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Dec 31, 2008 0
I’m sure some of you may have noticed your comments being linked to a different post then you might have intended. I thought it was a minor glitch at first, but it appears to be a pretty big issue. Needless to say I’m working on it and will get if fixed soon.
Dec 31, 2008 0
As the year draws to a close, I just want to wish everyone a happiest of times. It’s been great creating and chatting with you all these past few months.
The best is yet to come!
Thanks for reading. To close out here are some of my favorite articles I’ve written. Enjoy, and have a happy and safe New Year!
Dec 29, 2008 3
Something you may or may not be using a lot in your 4e games are rituals. If you’re not using them, it’s understandable –rituals are a little wierd, aren’t they? They’re sort of spells, but they can’t be used quickly and they require some planning on the part of players. Here are some thoughts for how rituals can be useful in your games.
Dec 26, 2008 0
For the technology-savvy, time-pressed GM, a wiki really is a god-send. Gnome Stew has written a great article spelling out what a good wiki can do, but I want to add some of my personal notes to this as well.
I had contemplated using Obsidian Portal, but I prefer to have more control over these things and therefore decided to create my own wiki site on my web host. Dreamhost makes the creation of a site pretty easy, so from there it’s all just learning mediawiki’s (terse, kludgy, powerful) markup language to customize presentation. If I didn’t view the wiki creation as a project worthy of some time investment in and of itself though, I would have just gone with Obsidian Portal and I suggest you do the same.
What I love most about having a wiki is it allows me to build a world around the players. Rather than simply wait for them to ask, or for me to volunteer information, there is information about the world they are in. Information about places they have been and places they have not. This enforces the fact that world exists outside of them, and also lets them point out some places that the group may want to go. “Oh, this place sounds interesting. I want us to go there.” And I as the GM can then conspire them to have reason to go. Or even better, the players find some reason to get there themselves.
The last reason I love wikis is…It’s just pretty cool to have a world that you created sitting there to look over. Sometimes I go over what’s there so far as an inspiration for what will happen next, or to prime myself up for other writing. The “juice” of building a good campaign wiki is certainly worth the squeeze.
Use of a wiki isn’t perfect, though. I’ve had some problems getting players to go to the wiki. I’ve remedied this by simply sending e-mails to the group whenever I’ve done a major revision.
There is also little use of the wiki for collaboration. I’m comfortable with wikis and editing documents but my players are less so…this means at the moment that my players are likely to not put anything on the wiki unless I show them how to use it. My current project is to do a screen cap tutorial to help them along and push the player involvement to the next level.
So….how are you using wikis for your campaign?
Dec 26, 2008 0
Hope everyone had an enjoyable Christmas season. Christmas was super-relaxing for me, and also gave me more time for writing and blogging.
One of the nice perks of an Insider account –and this is a small thing, and not a reason to subscribe, really — is the archived image galleries that they are now releasing. It’s a great way to get handouts for your players or to get images to populate your campaign wiki. The normal images are nice, and the map galleries are tremendously useful. One of the things I’m most thirsty for as a GM these days are maps. I’ll make them if I need to, but if I can have battlemaps pregenerated on-hand, it really helps my ability to improv and react to the unexpected actions of players.
WotC even goes to the trouble of giving us marked and unmarked maps. This will be especially handy for the online game I am preparing to run (more on that later!).
As a GM, what places do you use to get maps and images for your campaigns?
Dec 25, 2008 2
Thanks to the complicated marriage of a series of tubes and the online retail juggernaut Amazon, I got the Manual of the Planes shortly the day after it was released. It’s a good read, and a worthwhile purchase for GMs, but all is not well in the planes.
This books weakness is the dark half of its strength. For the first time, ermm….ever, the planar cosmology of Dungeons and Dragons is accessible to PCs of all levels and types. All you need to find is a portal to a plane and off you go. No stocking up on a thousand potions of fire resistance or potions of underwater breathing. In part this is because the elemental planes of fire and water have been vanquished, and merged into the Elemental Chaos, a plane of…chaotic…elements. Bubbles in the plane can be more dedicated to fire or water or earth or air, but no longer do you have to worry about going on a quest to prepare you to go unto another quest. This was always a weakness of the planar cosmology in previous editions, as the lethality of a plane was it’s main selling point. The elemental plane of fire is all fire! So you’ll get instantly scorched if you go there, take a ton of damage every round! How exciting! But then, no smart player is going to go there without preparing. No one wants to become an adventurer-burger.
Dec 23, 2008 3
In Part 1 of this series, we discussed axioms of skill challenges. In Part 2 we discussed the need for improvisation and the importance of pink and purple dice.
What I’d like to address in this article is time.
Time is on your side (Yes it is)
Pace is an important storytelling tool in every medium. When you GM a game, pacing and control of time is one of your main duties. You want to keep a game moving at just the right speed. Sometimes you gloss over a week. Other times you drill right down into a conversation, playing everything out in real-time. Time is fluid in RPGs, and mastery of where to put the players is, again, a prime skill for a GM to have.
The use of time in skill challenges is a microcosm of what you do in the rest of the game, and the decisions of how to move time forward can change the feel of a skill challenge dramatically.
Dec 22, 2008 6
Paladin Power Packs…quick, three times fast, say it!
Reagardless of how well you did with that little test, I shall bestow upon thee, a group of 14 Utility Powers for use with your paladin. Please offer any comments or critiques you have here.
Enjoy!
Dec 19, 2008 3
In Part 1 we discussed two fundamental axioms of running skill challenges. When running skill challenges, one needs to understand that ’skill challenge’ is another term for ’structured roleplay’. It is also vital to understand that the fundamental unit of skill challenges are actually actions and not skills.
With that being understood, there are few more thoughts I’d like to offer regarding improvisation and scene setting. But first I need to share a little tip I’ve learned with you:
Dec 17, 2008 0
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