Tag: game mastering

  • 30 Days of Game Mastering, Day Nine

    Have you met 30 Days of Game Mastering Challenge? No? Well please get acquainted… Player “homework”: what do you ask of your players before and between sessions? As you can guess from my previous post on world-building, I prefer to focus the world/campaign on the player characters. Like characters on a TV show, the action…

  • 30 Days of Game Mastering, Day Eight

    30 Days of Game Mastering Challenge, etcetera and so on. How do you prep for each session? I know there are GMs out there that maybe don’t do a lot of prep between sessions. I respect GMs that can really work on the fly, because I am not one of them. I’ve gotten better at…

  • 30 Days of Game Mastering, Day Seven

    30 Days of Game Mastering Challenge, yadda yadda yadda… How do you prep for the start of a campaign? Most of the Game Master prep I do at the start of a campaign was touched upon in yesterday’s post. To sum up, I heavily detail everything immediately around the party’s start location, because this is…

  • 30 Days of GMing, Day Four

    I feel like you guys should know what’s going on by now, so I’m just jumping right in. Do you use pre-published adventures or write your own? These days it’s about an 70/30 split between pre-published and the fruit of my own fevered brain. It has been many years since I have run a campaign…

  • From my Brain: 50 Random NPCs

    Monday I talked about what to do if game night came around and you had nothing, and I suggested having some pre-made NPCs on hand to make your life easier. Looking through my GM’s binder (you don’t have one? Oh, they’re brilliant! I’ll tell you all about mine sometime) I noticed my stock of NPCs…

  • When the Cupboard’s Bare

    It happens to every game master at one point or another. Game night is here, players are expecting a continuation of your Super Fun Time Awesome Campaign™ and you’ve got nothing. Maybe it’s been a particularly busy week at work, or you’ve been caught up in your studies. Heck, maybe it’s the “centipede’s dilemma”, and…

  • My Game Master Kit

    I’ve had a few folks ask me, here and at Gen Con, what I carry with me to GM. So I thought I’d give you a virtual tour of my GM kit. First thing to note, I don’t always carry this full kit with me to every session. What I take depends on the game…

  • 3 Tips for Running a Con Game

    Summer con season is in full swing, and that means con gaming! I love playing and running RPGs at cons. It gives me a chance to try out new ideas and game with folks I don’t see or have just met. If you’ve never tried gaming at a con, I highly recommend it as a…

  • GM Advice: Letting Go of “No”

    If you’ve been game mastering for a while, the word “no” can start to feel like a comfortable old friend.  After all, you spend your sessions riding herd on players, who often have the impulse control of Ritalin-deprived, sugar-soaked 10-year-olds…or maybe that’s just my group.  In any case, it is easy to just say no…

  • When a Game Master Gets Lost

    It can happen to any Game Master.  There you are, mid-campaign.  In an attempt to keep the party engaged you have plot threads running everywhere.  But some of those threads are fraying, others are getting snarled up.  You aren’t sure anymore what is going on, and if you aren’t sure it is only a matter…