Campaign Mastery

It took so much longer to plan out the article that I intended to publsh today, and it contains so many sections that I hasd grave doubts that I could finish it in time. Rather than risk having nothing to post in what is already shaping up to be a very busy week, I decided […]

Finished at last – this is only about 90 minutes late! Enjoy :) Anytime a product with the combined talents of multiple industry heavy-hitters like Ed Greenwood and Skip Williams comes onto your horizon, you pay attention. When that product made its funding targets in just 2 1/2 hours, you pay even closer attention. Clearly, […]

All GMs should recognize and follow the rule of cool, which states that if a player wants his character to do something cool, the GM should try to find a way to let him, even if it violates canon or what the character should normally. be capable of. Alas, in one of the great inequities […]

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 […]

The First Frontier: Appearance Early science fiction depicted aliens as having animal heads or other elements of animal anatomy. Fantasy, myth, and legend carry the principle even further back in time – the Minotaur of Knossos comes to mind. And I would not be at all surprised to be told that centaurs predate even those […]

One problem. Two characters with the same Skill. How do they combine abilities to make the problem easier to solve? Or are two heads no better than one? This is the Dual Competence rules problem. Another problem. One character has the Skill needed to solve it, another who doesn’t – but who has to actually […]

…at least, I hope it’s new. As I wrote, a strong sense of deja vu crept over me, and it started to sound awfully familiar. But a careful search of past posts failed to turn up anything… I come up with more ideas than I can ever use. Until I co-founded Campaign Mastery, I simply […]

Last week’s post was (technically*) the 1000th here at Campaign Mastery. Appropriately for such a number, it dealt with big-picture abstractions and the fundamental principle upon which the blog is founded – having more fun at the gaming table. That make’s this post (again, technically*) the 1001st – a number that itself both the seeds […]

One of the banes of RPGs since time immemorial has been been the seemingly inevitable drift toward out-of-control character capabilities at high levels. It’s something that afflicts almost every campaign that persists for any length of time, regardless of genre, but most notably, the various incarnations of D&D. This problem is so ubiquitous that there […]

I’m posting this early to beat the kickstarter deadline. If you want to back the project, which has now reached its funding target, you will need to act quickly – you have less than 52 hours! Background A week or so ago, relative to the publication date of this article, Campaign Mastery received an invitation […]

I get asked questions all the time. Those coming at me through twitter I usually answer extremely briefly; if the 280-character limit (was 140) is not enough, I will either add more replies or set the question aside for answering here, if there is likely to be sufficient interest in the question. Those I get […]

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 […]