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You are here: Home / Archives for Newest Critical Hits / Columns / Musings of the Chatty DM

Nothing kills a fight faster than starting a combat.

September 23, 2007 by The Chatty DM

Image Source: Fiery Dragon Productions A few months ago, while reading the most excellent, and sadly concluded, DM of the Rings webcomic, I came upon a very inspiring strip. I wrote a forum post about it but I’d like to re-edit it here instead of letting it fall off the 20th page. Shamus’ cynical comments […]

Filed Under: Geek Stuff, Musings of the Chatty DM, Roleplaying Games Tagged With: DMing

Meet the players!: Eric

September 23, 2007 by The Chatty DM

Image Source: Ubi Soft’s Prince of Persia, The Two Thrones Two weeks ago, I sent a questionnaires like this one to my 5 D&D players. I got 4 responses so far and I’m posting the 2nd one today, along with my usual editorial comments. What character do you play in our current D&D campaign? (Name, […]

Filed Under: Musings of the Chatty DM, Player Psychology, Roleplaying Games Tagged With: Community, Player Profile

Has it been 2 months already?

September 22, 2007 by The Chatty DM

Image Source: Old-translated-to-French Manga called Mini-Fée. Yax and the Stupid Ranger crew (Stupid Ranger,Vanir and Dante) celebrated their 2 months on the blogosphere earlier this month and it made me realize that I started at about the same time. Woot, 2 months, 60-some posts (I ain’t called Chatty for nothing!) , 2000 total page views […]

Filed Under: Musings of the Chatty DM

The Stages of a RPG Team's Development, Part 3: Storming

September 21, 2007 by The Chatty DM

Let’s forge onwards in this ‘D&D and Workplace teams are similar’ analogy. With the four stages of a team’s development concept, we’ve covered the introduction and the forming of a new RPG gaming group. Now onwards to the choppy waters of a Storming group. Storming Half the players are reading from their manual, fiddling their […]

Filed Under: Musings of the Chatty DM, Player Psychology, Roleplaying Games Tagged With: DMing, The 4 stages

Obligatory Blog Social Meme: Four on the Floor

September 21, 2007 by The Chatty DM

Wow, a few days shy of my 2nd month doing this Bloggy buisness and I’ve already been tagged by The Stupid Ranger for a thing called a Meme. Now having read both of Brin’s uplift Trilogies I know that a Meme is a lifeform made out of ideas!!!! So I am basically being infected! Never […]

Filed Under: Geek Stuff, Musings of the Chatty DM

Mining Tropes for RPG nuggets: Running on the Edge

September 20, 2007 by The Chatty DM

Image Source: Gamespot This is part of a series of articles that tackles the concepts of tropes and how they can be applied by a DM/GM to improve their favorite Role-Playing game adventures. It is heavily inspired by the sheer goodness of the TV Tropes Wiki. All right, so Marty’s dead now and we need […]

Filed Under: Musings of the Chatty DM, Roleplaying Games, Tropes Tagged With: DMing, rule of cool, Tropes

Selling Fluff to a Crunch Diehard

September 19, 2007 by The Chatty DM

I’m a crunch junky, always been and I know it. I love the rules especially those involved in the creation of monsters (I’m looking at you Mr Chaos-Shaped Were-Boar Ogre!) In fact, that’s probably why I like reading stuff by Mike Mearls (Iron Heroes, Book of Nine Swords, Book of Iron Might) so much. That […]

Filed Under: Musings of the Chatty DM, Roleplaying Games Tagged With: Crunch, DMing, fluff

Recycling the Echo Chamber…

September 19, 2007 by The Chatty DM

Deeper in the archives of my pals at Critical Hits lies a link to a gaming video made by semi-celebrities of the audio-visual arts in the frigid spaces of Québec, Canada. I’m not bringing a lot of new things to the discussions (hence the title reference) except to show it to people who haven’t seen […]

Filed Under: Geek Stuff, Musings of the Chatty DM, Roleplaying Games

The Stages of a RPG Team's Development, Part 2: Forming

September 18, 2007 by The Chatty DM

In part 1 of this series, I compared a management job to that of a DM.  I really think the comparison holds on many levels as you’ll find in this post and the next ones. I then went out to introduce the 4 stages of a team’s development cycle. I concluded by saying that a […]

Filed Under: Musings of the Chatty DM, Player Psychology, Roleplaying Games Tagged With: DMing, The 4 stages

Getting to know the player's around here…

September 18, 2007 by The Chatty DM

Stupid Ranger beat me to it this morning by providing a very good answer to one of the player questions I posted yesterday when I introduced my first player. Now that I asked similar questions to your DMs (and hope they’ll continue answering as they drop by) I’d like to hear from you players, part […]

Filed Under: Musings of the Chatty DM, Player Psychology, Roleplaying Games Tagged With: Community

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About the Author

  • The Chatty DM

    The Chatty DM is the "nom de plume" of gamer geek Philippe-Antoine Menard. He has been a GM for over 40 years. An award-winning RPG blogger, game designer, and scriptwriter at Ubisoft. He squats a corner of Critical Hits he affectionately calls "Musings of the Chatty DM." (Email Phil or follow him on Twitter.)

    Email: chattydm@critical-hits.comWeb: https://critical-hits.com//category/chattydm/

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