Vibrant NPCs

I ran the first session of my Airship Privateers campaign last night, and I tried a new approach with my NPCs. It’s an Eberron game, and one of the things I find appealing about pulp as a genre is that it’s full of vibrant, broadly-painted characters. So I went with that: I used broad tropes to try to create fairly simple, memorable characters.

This approach was a lot of fun, so I thought I’d share some of the details.

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GM by Default

Have you ever run a game because no one else will?

I know I’ve done this in the past, and probably will again — and I’d be willing to bet you’ve done the same thing at least once. Why does this happen?

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How Did You Learn to GM?

A simple question to which the answer will, I suspect, vary pretty widely: how did you learn to GM?

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The Bones in the Soup

This post is a follow-up to my first post on TT, “Every Campaign is an Experiment.” By way of The 20′ by 20′ Room, I found out about an online gaming magazine I’d never heard of, Places to Go, People to Be, and read this nifty article: “Theory 101: The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast.”

After a minor implosion in my gaming group based in part on my stiff background expectations for the PCs — and after reading the above article — I decided I wanted to lay out all the cards for my approach to our upcoming campaign. So here they are: the bones that make up this particular soup — and along with them comes a question. If you were about to start a new game, would you want your GM to tell you about this stuff?

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More Fun, Less Work

A little while back, Ryan Dancey made an interesting comment in Mike Mearls’ LiveJournal:

Dave Wise, who was one of my Brand Managers at WotC, and was a talented writer and editor for TSR, is married to the person who first made the observation, after watching his gaming group, that D&D seemed like 20 minutes of fun packed into four hours – which was her way of saying “shouldn’t this game be more fun, considering the work and time everyone seems to be putting into it?”

Assuming that you want to keep playing the games you’re already playing, how can you improve the “work to fun” ratio of every session?

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Quirky is Good

Last month on Yudhishthira’s Dice, Brand Robins wrote a long post entitled “Why hearing about your game should suck.” Here’s a snippet:

Honestly, I think there is a degree to which any good RPG story should suck, or seem odd, twisted, or wrong to those who were not there. If it’s something that any group anywhere could have played, rather than something that came out of the idiosyncrasies of the stuff in the player’s heads, what’s the point?

He’s primarily talking about game design, but I think this might be equally applicable to playing RPGs in general.

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Rules for Exerting Player Control?

This comment from Bankuei (author of the Deep in the Game blog) on Matt Wilson’s site (The Dog Blog) really got my wheels turning:

Unfortunately, there is not a single mainstream game that solidly lays out the idea of framing conflict outside of physics (even cinematic, anime, cartoon physics).

We have zero mainstream examples to point people to in terms of reconsidering that resolution, and more importantly, conflicts, might be about something other than who can hit who, move faster, or carry more.

This kind of post is exactly why I link to design blogs here on TT: because I think looking at game design can make for better GMing. Let’s take a look at Bankuei’s point as applied to to the grandaddy of mainstream games: D&D.

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Timelines in Published Settings

A couple of weeks ago, I read a comment about Columbia Games’ Hârn setting to the effect that every Hârn product is set in the same year. That leaves room for GMs to advance events as they see fit, rather than feeling like they’re going against canon (which also seems to really bug some players).

I found this fascinating, and completely different from any of the published settings that I’ve had experience with. This got me to thinking: how do different settings handle their timelines — and what makes timelines GM-friendly?

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