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, […]

Summary Alea Tools sent me a sample pack of their magnetic markers for review. I have played with them for several sessions now and I give them a thumbs up. Details – Alea Markers in Use Alea markers have a great feel to them. Smooth surfaces all around and a nice weight. The plastic seems […]

This month’s RPG Bloggers carnival is themed on D&D. The guest article below by Mike E. has some great ideas for modifying your D&D experience by borrowing what he likes from one edition and adding it to another. I’d like to think I’m a fairly good DM. I know I have my strengths, and I […]

This month’s RPG Blog Carnival theme is Steampunk. My most memorable steampunk experience is Castle Falkenstein. The card mechanic at the time I felt opened gamers up to alternative resolution systems in much the same way Amber broke out the diceless movement. Castle Falkenstein’s crazy universe was a cross between Jules Verne and Alice in […]

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 […]

A couple of weeks ago we chatted about the top dungeon master screen hacks. This week, we cover a related topic – do-it-yourself screens. Have you ever made your own dungeon master screen? If so, how did you do it, and what materials did you use? Through the years I’ve cobbled together my fair share […]

Let me start off our discussion of doing game session post-mortems with some definitions: Retrospective: contemplative of past situations (dictionary.com) Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results (Albert Einstein) Kaizen: a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life (wikipedia.org) The goal of many Campaign […]

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 […]

The third dimension of the battlemat has long been a problem. How do you represent it with minis, other than by holding them up with your hand and making airplane noises? The first problem is marking which minis are going vertical because they are hovering, levitating, swimming or flying. The second problem is tracking height […]

RPGs use rules, usually relating to dice rolls and modifiers, to simulate the world around the PCs, resolve character actions, and provide an interface between the game mechanics and the simulated environment. But this is not the only approach that can be used, and there are times when alternatives should be considered by the GM. […]