GM techniques Archives - Page 4 of 5

October 5, 2007

Food in RPGs, Part II

Food can help define cultures, continued…. Once you associate different foods with specific cultures, you have another tool in your GMing palette. If your PCs walk into an area, they can be assaulted by familiar smells that might give them a clue about what they are dealing with. Once you establish, for instance, that kobolds like to soak their meat...

October 5, 2007

Food in RPGs, Part I

I like food. I enjoy cooking, and I am not too shabby at it, either. Last weekend I made borscht. I also broke out the ice cream maker for the first time and made some donut-flavored ice cream. (My housemate had been craving donuts, and it was her birthday on Monday.) I belong to a CSA. I read some food...

September 4, 2007

Beyond Alignment: Adding Moral Complexity to your Game

This article first appeared in the Silven Trumpeter (Vol. 4, Issue 2, June 2006). Many people play roleplaying games in order to escape from the moral ambiguity of real life. They want to sit down, roll some dice, kill some goblins, take their stuff, and feel good about it. Perhaps the only personal growth that they are interested in for...

August 24, 2007

Abandon All Hope… and stop having fun

This is a continuation, of sorts, of my last post. Let’s assume that the primary point of gaming is to have fun. You might disagree with this, but if you do… well… then what you and I do when we game are wholly different activities. Anyway… In any situation, some things can make a gaming experience more fun and some...

August 24, 2007

Playing in the Sandbox

Three weeks ago, Jeff blogged about sandbox play, and I said that I’d address it here at some point. Between then and now was a New Orleans trip, moving, and GenCon. Now, I am trying to get caught up. The basic idea of sandbox-play is that there is a world around the PCs and that the PCs can go anywhere...

August 10, 2007

I’m back

It was good to be in New Orleans. Now I am back. The guest house I was staying in was awesome. They had an internet connection, but I mostly stayed connected via my nefty-new phone (a Treo 700). It occurred to me that the Treo probably has some good gaming uses, other than being a handy calculator. It can function...

June 6, 2007

The Challenge Format, revisited

A few days ago, I mentioned the Challenge Format of as a method of presenting non-encounter challenges in a written adventure. I expect the format to evolve a bit more as WoAdWriMo progresses, but it has already changed a bit from where it was when I started. I thought I’d share that with the world. So, how have things changed?...

June 1, 2007

The Challenge Format

In thinking about my WoAdWriMo adventure, I realize that not every challenge to be overcome by the party is a monster to be defeated in combat. Sometimes there is a puzzle to be solved or a short quest to be completed. Many of these transcend the physical location that they are found in, so embedding them in the text describing...

May 2, 2007

NPC tactical guides

So, this morning, Jeff posted some stupid Dracula tricks. I should probably just post this as a comment in his blog, but… ummm… I didn’t. So there. Unless you’ve already read it, that won’t make sense, so let me explain. This past Sunday, Jeff ran Lords of Creation for the C-U Run Club. If you are curious to know what...

April 25, 2007

Sequential art

Monday after work I picked up Angela and we met Tim over at the Krannert Art Museum to see a talk by Scott McCloud. It was good. It was in fact, the best use of a powerpointesque (Keynote, actually) presentation I have ever seen. I suppose that shouldn’e be a surprise coming from someone who is a sequential art theorist…...

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