Campaign Mastery

You learn something new every day, and today’s example was a small factoid: IQs are increasing so rapidly that the average person today would have scored an IQ of 130 a century ago, qualifying as “gifted”. Projecting Forwards Since the average back then was defined as a score of 100, that’s a rise of 3 […]

This idea came to me while watching the fifth and final Ashes test on the television. At first, I didn’t quite know exactly what I had, which is why this post has landed in the “short but profound” category! Let’s try something radical (trust me)! Pick your favorite low-to-mid-level D&D monster. Now, halve it’s AC […]

If you need to save time or mental bandwidth, consider using dice roll averages for rolls of more than 4 dice. Disclaimer: nothing in this article should be considered prescriptive. You know your game system, your players, and yourself best. Use what seems useful and put the rest in your back pocket for when you […]

This isn’t the post I expected to put up today. The other one’s ready, and will appear later in the week. The reason is because it’s almost November – and that has a significance that will become clear any second now… Once again it’s time for Campaign Mastery to host the Blog Carnival for the […]

Introductory Recap This is the third post on the development of a bespoke game system for use in my latest campaign, which is now scheduled to start play on October 21st – so finishing this has become a priority. Let’s start with a recap. A couple of minor details that weren’t properly explained the first […]

For the last two days, what was an intermittent telephone and internet problem caused by excessive line noise has become no telephone and internet service at all. So I will be posting this via an Internet Cafe, but it will be the last post published until this mess is sorted out. Hopefully, that means that […]

I get far more invitations to review products and Kickstarter campaigns and the like than I could ever hope to satisfy. Every few months I gather several of these together for a round-up set of mini-reviews. This time around, with Christmas Shopping on the immediate horizon, I have no less than 25 products to bring […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Prelude I: Someone asked why readers might want to read a diary of rules creation. The Answer is simple: it helps you understand rules and rules processes, making it easier for a GM to interpret other game mechanics as they encounter them. That’s always the value of a glimpse behind-the-scenes!   Prelude II: Well, that […]

This is a somewhat unusual article for Campaign Mastery in that it is pitched as much, or even more strongly, at players than at GMs… While planning the next adventure in the Adventurer’s Club campaign yesterday with my co-GM, I made an observation regarding the changing style of roleplaying. Both my co-GM, Blair, and I, […]