Posted in Adventures, Character interaction, Characters, Dungeons and dragons, Inter-player conflict, RPG, Roleplay, Tropes, Uncategorized, backstories, storytelling, world building on Sep 1st, 2011
In his last post, Gestalt wrote about creating characters with more traditionally medieval values in his fantasy games. Now in reality, if you are striving to recreate (for lack of a better term) the most historically accurate medieval fantasy game ever to exist, that’s going to be very difficult. Many of the pieces of literature [...]
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So last time I talked about how – for some of us – it can be easier to think of a character’s background in relatively recent terms, rather than going Freudian and beginning in childhood. Today I’ll be talking about how hopefully all of us can benefit from knowing how stories like these get told. [...]
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Hello friend, my name is Jack Connor. I was born in 1885 and I am immortal… Well, not exactly immortal. More like really hard to kill. I was the world’s greatest card shark, so good people used to say I was born with a deck of cards in my hand. Actually, I was the only [...]
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In my last post, I described my Urban Arcana character, Eolyn, who is essentially ineffective in combat. Today I’d like to expand on her a little more by talking about the value of choosing to play a character that has little prowess on the battlefield. There are certainly advantages and disadvantages to taking on this [...]
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I hate writing backstories. While I believe myself capable of playing a variety of different characters in different ways, it’s difficult for me to think of too many interesting things that could happen to a character before early adulthood. While my current group doesn’t mind, I’ve RPed with people who would demand pages of character backstory about [...]
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When a new player joins your gaming group it is often a cause for celebration. A breath of fresh air for both the party dynamic and the storytelling. I have noticed, however, that when inexperienced players join a gaming group that the other players and the DM sometimes interfere with their decision making process. In [...]
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I’ve been spending quite a bit of time recently thinking about my 4e campaign that I plan on starting within the next couple of months. The problem I ran into this time is that I don’t want to run another sandbox campaign like I’ve done in the recent past. So I want to run something [...]
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Examples of blood oaths and blood brothers can be found in history and mythology cross-culturally. While it would be easy enough for two players to announce that their characters are blood brothers and detail a ritual that they would undergo, what fun is there if they don’t actually get benefits and disadvantages as a result? Since [...]
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Posted in Character interaction, Characters, Conflict, D&D 4th, Dungeon Mastering, Dungeons and dragons, Inter-player conflict, Roleplay, Uncategorized, backstories on May 3rd, 2011
An intrepid group of adventurers sets out to make their name in the world. With mighty swings, bawdy songs and esoteric spells they rid the kingdom of evil and earn their place among the legendary heroes. Along the way the heroes will fight many villains, striking down each with righteous fervor and without much hesitation. [...]
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In my current Legend of the Five Rings campaign, one of the players designed an entire character concept around a samurai who lost his arm as a young boy. His whole life has been dedicated to the mastery of swordsmanship so he can prove he isn’t half a warrior as his injury would lead his peers [...]
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