Art of DMing: Hacking Systems

I am intrigued and excited by the movement to hack (aka house rule, mod, reconfig) RPGs that's taking off. Done with respect and support." - @boymonster (Cam Banks)

Art of DMing: Putting your Players in a Bad Spot

"F" in the Relic Hunters A to Z is "Flat Broke", whch is what most Relic Hunters perpetually seem to be.  I thought about talking about player motivation, but instead I'm going to share a valuable lesson I learned about getting buy-in from your players when you want to do something horrible to them.

The A to Z of Brainstorming

Back when I first talked about this series I mentioned I was basing it on an "A to Z of Relic Hunters", and I think it's pretty obvious what I'm doing now that we're a few days into it.  I thought I'd take a quick break to talk about the why, as I ponder exactly what I'm going to say about F.

Relic Hunters: Desert and Empire, plus, the Value of Open Spaces

The blasted remains of the Empire of old are now barren and lifeless, reduced to lone and level sands.  Once, it was a single nation whose boundaries once stretched so far that the sun was always overhead somewhere.

Art of DMing: Making Published Modules Your Own (Part IV)

When last we left them, our heros were hot on the trail of a stolen artifact…

(As always, previous parts can be found under the Art of DMing tag.)

Art of DMing: Let your Players Surprise You

When you've played with someone for several years—as I have with the regular Wednesday night crowd at Game Masters—you get a pretty good idea of their tastes, how they play, that sort of thing.  You know what kind of games they like, what sort of stuff gives them trouble, and when they're going to chuck a die off your deck into the woods.

But sometimes, they surprise you.

Wilderness Travel, or, What I Learned on My Vacation

M and I (and faithful hound Argos) have returned from our visit to Blackwater Falls State Park in West Virginia, a trip that provided some much-needed decompression and relaxation—and an enforced vacation from the internet.  On the other hand, it provided some spectacular vistas and some thoughts about wilderness adventures, too…

Art of DMing: Making Published Modules Your Own (Part III)

If you've been keeping up with this series, you know that I've been taking my players through some of the classic B series of modules. Unfortunately, I broke one of the cardinal rules of GMing published adventures when I started this campaign: I didn't read the whole adventure. Reading and familiarizing yourself with everything prevents a lot of embarrassment when it comes to your game - and not just from accidentally undermining yourself.

Art of DMing: Making Published Modules Your Own (Part II)

I didn't intend to leave this big of a gap in between the entries in this series, but real life and scheduling problems intervened and I didn't want to get ahead of what actually happened in the game.  As you might remember from Part I, my players were looting clearing monsters out of a castle that had been purchased by a local merchant with too much money and too little sense.

The Art of DMing: Everything I Needed to Know about Random Encounters I Learned from J.R.R. Tolkien

Back at the end of July I mentioned a random encounter I had rolled for my players, and how I tied it into the ongoing adventure.  While listening to an episode of Fear the Boot discussing travel in RPGs, I got to thinking about random encounters again.

The Boot guys (Booters? Booties?) seemed a little bit dismissive of random encounters in general, cracking jokes about the obligatory one random encounter during any particular travel scene and generally regarding them as speed bumps getting in the way of the real story. I think that's selling them short.  Random encounters are, if used correctly and in the right kind of game, a great tool for DMs - and to show what I mean, I'll be using examples from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, or, There and Back Again.

Setting Design, or, Why I'm Probably Not Old School

As you can tell by the list over to the right, I read a lot of RPG blogs, many of which have some kind of connection to that nebulous school of thought called the "Old School Renaissance".  They're a continuous source of interesting thoughts and inspirations, but there are times when I'm brought up short by the vast gulf between the Old School and…whatever mishmash of schools I have wound up as.

In Which I (Respectfully?) Disagree with Another Blogger

Over at The Tao of D&D, Alexis posted an article entitled Creativity And Breast-Feeding, in which DMs are told in no uncertain terms to quit buying gaming stuff and make up your own already.  Keeping up with new games is characterized as a "dependency problem", and the people who do it are "weak".  Given that I recently made the first post in a series about making published adventures your own, you're probably right if you suspect I don't agree.

The Art of DMing: Making Published Adventures Your Own (Part I)

One of my biggest failings as an early GM was a sort of fear to deviate from published material.  If it was on the page, that was what happened, come hell or high water.  Oh, sure, I read the occasional advice column that talked about tailoring the adventure to your PCs, but it was always couched in terms of matching the adventure to their capabilities.  I never had a good example to go by for really integrating a published module into a campaign.  Fortunately, I was able to learn by trial and error, but I thought I'd try and put down some of the process here in the hopes that it can help someone's campaign out of where I was stuck for many years - or open up other GMs to the idea of using published adventures.