Fudging Die Rolls

In my previous post, “Rolling Dice in the Open,” I looked at not being able to “fudge” (alter the results of) die rolls as both an advantage and a disadvantage of rolling your dice in the open. That aspect of the post generated a lot of passionate comments, so I decided to spin it off into a post of its own.

As a GM, do you fudge any of your die rolls? Should you be fudging them? When you play, how do you feel about your GM fudging rolls? Do you alter rolls when running some RPGs, but not others? In short, fudging die rolls: good, bad or something in between?

Read more

Rolling Dice in the Open

Up until a few years ago, I’d never played with a GM who rolled all of his dice in the open. After a few sessions with one who did (Mark Serrahn, in his Banewarrens campaign), I was hooked — and I’ve made nearly all of my rolls in the open ever since.

There are advantages and disadvantages to this approach, as you might expect. Let’s dig into some of the pros and cons of rolling your dice in the open.

Read more

Collaborative PC Creation?

So you’ve got a great idea in mind for your next game — how do you handle PC creation? Not in the sense of, say, point buy vs. rolling for stats, but in terms of making sure you wind up with a fun, playable party of PCs.

Most GMs have their own ways of handling this, and I want to look at a few of the more popular ones here — but I’m also interested in a completely different approach: having the players collaborate on character creation.

Read more

Lead With the Cool Stuff

From a useful gaming advice thread on RPG.net:

“Don’t hold back or hoard ideas. If a cool NPC, scene, location, monster or whatnot pops into your head, use it as soon as possible. I’ve seen a lot of people saving their cool ideas waiting for the perfect moment, which of course never comes. The right moment is always now.”

This ties into my third point in “More Fun, Less Work,” but it was really brought home for me at this year’s GenCon — and it’s a great concept for home games as well as con games: put your best ideas out front.

Read more

Learning From GenCon

This is a bit of an odd post: I’m going to talk about some of the things that you can learn as a GM by going to GenCon as a player. This year will be my seventh GenCon, and I’ve never run a game at the con — I go to play.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about how to use my GenCon experience to improve my home games — and that’s what I want to cover with these 6 tips.

Read more

Applying Stross’s Law

Over in his LiveJournal, Mike Mearls recently set out what he calls Stross’s Law of RPG Design (after Charles Stross, inventor of the githyanki and other iconic D&D creatures):

A setting element should never require more than two paragraphs to explain it in full.

Assuming that “explain it in full” means “sum it up,” and not that those two paragraphs are the whole description, I like this concept. With that in mind, I’d like to propose a framework for applying Stross’s Law to setting elements in your game.

Read more

Getting Player Feedback

I don’t know about you, but most of the time when I ask my players for feedback it’s like squeezing blood from a stone. Even when they’re clearly jazzed about the game, and they mention having had fun, “I had fun” is often about the extent of the feedback that I get.

I’ve found this to be true with so many groups over the years that I don’t think it’s just me — I wouldn’t be surprised if other GMs have this problem, too. And that’s another thing: is it actually a problem?

Assuming that you, like me, think that getting detailed player feedback rocks, what are some of the best ways to go about soliciting it?

Read more

Booze at the Table

Some gamers like to drink while they play, or while running a game — and some don’t.

So how about it: do you allow drinking at the table during your games?

Read more

Next Page →