Archive for August, 2017

High-Fives and other in-Game Rewards

With this item, I continue the practice of offering shorter articles to start the week. Usually, this is to make room for a longer article later (and from time to time, the sequence has been temporarily inverted), but for much of the next year, that’s the plan. This week, though, it’s not for that reason […]

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Beware The Derivative, Embrace The Inspiration

It’s one of the easiest techniques to follow – you simply copy a character or a plotline from some other source, be it Television, a Movie, or a literary source. If you’re particular clever, you might go so far as to rename the character. There are a number of reasons why a GM might be […]

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We could be Frenemies: Using Good Creatures As Opponents

Sometimes, you want to hit your players with a problem that can be solved only with action of the most violent kind. In D&D, a monster that presents a kill-or-be-killed situation; in a superhero game, a violent threat that has to be stopped before innocents are harmed. But it’s never a good idea to do […]

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The Crafting Of Personality Pt 1: Walk-On NPCs

This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series The Crafting Of Personality

One task that confronts every GM is giving characters a personality. There have been a number of articles on the subject here at Campaign Mastery and I have no doubt that there will be many more. I tend to think of characters as coming in three different kinds or tiers: Feature Characters, Secondary Characters, and […]

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Fractional Pursuits To Focus Attention

For the last few weeks I’ve been (occasionally) reading a board-game development blog/newsletter – Brandon the Game Dev for anyone who might be interested – at the invitation of a relatively new twitter contact, @brandongamedev. This week’s post was about playtesting; in it, Brandon wrote, Since people can do unexpected and strange things with your […]

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The Elephant In The Gray Room, Pt 3 of 5: Significant Repairs

This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Elephant In The Gray Room

As long-time readers will know, I like to break up larger series, on the theory that any given subject will interest only part of the readership. On that basis, I’ve let this series lie fallow for a few weeks, but now it’s time to get back to it! The Elephant In The Gray Room is […]

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Kickstarting the Story

There is a principle of script-writing and fiction writing that says that if you want to grab the audience’s attention, you should start the story in the middle. Perhaps the ultimate expression of this principle is the James Bond teaser. I’m not sure if it’s the case with the most recent movies – I’m not […]

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The Success Of DnD: A guide to the history and incarnations of the most popular RPG

This is going to be a really long article* unless I control my enthusiasms really tightly, so expect me to be a little more succinct than usual. Until I get carried away, that is…. * Actually, it was always going to be a really long article. I should have said, “incredibly long article”! The Roots […]

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Embrace, Flirt, Subvert, Reject: The GM’s Relationship With Cliche

There are two different visions of a typical winter’s day. If altitude and latitude permit, you have your snowy day with bitter winds and flurries and whiteouts and snow getting down your back; if not, then cold and wet with howling winds and driving rain that sheets horizontally and in which the only cover is […]

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