wanted to…
| December 12, 2011 | Posted by Guest Author |
Back in October we partnered with Fear the Boot to run a charity auction benefiting the March of Dimes and raised $200. One of the things that the winner of this auction, Gnome Stew reader JavaDragon, won was the opportunity to write the first-ever guest article on the Stew — this one. JavaDragon did a killer job, and turned out exactly the sort of article the Stew is known for: system-neutral GMing advice you can put to use today. We’re proud to be able to…
| February 16, 2009 | Posted by Kurt "Telas" Schneider |
We’ve all been there. A mistake is created when a rule is misinterpreted or misapplied, but not caught by the group. Later on, for some reason, the mistake becomes apparent. The overwhelming temptation is to go back in time and retcon* the initial event, and fix the mistake. Retcon – Contraction of “Retroactive Continuity”, or a rewrite of an event established in the past. Common in long-running comic books and soap operas. Sounds tempting, doesn’t it? And after all, if it’s used in comic books,…
| February 10, 2009 | Posted by Matthew J. Neagley |
What do you do when you have a chunk of time with nothing planned out? Standing in a line, between the ordering and the eating at a restaurant, waiting for a meeting to start? Don’t waste that time. Instead, have the tools on hand to game. Most commonly, that means carrying around your Tiny Notebook and working on your next session, fleshing out NPCs, or roughing out an encounter or map. But what about when you’re sharing that time with your fellow gamers? If you’re standing in…
| January 28, 2009 | Posted by Phil Vecchione |
This post is one of two posts today in our Gnome Stew Doubleheader. Today’s Doubleheader is about designing campaigns. Check out Patrick Benson’s article: You Do Not Have Time for That after reading this…. When I am not wearing my pointy hat here on Gnome Stew, or behind the screen GMing, I am a Project Manager (stop boo-ing..) In Project Management there exists something we call the Triple Constraint. All projects have three constraints that are related: Scope (what are we going to do?), Schedule…
| January 28, 2009 | Posted by Patrick Benson |
This post is one of two posts today in our Gnome Stew Doubleheader. Today’s Doubleheader is about designing campaigns. Check out Phil Vecchione’s article Doubleheader: The Triple Constraint of A Campaign after reading this…. My father retired a few years back after several decades of being a union electrician for the Chicago Transit Authority. He was a foreman in charge of maintaining the signal services for several of the train lines. That was his purpose in life for the majority of his years. I asked him…
