Archive for June, 2010

New Contest to Celebrate 500 Issues

To celebrate upcoming Issue #500 for Roleplaying Tips we’re holding a contest. RPT reader Daniel at www.steamcrow.com said we should do 500 of something, such as 500 random city encounters. That’s pretty ambitious, but it sounds like a great idea. Let’s do it. I’ve got some prizes lined up, as well, to further celebrate. How […]

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Plot Stat Block For The Organized Game Master

How do you organize your plot notes so you are on top of the details? In my Riddleport campaign, I have several plots hatching, and I would find tracking them difficult without using my plot stat block. It does not matter if you use Obsidian Portal, another wiki, a notebook or Post-Its; you must find […]

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A Journey Of 1,000 Years: Time Travel in RPGs, Part 2

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Time Travel In RPGs

The first part of this article looked at two simplistic solutions to the question of how to handle time travel in RPGs, and found that as they stood, neither was satisfactory. A number of readers were kind enough to write in, suggesting additions that could be made to these two solutions to make them more […]

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How To Be A Confident GM, Part 2

Confidence is key to having fun long term as a game master. Last week we covered several tips on how to become a confident GM, and this week we deliver more. Collaborate Say yes whenever possible. Get into the habit of building on player input and ideas instead of overwriting them. Pass ideas around so […]

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When Inspiration Is Not Enough: Time Travel in RPGs, Part 1

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Time Travel In RPGs

When writing my submission to the June 2010 Blog Carnival, A Medley Of Inspiring Media, I said that Time Travel was a special case. This article started off as just another section of that Blog Post, but quickly showed signs of growing into another of those monster subjects requiring a multiple-part post to completely contain […]

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How To Be A Confident GM, Part 1

Gnome Stew recently posted an article about running on minimal prep game. One of the points was to GM with confidence, and that got me wondering about how exactly do you be a confident GM? Following are a few ingredients to that recipe. I look forward to your comments about what you do to bolster […]

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The Critical Threshold: A brief debate on the Merits of Extreme Results

This is not the post that I expected to make this week. I simply ran out of time and could not finish either the article I had intended to post this week [about time travel] or the one for next week [the long-awaited followup to last year’s Pillars of Architecture article], in time. Instead, I […]

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Google Calendar As An Awesome Campaign Calendar

I’m using Google Calendar as the in-game calendar for my Riddleport Pathfinder campaign. It started as an experiment, but it’s worked so well I’m making it a permanent addition to how I run the campaign. Perhaps you can do this too. Riddleport is set in Paizo’s world of Golarion, and the calendar in that world […]

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Blog Carnival June 2010: A Medley Of Inspiring Media

This month’s RPG Carnival, which Campaign Mastery is delighted to host, poses the question: What non-game media have most inspired your games and how? A doozy of a topic, this. Sure, there are the obvious genre-related materials – you can’t talk about Fantasy in this context without mentioning The Lord Of The Rings, first the […]

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