Campaign Mastery

A couple of weeks ago we chatted about the top dungeon master screen hacks. This week, we cover a related topic – do-it-yourself screens. Have you ever made your own dungeon master screen? If so, how did you do it, and what materials did you use? Through the years I’ve cobbled together my fair share […]

Please your players, reward roleplaying and creativity, and keep game pace moving along by saying yes to player plans, actions, and ideas. This is a classic tip mentioned in Roleplaying Tips Issue #303, Roll Dice Or Say Yes and I’ve seen various wise websites post this advice over the years as well. There are a […]

Dungeon master screens are often talked about, especially customizing them. I’ve been following a thread over at Roleplaying Pro where I commented on a few tips for customizing your screen. The potential of the game master screen has also been covered at RoleplayingTips.com, and numerous readers have responded with their tips over the years. Published […]

Let me start off our discussion of doing game session post-mortems with some definitions: Retrospective: contemplative of past situations (dictionary.com) Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results (Albert Einstein) Kaizen: a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life (wikipedia.org) The goal of many Campaign […]

The third dimension of the battlemat has long been a problem. How do you represent it with minis, other than by holding them up with your hand and making airplane noises? The first problem is marking which minis are going vertical because they are hovering, levitating, swimming or flying. The second problem is tracking height […]

Many games use experience points, and if you game master such a game, you might wonder when the best time is to handout XP – before, during, or after? I’ve done all three, and there are pros and cons to each approach. Here are a few tips. Character wants Characters live for experience points. They […]

Last night was Session #13 – Bearded in Orcus’s Lair of my D&D 4E Carnus campaign. I used to write session logs after each game night, but fell out of practice due to time pressure. However, the benefits of logging are too great, so it’s time to get back into the habit. Roleplaying Tips readers […]

I received an advance copy of the Player’s Handbook 2 and checked out the shiny new barbarian class. Yowsa. Dungeon masters watch out, this guy is mean. As a skirmisher, he’s all about movement and doing massive damage periodically during combat. “Class Traits: Striker. You use powerful two-handed weapons to deal serious damage to your […]

When Toolbox for d20 by AEG came out I scooped it up right away and have found it very useful over the years. Now, in 2009, its big daddy has arrived on the Prime Material Plane and it’s awesome. While some might scoff at a book of tables, I see the Ultimate Toolbox, like its […]

This blog post was originally going to be a review of Master Dungeons M2: Curse of the Kingspire by Goodman Games. However, once I got well into reading the module, I decided I was going to run this adventure for my Carnus D&D 4E campaign. It’s an excellent adventure, full of combat, puzzle, and roleplaying […]

I received a box of Campaign Coins for review and they are fun, high quality game props. They must be great because the box packaging has no less than six exclamation marks in the text. :) Each box contains 121 detailed coins depicting four metal types in 1, 10, 100, and 1000 denominations and 1 […]

I never understood mindmapping until I read one of Tony Buzan’s books, saw numerous examples, and clued-in. For game planning and tracking, mindmapping is now one of my essential tools. My mindmapping tool of choice is FreeMind, a free application you can download for Windows, Mac, and Unix. It’s a natural fit for documenting relationships. […]