Nice clickbaity headline, well done. But it’s true – narrative, “modern” games like Fate or Dungeon World are seemingly much harder to run, or even play, correctly, as compared to the more “traditional” games like D&D. By “running the game correctly” I mean using the rules to their full potential and in a manner articulated […]
We’ve all been there. You unleash an awesome boss monster on the party, expecting it to last good solid 5-6 rounds, only for it to suffer from premature evisceration. So what do you when your dracolich drops on round 3? You can leave the players unsatisfied, or cheat and pump up its hp, or use this one […]
This is an updated, 2017 version of an older article, with much better terminology. …in which Magician talks of himself in third person and reinvents GNS. Well, not quite. GNS (at least as far as I understand it) concerns itself with the desired experience, the agenda of a game: to win, to tell a story, […]
Like many others, I’ve started my roleplaying career with D&D. It was, without a doubt, a formative experience, shaping my gaming attitudes and habits. Not always for the best. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say me and my fellow players marked by D&D require rehabilitation. Why? Because we think D&D has taught […]
This was meant to be a different post. I was going to talk about rehabilitating post-D&D GMs and players. That particular fuse will have to wait for its match. As I worked on the intro, meant solely to prevent readers from declaring me a heretic, it kept growing larger. And larger. Until it became its […]
Dice do many different things in our RPGs. They are a crucial element of the Game part of it. They model the un-modelable, all the little things that combine to determine what happens. They offer the illusion of challenge – we know the PCs will win. They take the story in unexpected directions. But do […]
Having examined lessons learned from running a lengthy 4e campaign in the previous post, today I will take a look back at this very blog. Over the years I’ve used it to consider the problems raised and ideas inspired by my game, and try and find solutions for them. That, and lots of theoretical blathering. […]
Having completed my 140-session D&D 4e campaign (I know, I know, I’ve mentioned this last time; I’m still proud, shut up), what have I learned? While I’m done with the system, perhaps you aren’t. So let me be your guide. We’ll take a look at 4e itself in this post, and then at the ideas […]
I’ve done it. I’ve finished my long-running 4e campaign. 140 or so gaming sessions, 3.5 years. I feel I’ve squeezed every last drop out of the system, done everything I could have with it. I won’t be GMing it anymore, which means I won’t be writing about it anymore. That is, after I make a […]
Reviewing DramaSystem and analyzing how it handles inner character conflict got me thinking of how I’ve handled this in my 4e campaign. The fact of the matter is, 4e and D&D in general offer little to no support for creating drama. They provide rules for actions, but how character motivations inform those actions, and how in turn […]