Because Gaming is More Than the Rules
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 Characters, Dungeons and dragons, Houserules, Magic, Roleplay on Feb 15th, 2011
Anyone who is familiar with 3.5 Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder is acquainted with the spells per day system. Depending on your character level and your ability scores you are alloted a certain number of spells per day of the levels that you are able to cast. Unlike 4th edition which utilizes At Wills, a [...]
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 [...]
Posted in Character interaction, Characters, Conflict, Dungeon Mastering, Information control, RPG, Roleplay, Star Wars, storytelling, world building on Jan 20th, 2011
Sorry folks, but the devil’s advocate is in. On Tuesday, I talked about the wonder and majesty about playing around in the canon of the Star Wars universe. Today, I will tell you why I almost never do it. Star Wars has always been a bigger place than the canon to me. I still have [...]
Posted in Character interaction, D&D 4th, Dungeon Mastering, Dungeons and dragons, Information control, RPG, storytelling on Jan 7th, 2011
DM: You get hit with the attack from the goblin Player: No I don’t! you rolled a 8 if it has the same attack bonus as before I don’t get hit Some time later DM rolls a third critical against player one in one encounter who currently has 3 hit points. DM: The attack misses [...]
Posted in Character interaction, Conflict, Dungeon Mastering, RPG, Roleplay, Uncategorized, storytelling on Jan 3rd, 2011
DM: The Knight commander leans across the table and whispers the task you must complete to clear your name…. PLAYER (interrupting): We must cut down the largest tree in the forest…. WITH A HERRING ALL PLAYERS: *Laughter* As a DM your first instinct when a player interrupts you with an off topic comment or quote [...]
Posted in Conflict, D&D 4th, Dungeon Mastering, Dungeons and dragons, RPG, Roleplay, Tropes, locations, storytelling, world building on Dec 7th, 2010
Tropes are powerful devices. Devices that help define genres and styles and are incredibly useful tools for developing portions of your story. One of the most common tropes in fantasy stories is the massacre. Some impossibly bad-ass fighting force or rampaging monster ventures into a town or hamlet just to wipe everyone out with our [...]
Posted in Character interaction, D&D 4th, Deities, Dungeon Mastering, Roleplay, Star Wars, storytelling, world building on Nov 29th, 2010
Psychic visions are popular plot devices in fantasy and film. Everything from Star Wars to Heroes uses visions of the past, present and future to help move the story along and provide sources of anxiety and conflict. Despite the value of divination as a plot source I find that psychic visions are often mismanaged in [...]
Posted in Character interaction, Characters, Conflict, D&D 4th, Dungeon Mastering, Dungeons and dragons, Hero System, Inter-player conflict, RPG, Roleplay on Nov 29th, 2010
Thanks for sticking with us for 100 posts. Your support and comments have made this entire effort worthwhile. As a celebration, the four of us got together for our first podcast to discuss character deaths. We talk about everything from the unfortunate inability of Pensive to play a survivable rogue to Gestalt’s magical ability to [...]
