Way back when, I started a series of posts where I would review and comment on Robin D. Laws excellent GMing book called Robin’s Laws of Good Mastering. My main goal is to compare his thoughts on GM to mine and see how the 7 year old book stayed relevant today. My objective isn’t to […]
Chatty’s Mailbox: Helping out a New DM
This morning I had the pleasure to get an email from a reader asking me a few questions to help him out in his D&D 4e DMing. As usual, I love doing that and it creates instant fresh content of interest for other readers in a similar situation. Win/win says I. Let’s dive into it […]
Chatty’s Reruns: Making Memorable NPCs
I’m on Blogging break until the week of December 20. In the meantime, I’m re-posting some of my old texts. In this one (August 29th 2007), you can see me start linking out to fellow bloggers where I write my take on a subject they recently talked about. Not too long after, I started getting […]
Chatty’s Reruns: My craziness and DMing….
Until the week of December 20th, I’ll be posting reruns of older blog posts. One of my earliest Blog posts (August 21st 2007). I wrote this while I was planning last year’s D&D campaign. Its still very actual and defines me as a person in all my life spheres. Its a bit rough around the […]
The Pain of Campaigning IV: Put a Little Politics in it
One of the hallmarks of my DMing style is the political element. My games tend to focus on character development and overarching story, with combats serving to accentuate those aspects. One of the key fuels for this kind of game are nations, kings, countries and gods all jockeying for position. It is crucial in this style of game to involve the players in the details without overshadowing them.
The Perfect DM
According to players, the Perfect DM should be able to… Create an evocative world with every tiny detail thought out for whatever the players decide to investigate or whichever NPC they decide to converse with. Be able to improvise an entire adventure based on the whim of the players, in case they decide they don’t […]
Robin’s Laws Revisited: Part 4, Creating your Campaign
This post is part of a series that revisits Robin Laws’ classic work on Gamemastering, called simply enough Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering. I tackle each chapter in order. It’s not so much a review of the book but more my views on the subjects Robin touched then. If you want to get better […]
Robin’s Laws Revisited: Part 3, Picking up your set of rules
This post is part of a series that explores Robin Laws’ seminal work on GMing, Robin’s Laws of Good Gamemastering and adds my thoughts on the same subject. This time, we tackle choosing a Rule set which is very actual since we’re at the butt end of D&D’s current edition. Part 1 can be found […]
Mining Tropes for RPG Goodness: You, Bastard!
As promised, after having covered the Overlord trope in all (well at least some of) its RPG glory, I now want to tackle another of my favorite character tropes: The Magnificent Bastard (I’m making no reference whatever to any good friend of mine, honest!) Love him or hate him, there’s a certain type of character […]
Aight, I put on my robe and wizard hat…
Sooooo, a few days ago Vanir puts up a post about what his Epic Level Heavy-Metal Bard called Bat Loaf did when he was riding the Tarrasque with his pals. My brain broke down somewhere down the line but now that my memory matrix has been reconstructed, it seems that Bat Loaf got his metal […]
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