Campaign Mastery

How do you ensure that every player gets a fair share of the attention when one of them has a dominant personality? Sometimes it can be hard to determine exactly what the problem is when someone asks for advice. When that happens, we do the best we can to interpret the request, dissecting every word […]

How do you pace a campaign? How do you know if you’re giving too much or too little in experience and treasure? And how do you get the PCs to explore more than the local area? Hello Johnn and Mike, I have been gaming on and off for about 10 years but am a rather […]

This is part five of this six-part series. Parts 1 and 2 discussed the fundamental concepts needed to simulate a unit of 100 soldiers. Parts 3 and 4 described a step-by-step procedure for conducting battles between two armies. But if the PCs are mere bystanders, there is not a lot of point to it all. […]

Part 1 and Part 2 of this six part series discussed the fundamental concepts needed to simulate a unit of 100 soldiers. Part 3 begins applying the theory… Part 3: Playing At War: The War Round Having turned each unit of 100 men into, effectively, a single creature, and simplifed the combat mechanics down to […]

This is part four of this six part series. Part 1 and Part 2 discussed the fundamental concepts needed to simulate a unit of 100 soldiers. Part 3 began discussing the practicalities of war in play, introducing the Initiative and Action Phases, the Action Order and handling Initiative for army units, and unit Morale. Part […]

What do you do when one character doesn’t trust the other characters, and it starts to degrade game play? A game master asks: Hi Mike and Johnn, I am new to GMing and play with a group of close friends every week. One of my player’s characters doesn’t trust the rest of the group. Even […]

This is the final part of a four-part article. The first part gave a relatively straightforward technique for creating a unique society; the second and third parts identified four ways of communicating the uniqueness of the result to the players, selling them on its credibility, and exploiting it for scenarios and subplots, and examined these […]

This is the second part of a four-part article. The first part gave a relatively straightforward technique for creating a unique society; this part and the next (which were originally intended to be the whole article) gives some techniques for conveying the uniqueness of the resulting culture to the players, selling them on its credibility, […]

The DMG II for D&D 3.5 defines Prestige Classes as representing organisations; Taking a prestige class is synonymous with joining the organisation that the Prestige Class represents. At least, that was the original theory. The fact is that it was only ever partially true in D&D 3.5, and D&D 4 has a completely different paradigm […]

I had my spring cleaning just the other day (living in the Southern Hemisphere, the seasons are the reverse of what most readers would consider normal), and it reminded me of something that should be an annual tradition with gamers – spring cleaning of their games. For Players, that means looking at any long-standing character […]

How does each race in your game make a difference? Put another way, if any of race disappeared, how would the setting be different? How would gameplay be different? Remaining races might venture into unexpected niches, creating interesting twists. Elven smiths, orcish druids, gnomish sailors. The world might be poorer because no race or culture […]