Because Gaming is More Than the Rules
Posted in Character interaction, D&D 4th, Dungeon Mastering, Roleplay, storytelling, world building on Apr 19th, 2011
D&D is really cool, though it has been rad in the past. New cars are hot, bad cars are lemons and old cars are clunkers. A bummed cigarette is a loosie, a canned beer is a cold one and coke is coke but so is coke. Slang is part of our world and our daily [...]
Posted in Character interaction, Conflict, D&D 4th, Dungeon Mastering, Roleplay, city building, world building on Mar 30th, 2011
The arena of politics is and always has been complex and filled with intrigue. Even the casual student of history is inundated with tales of corruption, party politics, and ambition. If nothing else, one must merely look to the innumerable jokes about the honesty of politicians to understand their questionable role in any society. That is [...]
Posted in Character interaction, Characters, Conflict, Roleplay, storytelling on Mar 22nd, 2011
While reading through the brilliant DM of the Rings comic at Twenty Sided I came across a blog post in which Shamus discusses the simple fact that wherever there are barmaids, princesses and female PC/NPCs at least one male player will want to have sex with them. Which got me thinking, in most of the [...]
Posted in Character interaction, Houserules, RPG, Roleplay, Skill checks, Star Wars on Mar 4th, 2011
When running Star Wars Saga Edition or Urban Arcana it became apparent to me that big value items can throw off the balance the party’s wealth and drastically increase their ability to purchase powerful items. For example, in Star Wars starships cost tens to hundreds of thousands of credits new and any up to three [...]
Posted in Character interaction, Characters, RPG, Urbana Arcana, storytelling on Feb 21st, 2011
Please enjoy a look into my gaming table with this adventure log from my Urban Arcana campaign. Today’s post was brought to you by my friend Kelli AKA Tanya Nyx. August 18 – 2011 My day at work started out normally. I did some business around the club: signed for a couple delivery orders, made [...]
Posted in Character interaction, Dungeon Mastering, Inter-player conflict, items on Feb 16th, 2011
Have you ever felt like your group of PCs is just a little too friendly with each other? Like everyone gets along just a little too well? I personally like to have a little bit of group drama when playing any game so that the players keep themselves busy even when they aren’t fighting enemies. [...]
Posted in Character interaction, Characters, D&D 4th, Inter-player conflict, RPG, Roleplay on Feb 14th, 2011
In most of my posts, I’ve talked about creating a solid character and role-playing well, but I realized that I’ve left one glaring oversight that is perhaps the hardest feat in immersive roleplaying – being the first in your group to do it. It’s human nature to adjust your behavior to match the group you’re [...]
Posted in Character interaction, Characters, D&D 4th, Dungeons and dragons, RPG, Roleplay, storytelling on Jan 31st, 2011
I thought that with the news that WOTC is releasing the Shadow Source book, I would write a post about how to roleplay evil characters for an evil campaign. Yes, I realize that Shadow Source is not synonymous with evil, you can play neutral or even good, etc. But sometimes, you just want to stop [...]
Posted in Character interaction, Characters, Dungeon Mastering, Houserules, Inter-player conflict, RPG, Roleplay, Star Wars, storytelling, world building on Jan 27th, 2011
How do you know when a character has crossed over to the dark side? Star Wars: Saga Edition has dark side points: a numeric representation of how far towards the darkness a character has traveled. When a character has reached a number of dark side points greater than his/her wisdom score, that character can no [...]
Posted in Character interaction, Inter-player conflict, Roleplay, backstories on Jan 26th, 2011
I’ve always been a fan of making sure that there is a character with noble descent in any of my games, whether I was playing the character or not. Just because you have a mismatched group of adventurers on a quest to save the world doesn’t mean that they all have to be ragtag vagabonds [...]
