GM: “From your vantage point you see two trolls cooking something over a fire pit. Both wear what looks like leather armor and carry large two-handed weapons. Two cave entrances behind them are dark but you can hear occasional noise coming from inside. What are you guys doing?” Player 1: “Those trolls look pretty tough, maybe we should find a way to get around them.” [Read the article]
Over the years my approach to running games has changed and evolved. I used to spend the game session scribbling notes, rolling dice, consulting charts, and frantically trying to anticipate my players’ actions, and keep them on track. Oftentimes, the players would throw me off by wanting to go somewhere that I hadn’t planned on, or by interacting with an NPC that I hadn’t fleshed-out, [Read the article]
It’s a problem: you give your PCs an objective, a goal, and they spend most of their time pursuing every side distraction they can think of. You need to get them focused on the task at hand, but how to do that? One way to help keep the PCs moving forward is to give them a time constraint—a deadline. If the PCs don’t accomplish their [Read the article]
This is not the first article to be written on this subject, nor will it be the last. In my experience, there are two kinds of DM’s. One is concerned with “balance,” the other with “fun.” For the record, this is not me complaining that I was never allowed to try my crazy idea for a half-orc fighter/barbarian with a spiked chain, and massively exploit [Read the article]
Flashbacks are known from movies and TV, where they can be used to reveal important moments in the past of the characters, can reveal the motives of the villains, and can be used to surprise the audience when a well-timed flashback reveals that our heroes already had taken care of the villain’s alarms. In roleplaying games, the flashback can be used in much the same [Read the article]
Adventure writing is often viewed as a free-form creative exercise where the “sky’s the limit”. The fantasy genre, with its emphasis on magic, can especially leave the adventure ideas open to pretty much anything our minds can imagine. Science fiction isn’t as open-ended, since it’s supposed to be at least theoretically scientifically plausible (or at least feel like it is), but even here, the adventure-writer’s [Read the article]
Please welcome Jonathan Baldwin to the Stuffer Shack Crew… Sometimes you really need your villains to stand out in the minds of your players. Since role-playing is, at its heart, a verbal exercise, this means spending a little extra time on your dialog. You can describe the wicked fiend all you want, but unless you have pictures, your players are only going to remember what [Read the article]
This time, the Gamecraft 25 is going to take a look at plot complications for your adventures. All of these are designed to add an interesting set of circumstances to challenge your heroes in different ways. Most of these ideas will make an adventure more difficult, so keep that in mind when using them. The party has a “tag-along.” This could be a bard looking [Read the article]
GMs aren’t the only ones with responsibilities. The players are co-creators with the GM and that gives them certain responsibilities. Below are lists of player do’s and don’ts: Game Preparation Be on time. If possible, try to be a little early. That will give you some time to get settled and ready to play. If you can’t be on time or have to miss a [Read the article]
Imagine the scene: You’re playing the uber-cool DEATHWATCH, more specifically, larger-than-life ultra-high-tech space marines. You carry ultra-cool equipment, like bad-ass armor, a super-cool machine-gun, and jump-jets that help you run faster, leap over obstacles, and even fly. Oh, and don’t forget about your ability to sustain your daily nutritional requirements from your built-in ever-efficient “Waste Recycling” system (yeah, you read that right). You’re fighting hordes of [Read the article]