This blog post is a long and rambling story of how Dungeons & Dragons, and by extension, the whole milieu of roleplaying games, came to be. In my reading of early publications on the subject and research of facts, figures, and related goings-o...
Hey Game Masters, depending on your style and the style of your gaming group, encounters probably form a big part of your campaigns. Typically, encounters are defined as combat or non-combat, and can take up a significant amount of time in a gamin...
As part of my quest to engage more with roleplaying games (a quest this blog forms a part of), I’ve decided to start reading the core rule books of other systems I’ve never played before. I may not get a chance to actually play them, especially no...
There are two kinds of people: those who have a plan, and those who plan to have a plan. In the art of Game Mastering, what the players chose to do is referred to as the Great Unknown. You have no idea what they’ll do, and how could you? No one...
This post is about a TEDxStockholm Talk given by David JP Phillips entitled “The Magical Science of Storytelling” which I discovered recently to be rather descriptive of why I write roleplaying game stories the way I do. As far as I can tell (f...
It might be a touchy subject for some, but I’m about to call down the hate on the class-based roleplaying game systems you know and love. I won’t name names, for the sake of a sense of congeniality, but I feel like the most well-known of the rolep...
I thought it appropriate that this song would get some exposure, as it encapsulates the roleplaying game experience, the joy, and the love I have for the game, perfectly. Thank you Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse for writing it, and to Gene Wil...
I've recently started an interesting campaign with my brother. It's interesting because I'm the GM and he's the only PC. I've never done a one-on-one before, and I think it has a lot of potential, especially if the PC is up to the task of, say, pl...
I'm often heard encouraging my players to create characters with depth. I'm not sure they know exactly what I mean, or anyone else for that matter, and I feel like the subject needs some threshing. At the very least, I'd like to be able to explain...
After my brother had asked for help creating a character in a new d20 Modern campaign he was in, I came across an interesting text box in the Core Rulebook beside the entry for the Knowledge skill. If I hadn't developed such a distaste for d20 and...
I was going to just post on the topic I recently chose, but I felt silly doing it so out-of-the-blue and decided to write an introductory post on what readers can expect from this blog in the future. One of my interests other than chess is tab...
