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 […]
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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: 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: 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 readingGURPS101: Deconstructing Size Modifier
Guest Post by Sean “Dr. Kromm” Punch First off, this one isn’t by me. It’s been a bit edited by me to fit in my blog, but is otherwise Sean’s words. This entire post stems from a conversation that was had in the GURPS Discord where Greyman asked: “Is there any way to make your […]
Continue readingCarpe Blogiem: Rules I Don’t Use, Replace, or Revise
GURPS 4th edition is a very well put together system and one that I deeply enjoy using and writing for… but there are things about it that I rather don’t like and have either ignored or houseruled away. Now, as any of my players can tell you I really don’t have a lot of after-character creation […]
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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