Tag Archives: Tabletop Gaming

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 […]

Saving the Game from Party Imbalance

July 8, 2015 · by · in Advice, Humor, RPGs · Leave a comment

We have all faced this beast before.  The heroes line up to go on their adventure and everyone is proud of the hero that they’ve built.  Bill has built a character with a lot of cool tricks, Mike is excited because he’s going to be an awesome ninja, and then there’s Frank.  Frank has built […]

Turning the Gears: The Tinge of Death

July 2, 2015 · by · in Pathfinder, Turning the Gears · 3 Comments

I talk about games a lot and critique how well they’re designed, balanced, etc. but I’ve yet to put anything of my own design up to be critiqued by my readers.  This seems like a lousy way to do things because calling out other people for their work is easy, and it’s actually easier if […]

RPG Inquiry: Legion

June 24, 2015 · by · in RPG Inquiry, Traditional Gaming · Leave a comment

Alright, I want to shift gears for a bit.  I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the video games that I played at MomoCON, and there’s still at least one more to talk about, but today I want to take the time to talk about one of the tabletop games that I demo’d as […]

Advice to Young Heroes: Getting into Tabletop Gaming

April 29, 2015 · by · in Advice, Gaming, Traditional Gaming · 1 Comment

Those of us who have been in the tabletop gaming hobby for a long time are likely to forget the time that we spent as fresh-faced rookies.  This means that sometimes when we end up recruiting new players into the hobby we find ourselves skipping important steps or forgetting that they don’t have our existing […]

The Five RPG Player Archetypes

March 22, 2015 · by · in Analysis, RPGs, Traditional Gaming · Leave a comment

Last week I talked about the five types of game masters and how they behave.  I’m always writing from a game master perspective because that’s the role I seem to always find myself in, but it was nice to think about things from a player perspective for a while.  I realized that I kind of […]

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. […]

Entry 16A: It’s a Kind of Magic

April 6, 2014 · by · in Uncategorized · Leave a comment

Alright, first off I want to apologize. I was going to do a segment about the alignment of canon characters. I’m not going to lie, the reason I didn’t is because it became tedious and also became just an example of how fluid the alignment system is Every time I thought about it more the […]

Entry 15b: Alignment and Mechanics

March 20, 2014 · by · in Uncategorized · Leave a comment

Warning:  This is part two of a multipart blog entry on alignment.  Please read Entry 15a before reading this one. This blog entry is all about the things that I believe alignment should and should not restrict from a gameplay perspective.  This refers to things like certain classes (in Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder, this […]