Campaign Mastery

“Sometimes I’m a foodie, and sometimes I revert to good old American comfort food.” That was said, in-character, by one of my players in the course of this weekend’s game session, and it is at the heart of today’s article. First, some information on the narrative thread that led to this line of conversation: Four […]

Today, as I waited for the bus, I contemplated the relationship between the 80s/90s concept of “Personal Space” and the Mid-Pandemic concept of “Social Distancing”. After all, the two mean much the same thing – ‘don’t get too close’, ‘give me enough room’. Invading someone’s personal space was as perceived as threatening as invading someone’s […]

I’ve written a lot of articles about luck and a lot of articles about plot, but very few about how the two intersect. Time to change that. A linear plot, like that depicted in Figure (1) Below, is very boring. Nothing the players say or do – and, more importantly, nothing the players have their […]

I’ve been an active Quora user for the last few years, as long-time readers would know. Since August 2017, more than 1200 answers have been viewed almost 250,000 times. My content there averages more than 2000 readers a month (my content here averages more than three times that number). I’ve even built whole articles here […]

This article started in my mind when I was thinking about the Covid-19 situation here in Australia (and elsewhere where the virus has been close to eliminated) but I’ve since broadened and generalized it to some extent. It began with my imagining a set of random tables to describe someone’s interaction with Covid-19. Such-and-such a […]

This article is likely to ramble a bit. There will be times when I have to talk around the subject so as not to give away any surprises to my players, or to provide a proper foundation for the point of discussion. That’s an unfortunate reality for life as an RPG Blogger; the only alternative […]

I generated two images to accompany this article (actually, I generated 10, but these were the two that made the cut) – and could not pick between them; they both reflected the content and title in equally-compelling but distinctly-different ways. So I’m using both of them. The second image will appear a bit later. While […]

Just to prove that the recent two-and-a-half-part article RPGs In Technicolor (part 1,part 2, part 2a) weren’t the last word on the subject, I thought of this topic of discussion. Picture a room in which your character is located. A partially-closed door leads to a corridor beyond. Somewhere down that corridor, something is glowing in […]

“A rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet” – or so wrote Shakespeare. This afternoon, I watched (not for the first time), the Star Trek (original series) episode of (almost) the same name, and spent a few seconds ruminating on the expression. This essay will expand and expound on the passing thoughts that […]

When I first started playing & running RPGs, prep was simply for “the game”. Then, with a little more experience, and in particular when I spread my wings from D&D to running a superhero campaign at the same time, it became prep for “the x campaign”. As the number of campaigns under my belt (and […]

I was really pressed for time when I wrote Part 2 of this 1-2 treatment of the subject, and as a result a couple of things that I wanted to write about got kind of lost in the shuffle. They aren’t enough to really stand as a full post on their own, so I’m sneaking […]

I’m going to zip right along under the assumption that you’ve read Part 1 of this article because I don’t really have the time to recap. Color impacts on Cognition There have been studies that showed that exposure to the color red can impact scholastic performance by as much as 20%; other studies looking at […]