Campaign Mastery

Someone once asked me why D&D bothers to include skills at all. After all, the GM generally tells the players anything they really need to know (rather than seeing all his hard work in preparing the game crash and burn); and even if he doesn’t, players can always take a twenty. After further discussion, this […]

Means, Motive, and Opportunity. The M-M-O triad are the foundation of mystery stories and crime fiction in general, and have been for centuries. To be fair, most stories rely on the fallability and limitations of the triad as a means of solving those mysteries, especially on the first and third of the trio. Motives, after […]

How much, if at all, should the final villain of a long running campaign pull his punches? My campaign boss [villain] is a high level wizard with access to epic spells, and my party just made 20th level. They are on the way to fight him. Should I open up with his most powerful abilities, […]

Like all GMs, there are times when I know I need an idea, I know what the reason is and what will be done with it – I just don’t know what it is. There’s this empty spot in my mind labelled “Idea goes here”, but I’m absolutely bereft of inspiration, and the deadline is […]

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 give your campaign realistic weather without overloading the GM with Admin tasks? Hi, both of you, First I would like to praise you for a wonderfully done job! My question is about weather in role-playing games. Let me expain: I’ve been running a campaing for a while now where the PCs evolve […]

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. […]

This is the final installment of this 6-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, and Part 5 described how to integrate the PCs into the war action. This final part […]

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 the PCs start recruiting people as information sources? A game master writes: Hi Mike and Johnn, I’m running a 3.5 D&D campaign, where the player characters are largely based in a major city. Because of the structure and history of the campaign world, my major cities are quite large, which […]

The subject of this month’s blog carnival is War. As part of that canival, I present an article on how to referee a war in an rpg. Not one that happens in some distant country, or a neighbouring city, but up close and personal – so close that the PCs can touch it. And not […]