Rule of the Dice

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...