Rule of the Dice

I am gearing up for a new campaign and in the process of finishing all the fun bits and pieces. This is my favorite time, just before the show starts and the lights come on. I am trying very hard to create a campaign that will execute maximum awesome with minimum stress. I try to follow three simple rules when I create a new campaign and get ready to throw my players into it. 1) Your players are your campaign - Make the campaign for your players, not for you. Its that simple. 2) Create stories, not a story - Its always a temptation to go all Lord of the Rings with a campaign. DON"T.... you are not Tolkien and this isn't Middle Earth. Creating an epic over-arching super story that binds the characters into an amazing epic adventure is almost always doomed to fail. Create many stories for your world and let your players own ambitions create the epic story. 3) Make the campaign intriguing not cool - If everyone is an uber-cool ninja gangster, and there are a thousand co...

This is a re posting. I am still too busy to do a real post, but someday soon real life will no longer interfere with my blogging life. I wrote this post originally as my first post for the RPG Bloggers network and then foolishly backdated it by accident, so I'm pretty sure a lot of people haven't read it. The post sums my play style and general philosophy of role playing. To me, world and campaign building are the meat and potatoes of role playing. I am a homebrewer through and through. I hardly use any published material, as a matter of fact the amount of RPG books that I own can fit neatly on one small shelf. On the other hand the amount of homebrewed material that I have wouldn't fit neatly into a large room. Creating worlds and campaigns is what I do best, and its what I love most about gaming. I have used many game systems over the years, but I find myself becoming more indifferent to the system with age. I've always found that you can argue the virtues of a g...

I have been reading a lot about old school gaming recently. Maybe its because the Godfather of Gaming passed away, or maybe us older gamers are longing for the days of our youth and pining over our favorite long faded campaigns. Whatever it is there seems to be a marked upswing in the old school gaming racket. This got me thinking, what does old school gaming mean to me? My old school gaming was dungeons & dragons, killing orcs and bad storylines that involved killing more orcs. None of the crew that I played with knew what the hell we were doing, but holy shit did we ever love playing. Our games were a hodgepodge of convoluted rules placed in campaign settings that resembled Heavy Metal magazine a lot more than the Forgotten Realms. But it worked somehow, it always worked. It worked not because of the rules or campaign setting, it worked because of the spirit of adventure. We all had a spirit of interdependent creativity, we were in it together and everyone created something. If...

I expect my players to create characters that they think are completely awesome, and it is my job as a GM to facilitate the awesome within the context of my campaign. Repeat this many times, let it be your mantra and your players will love you forever. Everyone wants a unique and cool character to play. Whats the point in playing someone who is mediocre, if we wanted that we would play Administrators & Secretaries not Dungeons & Dragons. Heroic characters doing heroic things in a heroic world filled with heroic adventure is what we all want and it is your job as the GM to deliver it. Here are four suggestions for players and GM’s to awesome up a player character. 1. Delete unawesome elements - If the game you play has boring, useless, fluffy or irritating character classes or races, get rid of them before you start playing. This way no one will feel either compelled (the super role-player type) or obliged (the “balance the party type”) to play them. Now this is different fr...