While I’m gearing up and preparing to continue the Architect DM series into 2011, I decided to first put out a call for more questions on my twitter account and see what kinds of questions you guys have when it comes to DMing and world building in your RPGs. This has worked incredibly well for me in the past, at least half of the posts in this series so far have come directly from reader questions or suggestions and I’m always looking for more topics to cover.
Personal Encounter Design Workshop
In mid-December I received a great e-mail from a reader named Brian that I talk to regularly on my twitter account, he was planning for an upcoming D&D adventure and wanted some specific help with designing an encounter. I’m not sure what exactly prompted him to send it my way, but I was more than happy to read through and share some of my ideas to help spice up his encounter. Just today I received a follow up e-mail that he is planning to run the encounter tomorrow and that he wanted to run his updated encounter by me again. I was all to happy to oblige, and I also realized that the exchange of e-mails might be something some of you would be interested in seeing. So here it is, with his permission of course.
The Architect DM: Open Spaces, Plazas, and Holidays
It’s the end of the year and what most of us would call the “Holiday Season”, and I have instead decided to bring up a relevant topic that is quite fitting for this time of year. I’m sure there are several published pieces and posts online about incorporating holidays into your RPG game, but I’d like to discuss them with a specific focus on the location designs you use in your game. I’d also like to focus on one specific holiday trope that you’ve probably considered for your own game – if there’s a holiday/special event, the party is most likely there to experience it.
The Architect DM: Fantasy Technology & Development
In my last post I talked about how the abandonment of locations and their resettlement can be used to influence the way we design our RPG worlds. The discussion led into the idea of technologies that could be developed and subsequently lost along with a civilization, only to be rediscovered at a later date by different cultures. I know for a fact that many people have a mental disconnect when it comes to thinking of “technology” and their typical Dungeons & Dragons game world. I often think of technology in an RPG along the same lines as psionics, there seem to be a lot of people who love to use them and a lot of people who avoid using them altogether.
The Architect DM: World Building Basics
So far the Architect DM series has focused primarily on locations and building design, but today and over the next few weeks I’m going to take a look at the larger scale idea of world building and some factors that play into designing a realistic and believable world to play your games in. As with many of the design aspects I’ve talked about previously, designing a realistic world can feel like one of the most intimidating and daunting tasks to undertake but in reality if you apply principles correctly it can make your efforts easier and better at the same time.
The Architect DM: Give It Some Structure
Today I’m going to focus on what could be considered the biggest and most important architectural element that anyone could use. As things go, this element may also be one of the most overlooked when it comes to dungeon design for home games or even in published adventures. I’m talking about structure, and not the kind that makes sure your adventure has a beginning, middle, and end (though it can help with that with surprising ways) but the kind that if it were simplified to its most common element: you could just call it columns and walls.
The Architect DM: Environment and Interaction
It’s been a few weeks since my last Architect DM post, but don’t worry the series will continue and there seems to be a lot of information to cover! In my last post I talked about function and playability of a location in a more general and meta sense, but what I originally started that post to discuss was the specifics of how the environment is experienced. One of the most crucial considerations when it comes to design in Architecture is the human experience of the environment, after all the buildings are designed by humans for our own use and appreciation.
Chatty’s Mailbag: Good Troll Hunting
Last week, I got an interesting email from M. asking advice about dealing with “That Guy”. Now contrary to the ones we discussed in that panel in Toronto, everything seems to indicate that M.’s guy is one to get the generic “you have to be the flexible one to fit him in your game” answer. Quite the contrary.
Toronto Fan Expo: The DM Master Class Seminar
One of the highlights of my visit at last weekend’s Toronto Fan Expo was the one hour panel I had the honour to share with RPG legends Ed Greenwood and Robin D. Laws. We ended up speaking to packed room of 100+ people. I was impressed!
The Downside of Awesome
I’ve recently discovered a pattern common to the gaming sessions where I’m not entirely satisfied with the way things went. I realized that it’s partly because encounters reach a state of complexity such that players become confused about the best way to navigate through them. The goal becomes fuzzy or the options are either too numerous or too complex mechanically to be used in full.
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