Quora RPG Answers By Mike – Part 1

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay, background color by Mike
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 at Campaign Mastery around some of them. You see, I try hard to stick to the point when answering someone’s question, whereas in an article here, I feel more free to explore side-aspects and tangents that might be of interest to a general audience.
Lately, a lot of my answers have been RPG-related, and that means that a broader round-up might well be of interest to readers here.
I’m going to split the list in two, and save the second half for the next time I need a fill-in post. I’m also going to pad it a little with some more general answers that could have RPG applications.
Afterwards: Wow, there have been a lot more relevant answers than I expected! I’ve only listed up to 2019 and I already have 130. There are WAY too many for just two posts. In fact, there are probably enough just in the ones listed so far for three posts of about 40 links per post. And, since I’ve written more on RPGs in the past year than I had previously, there will probably be at least two more in the series after that dealing with 2020 – by which time, there will be at least one more covering 2021 before I get up to date! It looks like this will be my go-to for fill-in posts for quite some time to come….
So let’s get started….
Do experienced DM’s usually create their world first, or create it based on characters?
How do I create a good combat system for a tabletop RPG? (my answer to this question was the foundation for an article at Campaign Mastery that still gets lots of traffic, almost three years after initial publication: Combat System Design and Understanding The Rules).
How is the movement handled on large imaginary maps when people play through text and speech in D&D?
How can I write a compelling villain with a motive based in philosophy that is understandable?
Will the author of a blog know I am reading their blog?
What are different ways to remove text from an image?
Is 5,000 words a day a reasonable goal for a writer?
Can having a lot of interests be a bad thing?
How do rumors get started? Is there something which is in such a large percentage of the population that makes them lie to people about other people? Is it a disease or habit? What is is it? (may be outdated in this era of Fake News, which was almost unthinkable back in early 2018).
Is it a good idea to just improvise a several session long campaign for D&D 5E?
What is a good amount of time to play D&D? We play 16 hours usually.
What’s the most interesting D&D world you made or played in?
How would you run a game of D&D with only 3 people?
What are some of the most interesting shower thoughts you have had? (My answer is about mapping and coastline lengths)
In D&D, as a DM, how do you coax shy PCs into roleplaying more? (This answer was discussed in, and was the inspiration for, Inhabiting the Character Space and 16 other ways to help shy players here at Campaign Mastery).
What is the most imaginative science fiction concept you have ever come across?
If life could form on the surface of a star, what would it be like?
Is there a limit to how much new scientific discoveries there are? (This actually came up in Saturday’s RPG campaign, when the PCs had to estimate the pace of advance of medical knowledge to postulate when the treatment that they needed would become available).
What advice would you give to a new dm/gm?
How can I fix this (D&D), “Players are only motivated by gold and have way too much of it”?
How can I keep my D&D campaign on track when my players talk their way out of every problem?
What’s the best way to reward players in D&D?
How late can we discover a long period comet in the worst scenario (which is about to hit us)?
How do you manage a kingdom in Dungeons and Dragons?
If the universe is 13.7 billion years old, does it mean that no two stars can be more than 13.7 billion light years apart? (From memory, I actually expanded on this, with some illustrations, in a post here at Campaign Mastery: The Improbable Dances of Space and Time).
How does a writer choose what to apply from the large amount of sometimes contradictory writing advice out there? (Applies to GMing advice, as well)
What is the most fun / memorable / unique way you have ever started a Dungeons and Dragons campaign?
Okay, that should be roughly 40 answers, more than enough for people to read! Some will be very short, only a dash of wit or a line or two, or perhaps couple of paragraphs; others will contain reasonable depth – but all of them will be much shorter than the average article here at Campaign Mastery. And I have only to put together introductions, and another couple of these footnotes, and I have two more of these posts ready to upload, and have started on the one after that. So posts might occasionally be late, but there should be no reason not to put something up here every week!
- Quora RPG Answers By Mike – Part 1
- RPG Quora Answers By Mike – Part 2
- RPG Quora Answers By Mike – Part 3
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