GM techniques Archives - Page 3 of 5

April 25, 2008

Nostalgia and Ingenuity

Last night, in the final session of our Gygax Memorial 1e AD&D game Jeff has been running, we finished clearing out the moathouse near Hommlet. Up until last night, out performance had been kind of lame. Last night,I think, we got into the dungeoneering mindset. We set an ambush. We used decoys. We took advantage of those few tools we...

March 17, 2008

Random observations (that aren’t mine)

On Saturday, Angela and I went for a walk and ended up talking mostly about gaming. Angela has a somewhat different perspective on gaming than I do. She never gamed growing up, but she had an old (1e) AD&D Monster Manual that she enjoyed. She got pulled into LARPing in college – first Vampire (which she didn’t really like the...

March 7, 2008

Barbarian’s Dream House

It strikes me as odd, but I suspect that most D&D characters are technically homeless. This varies for other RPGs, of course. Many PCs in modern games have homes. Having a home in an RPG is often something of a liability. In a Mage game I played once, I sunk a ton of background points into a mansion. My PC...

March 3, 2008

Proprietary feelings

In all but the most sandboxriffic of games, GMs put things into play specifically for certain players and their PCs. In many cases, this might be as simple as polling players on what sorts of enemies they want to face – or creating in-game rewards that will have special meaning to one or more of the PCs. This is, in...

February 12, 2008

DM Organizational Tool-Tip

On Sunday, Angela ran D&D… and it was a fairly combat-heavy game for that campaign (we tend to avoid combat). The first fight involved a bunch of Phantom, Sand-form Skiurids (shadow-squirrels with a couple of weird templates). Angela has taken to marking up the battlemat with an identifying number next to each opponents’ miniature. This works reasonably well, but she’s...

February 8, 2008

Fairness Rules!

I’ve been thinking a bit about rules that I’ve seen D20 as not handling well (or at all): disproportionately-sized opponents, facing, grappling, mass combat, surprise, mounted combat, and things like that. (The astute among you will note that many of these are related.) Most of my thoughts have been along the lines of attempting to create relatively realistic models for...

January 15, 2008

The Elminster Temptation

When I wrote the post on Arcane Texts of the Second Age, I was very tempted to create an NPC in the setting – a wizard who used psychology texts upon human animae in the way that other wizards use tech manuals on techgods. Then I stopped myself. Yeah. Its a cool idea – but it could be a PC...

December 26, 2007

One-on One Gaming

I ran into this thread on EN World this morning and it got me thinking about GMing for a single player. This is a subject I’ve been interested in for awhile – so much source material for RPGs is based around a single protagonist rather than a team. It seems as though a one-player, one-GM game might be liberating in...

November 28, 2007

What do you want to play?

I’ve been getting the GMing itch lately. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to run a game until February at the earliest. One of my first reactions to the idea of running a game was to think about asking people I play with the following questions: If you could have me run any RPG campaign for you… What genre would it...

October 15, 2007

Lessons from history

My last post got me thinking about using sites of real-life coolness as gaming inspiration. I’ve done this in the past (a few times, but I am just going to write about one today). Once upon a time, I lived in Washington, D.C. (in the Dupont Circle area, for those of you who know D.C.). I ran a large and...

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