There are things that I wish someone had told me when I first started out being a gamemaster. Stuff you only get told by someone who knows (assuming you listen) or things which you learn at the school of hard knocks. Occasionally, you can read about them if some wise and learned master (*cough*) writes […]
Continue readingCategory Archives: Gamemaster’s Guidepost
Gamemaster’s Guidepost: On The Care And Feeding of Players
GMs can’t run games without players and players can’t play games without GMs. It’s a paradox of collaborative storytelling. But players can be finicky creatures and not all GMs know how to heard cats. Here’s a few tips to keep your players happy without giving into them all the time. Agency of Choices Players do […]
Continue readingGamemaster’s Guidepost: Short Sharp Shocks
Guest Post by J. Edward Tremlett #1: The Institute (File Under: Aliens; Demons; Fae; Secret Government Projects; Sorcery) Not everyone knows about the Institute, but everyone knows their handiwork. Because everyone knows at least one kid who just changed, seemingly overnight. One day they were super-interested in something – or had a real talent for […]
Continue readingGamemaster’s Guidepost: Flying Solo
Guest Post by Scott Rochat Sam Spade. Wonder Woman. Lara Croft. James Bond. What do all these famous fictional heroes have in common? Simple: they’re nearly impossible to play in the typical RPG campaign. Oh, they’re easy enough to build mechanically. But each of them is typically a solo act (Justice League notwithstanding). They star […]
Continue readingGamemaster’s Guidepost: The Plague City
Guest Post by S. A. Fisher Most people fled from cities infected with the bubonic plague. For instance, Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron revolves around the storytelling of survivors who fled Florence, Italy during its plague years. Player characters, however, may have business inside a plague city. How do you handle that? Mashup GURPS Bio-Tech and […]
Continue readingGamemaster’s Guidepost: What I Think a Good Player Is
Because I have such high standards for myself as a gamemaster I also have high standards for my prospective players. I’ve talked about this before but I feel it bears another post to look over what I consider the bare minimum for me to invest in a player as a GM. And I do invest. […]
Continue readingGamemaster’s Guidepost: Building History
Most GMs will eventually find themselves in one of two places when running games. Either they create their own settings (i.e., “homebrew”) or they use an established one. (Of course, there are heretics who do both at once, but we must consign them to the shadows where they belong)…. …if you’d like to read more, […]
Continue readingGamemaster’s Guidepost: The Heroic Index
The best games are a mix of gritty and cinematic elements. The player characters (and major NPCs) are cinematic beings with abilities beyond normal men and women. But the world they are in? That world is realistic. It’s the difference between a hero punching a mundane in a comic book and they go flying back […]
Continue readingGamemaster’s Guidepost: Simulatin and Shoutin
I’ve been playing role-playing games for a long time (I gamed for the first time with my brother when I was seven) and I’ve been running games for almost as long (I ran my first game when I was 11). I made a lot of mistakes in the beginning, mistakes I’d like to prevent newbie […]
Continue readingGamemaster’s Guidepost: Compromised Player Characters
One of the hardest things to do when running a game is to GM a compromised PC. (Compromised in this instance is a player character who is mind controlled, possessed, or replaced by a shapeshifter.) Taking over the character’s actions is going to result in the other PCs being suspicious so that won’t work – […]
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