As I introduced in my last post about improvisation, I believe that the key to being able to design a location (whether beforehand or on the fly) is grounded in what I’m calling your toolbox for design. The key is that once you have a well developed toolbox to pull ideas from, you can more readily and quickly design a location for your tabletop Roleplaying Games on the spot or adapt your planned locations to fit the developing needs of the game table. An underlying goal of this series of posts is to help you develop the toolbox required so that you will be able to accomplish this task with relative ease and a good amount of confidence.
How WotC Doomed Us All By Making The Fates Do Way More Work
Learn the dark secrets about D&D WotC doesn’t want you to know! Discover how you can break the game by doing nothing but buying official game materials! Defeat your enemies using nothing but cards (without becoming one of the X-Men!) All this and how to use Fortune Cards to fix your love life after the jump.
Critical Bits for the week ending 2011-02-13
From the Archives:: 10 word contest update http://bit.ly/f5KzZf #charchive # Cheapass Games returning with free, easy-to-print PDFs to download and print yourself, then pay what you want. http://www.cheapass.com/ # RT @joystiq: Activision axing Guitar Hero and True Crime; Freestyle Games reportedly hit with layoffs [update] http://aol.it/gLyrdj # "7 Dragons" coming later this year from @LooneyLabs […]
Blind Design, or How to Fail Better
Adventure design, whether for personal use or mass consumption, comes down to having a goal and heading straight toward it. And, of course, there are never pitfalls in the way . . .
Visions Verbalized
If you can’t produce an elevator pitch, your idea isn’t solid enough. All games rely on this initial expression to become all they can be. A lack of focus at such an early stage leads, at least, to wasted work as designers realize a game’s scope needs narrowing. At worst, uncertain direction at the outset is a path of failure. Kitchen-sink design’s best results . . .
The Architect DM: On Improvisation
I could not be happier for February to be here because it means winter is getting closer to ending and with it hopefully the seemingly annual lull in gaming activities. There was an unintentional break from my regular D&D campaign from late November until the very end of January due to weather and horrible holiday scheduling conflicts. Last year I somehow managed to go from thinking about canceling my campaign in early December to running three full adventures within January alone. Thankfully my game got back into the swing of things two weeks ago and now I am gearing up for another adventure this weekend. As I’m getting back into planning my adventures, I’ve been thinking more and more about improvisation in tabletop RPGs.
DDXP 2011 Recap Part Deux: THE EXCITING REMAINDER
For those of you who missed last week’s recap of my trip to DDXP 2011: SPOILER ALERT! I had a seriously excellent time. Today’s article continues my account of my adventures in beautiful downtown Ft. Wayne, IN. Learning the Hard Way As I said yesterday, I had an awesome time playing in the Battle Interactive […]
Critical Bits for the week ending 2011-02-06
RT @DreadGazeebo: Wherein I give you the lowdown on @Wizards_DnD's new Despair Deck http://bit.ly/igfzxe # From the Archives:: Exploring Evil in RPGs http://bit.ly/hP0AI0 #charchive # RT @loganbonner: The worst RPG characters (via @frequentbeef): http://bit.ly/fABiX3 # RT @rjschwalb: I chat about skill challenges here: http://bit.ly/fQIE6I I'm sure there's something here folks will hate 😀 #
The D&D Experience
Lots of conventions, from PAX to Comicpalooza, have D&D games and organized play. None of them are like D&D Experience. This convention is about hardcore D&D gaming and D&D news. It’s all D&D all the time on official channels. Players who come here come to play the game from sunup until the witching hour. When they’re not playing, they’re learning more about D&D from the experts.
Lessons Learned at DDXP2011
DDXP 2011 is in the books. I’ll look at what I learned, think about the joys of playing and DMing, and extol the virtues of the World’s Smallest Stripper.
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