Making your Star Wars RPG awesome
Ben David and Joshua talk about conflict and the dialogue that opens up from using it. From how to do it badly to how to make things much more interesting.
Continue reading “The Astounding Conflict Tale”
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Here’s something I’ve been dealing with lately that keeps jumping to the front of my mind. How can I deal with a published adventure that has significant problems with it but has a single diamond in the rough that will drive some great sessions?
Continue reading “Eyes Up – Diamonds in the Rough”
In Dungeons and Dragons I was able to game my DM because we never went up against a group of NPCs that were smart enough to attack the real healer. Every single one of the NPC groups had an INT score high enough to go for the healer, I just made sure I wasn’t the first one to heal. They would never retarget after the other healer stopped and I started. This realization allowed me to win D&D. Winning any RPG is one of the most pyrrhic things I can think of doing. It’s boring and you should never let this happen to your group. Continue reading “Confessions of a Newb GM: How to Not Win an RPG”
We talk about what in space can cause your players a hard time and how to make it more interesting in an adventure and story. From the terror of a black hole to the raw power of getting close to a star being in a starship can be fraught with danger. Continue reading “The Deadly Space Tale”
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GMs have to strike a weird balance in ongoing campaigns. Don’t do too much preparation; so that when players go off the blazed trail you aren’t starting the nights campfire with your notes. But, also have enough structure so they aren’t just spinning on the log flume again and again going nowhere. All while having a little bit of fun while doing it. Many people look to random tables to solve the preparation issue to avoid burning out from creative fatigue. The problem with that is many of the encounters I’ve seen using encounter tables have been horrible; worse than just throwing a dart at the index. There is little life to the encounter and the GM doesn’t understand how the monsters are to be utilized in the scene.
Continue reading “Eyes Up – Taking the Boring out of Randomness”
The other day my former DM told me what I missed in the last session. He told me told it was two combats and two skill challengesas an example of how quick the session was moving. Hence why he’s my former DM. I know my new DM cares much more about having fun than winning D&D. Continue reading “Confessions of a Newb GM: Game with a Difference”
What do you do when you’re planning on throwing your players into a disaster? Why are there certain tropes to use and to avoid? We look to some that come up and many of the research you can use to make your game feel even more amazing. Continue reading “The Disastrous Tale”
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You need direction at the table. If you’re reading this I’ll assume you aren’t trying to flesh out your Imperial Assault or Descent games just for that little extra bit of story. I mention this because the standard villain of the week approach is boring. It’s boring on TV and it’s boring on the table. A campaign has structure. A campaign needs structure, even if it’s loose, otherwise you and the players will spin your wheels after a while and people will drift away.
Continue reading “Eyes Up – Directing Your Campaign”
Massive battles aren’t what role playing games are good at. I have yet to see mass combat rules that are functional at a narrative level or that maintain the spirit of the rules set out in the core book. The rules don’t matter to playing on this scale. The conceit that you’re commanding armies of people often abstracts the rules to such an extent that you are either playing a board game with its own rules or the rules you started with no longer apply at all. Continue reading “Confessions of a Newb GM: Thoughts for an Epic Fight”
We talk about exploration and how to avoid some of the pitfalls that are so easy to come up against when bringing this to your players. From having a place be devoid of life to not remembering to have a goal once the players get to a new place we give a few ideas on how to make your exploration better. Continue reading “The Exploration Tale”
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Never talk to me about adventures, because if you are trying to it’ll be a book in length and I’m going to be bored, or it’s going to be a about something that isn’t all that long but I’ll be wondering where the rest of it is because I’m expecting the whole novel. Adventure is a meaningless term that could be anything from going and building a snowman to throwing some jewelry into a volcano, or even following the adventures of a Naboo ship-repair droid as he goes through the galaxy orchestrating the overthrow of an evil empire.
Continue reading “Eyes Up: A Trouble with Terms”
When setting a scene you should have a reason for the players to be in the encounter whether that reason is a piece of information, a contest that one is going to participate in, or an NPC they have to deal with for other reasons. Any situation the party has in front of them has multiple solutions to it and as a GM you should be trying to show at least a few of these solutions. Continue reading “Confessions of a Newb GM: Rooms as Costume”
We talk of Thrawn and grand villains as well as thugs that are easier to completely defeat. The discussion goes from why you want to use them and how you can frame long term villains within their own narrative for how they got there.
