All Games Considered spent most of a recent show reviewing a whole bunch of Hex products. If you’re on the fence or want to know more about a particular QAGS book, there’s a good chance they mention it in the podcast. What follows was written for a sort of game essay contest for a blog…
Since it’s con season, this week I’m going to talk about running convention games. For the most part, the tricks to running a good convention game are the same as for any other game: make sure everyone has fun, give each character a chance to shine, and give the characters a stake in what’s going…
Last week I posted a new article on Hubpages called “Seven Rules Every Game Master Should Follow.” That explains why I didn’t post here last week, but I don’t have any excuse for the week or two before that beyond a combination of real life stuff and lack of ideas. I’ve written, co-written, or contributed…
Most gamers agree that players are responsible for creating the characters in a role-playing game, but the GM’s responsibilities are more nebulous. Usually we say that the GM is responsible for the world, or stories, or both. In QAGS, I think we said the GM was responsible for “everything else,” which is definitely overstating things….
I recently finished writing the section of M-Force that deals with conducting investigations. Since investigation scenes are common in all types of RPGs, I decided to share it here. Since the details are more about process than mechanics, it should be fairly easy to adapt this to other game systems if for some reason you…
I’ve mentioned numerous times that my usual method of planning for a game involves deciding what conflicts are going on in the world and then trying to figure out ways to get the characters involved in those conflicts. I haven’t really gone into the “get the players involved” part of the equation, so I’m going…
I rarely do very much planning for the games I run. One of the benefits of using a rules-light system is that it’s easy to make things up on the spot, so I don’t see the point of spending a lot of time drawing maps and looking up stat blocks that might or might not…
A recent post on a gaming blog I follow mentioned an online tool called inklewriter, which basically lets you write your own Endless Quest books. The author had started using the site to make a tool to help new players make their D&D character and announced a contest where people make a gaming tool using the…
About a month ago, someone on Reddit asked for tips on using dream logic in games. He or she planned on introducing a trickster villain whose presence twisted reality into a dream-like state. I posted some suggestions and thought “that would make a good blog subject,” then promptly forgot about it. Now I’ve remembered that…
Books and movies often use time spent traveling to help establish the characters and relationships between them, but it’s sometimes hard to model this in a game, especially if your players aren’t used to un-prompted role-playing. Sometimes, giving them something that looks a little more like a traditional RPG “encounter” can help. Roll on…
