Only a year or two after I started GM’ing seriously, I got involved in Interactive Fiction (often abbreviated as “IF”) writing with a cyberpunk adventure game called Orchestra. My crummy setting naming skills and limitations of the platform I was building it on notwithstanding, it received generally positive feedback from the people who came to play it, and the things that players recounted to me [Read the article]
This article takes a look at the unique ways in which the Dark Souls series tells its story, and how the ideas can be applied to add some variety to the way in which a tabletop RPG can be told…
When I think back to the best times I had running adventures, I feel like they were great not because the adventure was fantastic (although in some cases, they were), but were great because of how we filled in the gaps…
In any roleplaying game, what defines an enemy? The defense numbers? The damage numbers? The extensive and daunting power list? No, I say, and say again, no. The only characteristic that defines an enemy is the one thing that’s impossible to quantify: the personality…
Engagement is key whenever one designs an entertainment experience. As a writer, I can testify for the fact that something that is boring won’t get read. Great games are made by people that recognize this concept and apply it to its fullest. The core principle behind engagement is the idea that players should always be focusing on the current action or a future action…
Please welcome Robert J. Schwalb and his first article at Stuffer Shack. He’s an established RPG game designer and novelist with a slew of credits to his name, and in this article he talks about that cool thing that makes monsters cooler…
One of the things I’ve often been asked as a somewhat experienced GM who’s run games with lots of players is “How do I get girls interested in my games?” It’s an interesting question, and one that can be really quite painful…
Let’s talk about assassins. Not the idealistic ones in white (popularized by the shiny ongoing series Assassin’s Creed), lest we get into a conversation about what they were thinking when they decided to make the game about pirates. Nooooooo, the fun kind…
In the beginning of January, I began an experiment: to run a play-by-post D&D 3.5 campaign entirely through facebook messages, just to see how viable an option it is. I expected to play through just one scenario…
I had only a couple of days to get ready for this game, so I tried to squeeze as much as I could. I had been mulling over a new fantasy setting in my head for awhile, one that was influenced heavily by religion, so I figured that this was a perfect time to test it out. Unfortunately, it was the beginning of a long list of mistakes…