This episode would not have happened without the article posted on Eleven – Thirty Eight
Continue reading “The One Shot Villain Tale”
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As a GM we fear the loss of control. I see this everyday with myself being the one fearful, but I also see it at the gaming table quite a bit. I’m a very weird player when it comes to RPGs, I’m not attached to a character and will play it like it’s just an avatar in adventures doing things that are far past the daring do of what a ‘sensible’ character would show. This is my own take on it because of needing to let go of my fears and do things in ways I wouldn’t do away from the table.
Continue reading “Eyes Up: Going for the Stands”
I want to help clear up a misconception that I’ve seen again and again in discussions. Skills are skills. It doesn’t matter if they’re knowledge skills, combat skills, bow hunting skills, or computer hacking skills it all comes back down to: The way you use a skill in one situation is the same as in any other situation. Continue reading “Confessions of a Newb GM: Skills and Structured Events”
We talk of Star Wars and how technology should be a support for your story unless it becomes the complete centre of it. We go from discussing the tech and some of the oddities to discussing how to use it at your table in ways that move the story forward. Continue reading “The Analog Tale”
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When creating a campaign you have a story you want to tell. This will have its own rising and falling actions, but, if you’re designing this week to week, it becomes near impossible to find ‘act breaks’ and make it fit well into the tropes of a nice classic three act structure. The best structure for planning long campaigns I’ve found is to follow the pattern of TV shows or comics, for example Saga, Babylon 5, Farscape, and Leverage. Continue reading “Eyes Up: Teasing A Bigger World”
In the last article we looked at the basics of why an NPC is in a scene. Today we’re looking at where an encounter is taking place. I know I’ve covered it, @Brometheus has covered it, and @theangrydm has covered this before. Here I’m going to be looking at it a little differently. What happens when an NPC isn’t in the room, but you still need to get information across to the players. Continue reading “Confessions of a Newb GM: When the NPCs Aren’t There”
We talk about adventures without combat in this episode. And look at many different ways of creating a dramatic narrative without forcing the players to pick up a blaster.
Continue reading “The Atypical Campaign Tale”
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Plans change.
As a GM you know this at least theoretically, combats don’t go the way you expect or even don’t happen at all. The changing course of how people interpret information you give them is often seemingly bizarre. Players jump to one conclusion and are unwilling to give up on that idea. I’ve seen players do it time and again. This isn’t a bad thing, but what you do with it can be. Continue reading “Eyes Up: Change with your Players”
Getting a group together and sitting down to play can be fairly nerve wracking for a GM. Building the world that people are living in is a weird sort of skill to expand. I see the expectation time and again in many RPG products, GMs are expected to be able to go create something and make it wonderful for players off the top of their head. Continue reading “Confessions of a Newb GM: Making NPCs That Care”
We talk NPCs and how to make them and your base interesting in an Age of Rebellion setting, as well as the varried locations you’ll run across in Edge of the Empire and Force and Destiny. Continue reading “The Deep NPC Tale”
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Let’s talk about rewards for players. I have yet to meet a GM or player who doesn’t get the basics of rewarding players with experience points. In some systems it’s an equation as simple as putting monsters in at one end, running them through the shiny bladed grinder of players, and dropping at the feet of the players blood splattered items of surprising usefulness. This is all well and good, and keeps the characters growing in power, but this can be minor to rewarding the players for their actions instead of just their characters. Continue reading “Eyes Up: Rewarding the Player, not the Character”
I’ve been talking with my D&D 4th Edition DM over the last couple of weeks. After trying to bring my DM to The Mad Adventurers Society and The Angry GM blog, in an attempt to bring the perverbial horse to water, we were discussing how the two of us envisioned a 5th Edition campaign. He wanted to wait for the 5th Edition DMs guide and delve into its depths before he was willing to run a new adventure. The biggest reason he gave for this was his memory of the DMs guide from Advanced Dungeons and Dragons with tables upon tables of things that can be rolled on. He was describing why this was a great thing, but there are some concerns when it comes to random encounters as a base for a campaign. Continue reading “Confessions of a Newb GM: Clunky Randomness”
We go looking at new ways your players can slip deeper into a crime lords grasp and how you can give the players two choices that they don’t want to take. Ben and David talk about how crime in fiction isn’t always happy go lucky and can be a huge moral quandary for those involved. Continue reading “The Hard Crime Tale”
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