2012 was another big year for Campaign Mastery. By year’s end, I was running the site on my own (with occasional support from co-Founder Johnn, for which I continue to be enormously grateful) and writing all the articles. This necessitated more of those articles containing my own campaign and adventure development – something tricky to accomplish without spilling the beans when your players are amongst the regular readers! There were three huge milestones – the 300,000th visitor, the 550,000th page view, and the 400th post. And, mid-year, the crowning highlight of the year, the ENnie nomination!

These achievements came on the back of continued strong growth in readers, and they came because the content continued to be very strong.

The Story Of Selection

It only gets harder to cull these down to a reasonable number. This was driven home to me rather forcefully when I examined the list of possible contenders from 2012. After a ruthless pruning, I was down to 46 great articles that I was trying to fit into 20 slots. Unsurprisingly, I just couldn’t do it, but it’s a wonderful problem to have!

I collected two sets of articles into series just so that I could point to the series’ page instead of the individual posts. I trimmed and culled and trimmed and culled some more, and got down to 32 items. I chose 18 must-have articles and series from that list, and had 14 contenders for the final 2 slots. I trimmed and culled a fourth time, and decided to inflate the size of the list to 25 entries, with 12 articles and series fighting to fit into the 8 remaining slots. And that’s where I got stuck.

None of the remaining articles was any more worthy of inclusion than any of the others. None were any less deserving, either. It was all, or none.

I compromised. The original 18, plus one of the 12, went into the official Best Of. And the remaining 11 (plus a ringer) have been placed in an “honorable mentions” sublist that forms a seperate part of the “best of” given below, and which is archived on the “Best Of” page as well, but which did NOT make the list in the RHS nav screen. They aren’t – quite – amongst the very very best of 2012 – but they are all good enough to make a list of “the very best”. If it weren’t for restrictions of practicality, they all would have made the cut.

So that’s how I split some hairs to achieve the list below.

Hey – any year with better than two “best of” qualifiers (counting series as individual posts) and more than one almost-as-good honorable mention (ditto) every month – that’s a good year by any definition!

The Best Of 2012

These are the 19 posts I’ve hand-picked as the best of 2012:
 

• The Foundation Of Averages: Psychohistory and RPG Rules
• A Twist in Time: Alternate Histories in RPGs
• A Good Name Is Hard To Find [Series]
• Big Changes For The Little Guy: How to go from Premise to Campaign
• Living in an RPG: The Accumulation Of Mundane Events
• Look beyond the box: a looser concept for NPCs
• Theologies at 30 paces: The Hell of Evil in D&D
• The Butler Did It: Mystery Plotlines in RPGs
• By the seat of your pants: the 3 minute (or less) NPC
• Value for money and the pricing of RPG materials – Part 1 of 2
• Value for money and the pricing of RPG materials – Part 2 of 2
• By The Seat Of Your Pants: Using Ad-hoc statistics
• Ensemble or Star Vehicle – Which is Your RPG Campaign?
• Adventure Structure: My Standard Formatting
• Been There, Done That, Doing It Again – The Sequel Campaign Part One of Two: Campaign Seeds
• Been There, Done That, Doing It Again – The Sequel Campaign Part Two of Two: Sprouts and Saplings
• The Acceptable Favoritism: 34 ‘Rules’ to make your players’ PCs their favorites
• What do you give the Gamer who has everything?
• Making a Great Villain [Series]

The 2012 Honorable Mentions

And these are the 11 almost-made-its, any of which could have filled the 20th slot in the Best-Of:
 

• The Echo Of Events To Come: foreshadowing in a campaign structure
• Exceeding the Extraordinary: The Meaning Of Feats
• One word at a time: How I (usually) write a Blog Post
• Go Hard Or Go Home: Graceful Character Aging
• May the camels of 1,000 fleas – wait, that’s not right: Improving Curses in 3.x
• All Wounds Are Not Alike [series]
• The Physics Of Uncertainty
• Turning Reaction into Proaction – plotting techniques to get your players moving
• On Alien Languages [Series]
• Good Storytelling Technique Or Bad? – Chekhov’s Gun and RPGs
• What matters to your character: the value of the shameful secret
• The Arcane Implications of Seating at the Game Table

Okay, so this article is a couple of weeks later than the schedule I outlined in
The Best Of 2011.

Blame a couple of posts that had to be split up and posted on successive publishing dates instead of as one article, plus the Secrets Of Stylish Narrative series which was supposed to be three parts and ran to 5 plus an extra, out-of-sequence post. Either way, the end of October is close enough!

If all goes according to plan, sometime in mid-to-late February 2015 I’ll post the next part in this series listing “The Best Of 2013”. That should get me on schedule to make “The Best Of” an annual event starting somewhere around June 30, 2015!

If the posts are half as good as this collection, it will be another nightmare (of the kind that’s good to have, of course!)