I am forever a GM by choice. I have very high standards when it comes to the sorts of games I’ll play in for protracted periods of time. If I’m in your game more than four sessions it means you met my standards and are continuing to meet them. Now that doesn’t mean a hill of […]
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GURPS101: Deconstructing Pact
One of the more interesting things about GURPS is that oaths, pacts, etc. can have a mechanical impact on the character. The easiest one to suss out is such agreements as a disadvantage, but the more salient is using the Pact limitation (p. B00) to reduce the cost of advantages (typically powers or some kind) bought by […]
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 – […]
Continue readingGamemaster’s Guidepost: How I Prepare Adventures
I’ve had a lot of experience running campaigns (both of the GURPS and non-GURPS variety) and have spent the better part of 28 years being a GM to a variety of groups in a variety of ways. After all this time I’ve learned a lot – which means I messed up a lot. No one […]
Continue readingGamemaster’s Guidepost: How I Designed An Adventure
Guest Post by Kalzazz I came up with and ran an adventure last Monday, so here is how it went. Around 6 PM identify that opportunity existed for game, ping potential players. By 630 PM I had identified players were available so I requested characters. By 7 had at least one character chosen, who was […]
Continue readingGamemaster’s Guidepost: Fixing Player Immersion
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: For the Sake of the Game/Roleplaying
When you start a campaign there are things that you can do for the sake of roleplaying and there are things that you do for the same of the game. Every decision you make will fall into one of these two groups. When you do something for the sake of roleplaying you are often removing […]
Continue readingGamemaster’s Guidepost: Reducing GM Overhead
Roleplaying games in general can get complicated even if it’s far on the end of narrativism. Simulationist RPGs tend to get a bad rap for overcomplications, rules, etc., but narrativist games can have the same problem with the GM having to interpret on the fly when a circumstance or event happens in game that the […]
Continue readingGamemaster’s Guidepost: Fixing GM Immersion
Being a GM is kind of like being a cat herder. Except some of the cats are on fire and the rest are trying to “help” you put out the cats who are on fire and just spreading the fire all over the place anyways. Now it’s not always like that but it’s like that […]
Continue readingGamemaster’s Guidepost: Ten Tips for Starting Campaigns With Ritual Path Magic
Ritual Path Magic is arguably one of the most popular magic systems out there. It started as the “on-board” system for GURPS Monster Hunters 1: Champions and gained such popularity that it got its own book, GURPS Thaumatology: Ritual Path Magic. It’s been explored dozens of times over in in Pyramid and has its own […]
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