Campaign Mastery

How can you make the players feel like their actions have an impact on the world?

Sometimes, the simplest questions have the most complicated or profound answers. So it was with some trepidation that we’ve approached this question, which was asked virtually exactly as it’s quoted at the head of this article.
The short answer is, you [...]

A few years ago, one of my players asked me why I had the Guinness Book Of Records amongst my RPG referance materials, and I told him that it was an essential source of colour for my campaigns. This puzzled him somewhat, because while he could see the applicability to a modern-day campaign, he knew [...]

Moral: Concerned with right & wrong conduct or duty to one’s neighbours; conforming to, or required, or justified by, conscience if not law.
Etihcs: The science of, or a system of, morals.

I don’t know why, but I always had the sense of there being a bigger difference between the two terms. Morals was always about right [...]

How do you handle PCs who seem to be immune to magic?

A recent inquiry in Ask The GMs asked us,
Hi! I’ve just started an AD&D campaign where the all the PCs have got really good saving throws. Less than 50% of any spells I cast on them will work on the Dwarfs and Halfling Priests [...]

For a long time, I’ve been dissatisfied with the way some games handle wild, improbable, luck.
D&D, for example, has no luck mechanism per se; only the critical hits subsystem comes close, where if you roll well enough, you score multiple damage, and in the skills subsection, whereby rolling a 20 on a skill check permits [...]

How do you create a campaign that gives the players absolute freedom but still leaves the GM in control?

Recently, Campaign Mastery was asked,
Is it possible to create a truly player-choice driven campaign (within reason)? I’m trying to create a campaign that’s anywhere from 75 – 90% roleplaying (there will be dice, but not battle so [...]

Some GMs read nothing but official gaming product. Others expand their horizons to include Game Supplements from other sources, both officially-sanctioned and homebrew. A few go further, and seek out genre-related works and referances from which they can seek out inspiration and detail. Very few are what I would describe as “Literary GMs”, who read [...]

What are the best ways to handle splitting the party up – especially over the long term?

An interesting question was asked of us recently:
I’m planning a pretty good science fiction game that will most likely involve party splits during a good percentage of the game. While this seems like it may be a bad idea, [...]