Tag Archives: Adventure

An Article that Ends Different than it Began

November 5, 2015 · by · in Non-Gaming · Leave a comment

November is, in addition to being amateur hour at the beard show, “national novel writing month.”  For those who don’t know, that means a bunch of people like myself who have always wanted to write a book take a month to buckle down and make it a reality.  I fancy myself a writer, and if […]

Game Master Toolkit: When There’s No Time to Plan

September 16, 2015 · by · in Dungeon Master, Game Master, Gaming, RPG, Traditional Gaming · 1 Comment

Game Mastery is hard.  It takes preparation and planning.  It comes with that whole added stress of trying to avoid creating a plot hole because you forgot something from three sessions ago and your players have memories like supercomputers all of a sudden.  Because of this, it’s much easier to take short cuts when you […]

Special Treasures: Alternate Rewards for Your Pathfinder Game

September 9, 2015 · by · in Gaming, Pathfinder, RPGs · Leave a comment

Remember your first magical item in an RPG?  Maybe.  Unless you’re like me and your first game was with an existing group and you bought all your gear out of the Dungeon Master’s Guide and it was all just a series of bonuses with a gold cost.  After a point we get jaded with magical […]

A Look at Adventurers in the World

July 22, 2015 · by · in Gaming, RPGs, World Building · Leave a comment

So I haven’t dusted off my world-building tools in a while, and I’d honestly like to see if I’m still up to snuff on it.  Last time I did an article on world-building I talked about the different types of people that exist in an adventuring world and how common each of them are (If […]

What I Learned My First Time DMing: A Guest Article by Ran

April 17, 2015 · by · in Gaming, Pathfinder, Ran, Role Playing, RPGs, Traditional Gaming · 1 Comment

DMing a game can be a rewarding and fulfilling experience. My first campaign had its ups and downs, but I learned a lot from it. I asked Trevor a while back if I could write a guest post on his blog about this experience, and he was all for it. So, here we go! First, […]

Talkin’ ‘bout Dragons Part 1

April 3, 2015 · by · in Fantasy, Pathfinder, Talkin' 'bout Monsters, Traditional Gaming · 1 Comment

You know who I don’t think gets enough love?  Well, you do if you read the title. I’ve been playing games like Dungeons and Dragons for nearly half of my life.  Now while that statement comes with many implications, most of which are probably unfortunate, I say it to give you perspective when I point […]

Big Fights Make for Long Nights: The Boss Fight

March 31, 2015 · by · in Analysis, Big Fights, RPGs, Traditional Game · Leave a comment

Note: The cover image of this article was found at the wikimedia commons, which lists the artist. I could not find any more information on the artist to more effectively source him. Last time we did this I talked about marching armies and giant battles but now I’m going to talk about a different kind […]

The Five Major Game Master Archetypes

March 15, 2015 · by · in Discussion, Game Mastering, Gaming, Role Playing, RPGs · Leave a comment

Every experienced RPG gamer is familiar with certain Game Master stereotypes: the killer GM who wants to win at D&D, and the railroader who gives the players no free will, for example.  I’m not here to talk about those specific behaviors, but rather more broad trends that I feel are very common among game masters. […]

Maddening Mechanics 1: D20 Leadership

February 3, 2015 · by · in Analysis, Discussion, Games, Role Playing, Traditional Gaming · Leave a comment

Maddening Mechanics will hopefully be another semi-regular series that I put out (similar to Gaming Habits), where I talk about specific game mechanics in RPGs or card or board games that are bad by virtue of either being too powerful, too weak, or just not interacting well with the rest of the system. So today, […]

Gaming Habits: Weaknesses and Dump Stats in RPGs.

February 1, 2015 · by · in Analysis, Discussion, Games, Gaming · 1 Comment

“Gaming Habits” will hopefully be a semi-regular series that I do from now on that talks about common habits and behaviors that I’ve seen show up in games over the years. Hopefully it will be really fun. Today we’re talking about the tendency of players to give their characters what should be crippling weaknesses, but […]

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