31 Days of Blogging for GMs

For the month of October, I’d like to invite you to participate in a project here on TT — I’m going to call it Blogging for GMs.

In addition to writing my own posts for GMs here, I’d like to highlight blog posts, articles and newsletters about GMing from all over the web — that’s the goal of the Blogging for GMs project. There are lots of great RPG blogs and sites out there, and I’m excited to see what people come up with on this topic!

Here’s how it works:

1. You write a blog post or article about GMing during the month of October. The only guideline is that it should be written for GMs: tips, advice, tricks of the trade, theory, anecdotes — the field is wide open!

2. Link back to Treasure Tables in your post, either to the main page (www.treasuretables.org) or to this post (www.treasuretables.org/2005/09/31-days-of-blogging-for-gms).

3. Email me at martin(at)treasuretables(dot)org with a link to your post/article.

4. Every day or two, I’ll put up a summary of the posts that I’ve been notified about, with links back to them.

5. Contribute as often as you like!

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Nifty Gaming T-Shirts!

I promised a big announcement as soon as I got back from my trip, and here it is: Treasure Tables now offers a line of shirts for gamers in our brand new store!

I partnered up with my friend Darren Hardy, a professional graphic designer, to create gaming shirts that we’d like to wear ourselves — and that we thought might appeal to other gamers as well.

We’ve worked hard to get things right for our initial launch, with 3 custom designs, a variety of colors (including black), professional printing and a great selection of items.

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No Stock Monsters

A couple of years ago, I had an idea for my then-upcoming campaign: don’t use any stock monsters — and by “monsters,” I mean “adversaries” in general. This sounded like fun, and it was, but I encountered a few stumbling blocks along the way.

Let’s take a peek at two reasons why you might want to use custom critters, five ways to do just that, and a bit of advice about what works best.

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More Books, or Fewer Books?

I have shelves full of gaming books, but there are a lot of them that I don’t use — even for the games I play regularly. That doesn’t bother me, because I enjoy reading them in their own right, and I like having a lot of ideas on hand.

How about you? Do you buy every book for the games you like, or do you buy the core rules and leave it at that? In short: more books, or fewer books?

I see the appeal of both approaches, though I tend to swing more towards having lots of books. Apart from just getting enjoyment out of reading them, more books = more ideas, as well as more options for my players.

Even though I can’t possibly act on every idea that comes up, sometimes they take root and grow into entire campaigns, and sometimes they bubble back to the surface just in time to get used in an ongoing game. I’ve also found that books I bought, read (or skimmed) and then shelved for a few years tend to become useful later on, often unexpectedly.

Particularly with D&D, players also like to have a lot of options for their characters (sometimes to the point of being intimidated by character creation) — and having a shelf full of books lets me provide those options.

On the “fewer books” side of things, it can be really refreshing to get into games with very low buy-in, like Amber (2 books) or Burning Wheel (3 books). Part of that comes from the fact that there aren’t many books available for those games — if there were more, I’d probably buy them!

Given your druthers, do you prefer to have a lot of books for the games you play, or just a couple? Have you always had the same preference, or has it changed over time?

From Map to Campaign

In a post last month on attacks of opportunity, Phil proposed having the players decide where the campaign begins, and what it’s about.

That’s a neat idea. If you used it, what would you have to change about your approach to GMing?

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Speeding Up Item Management

After getting feedback from my players (using my own advice from “Getting Player Feedback“), I took a crack at trimming down the time needed for item management in my D&D campaign. Among other things, I proposed that we try to resolve a post-adventure dissection of the party’s haul in 15 minutes.

It took over an hour. (Not that it was a boring hour, but still!)

With that in mind, here are 6 tips on speeding up item management in your game.

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Handwaving PC Advancement

In this thread on EN World, punkorange posts about handwaving 4 levels and over a year of game time in his D&D campaign. Reading this, my first thought was, “Neat! How does that work?”

And more importantly, how could you give this a shot in your own game?

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Music for Your Game

Up until about a year ago, I wasn’t into using background music when I ran games (though I enjoyed it as a player). The tipping point was my friend Don’s Stargate SG-4 game, which used music so effectively that now I can’t imagine not having something on in the background.

This post covers a few considerations about using background music, and it lists some of my favorite multi-purpose gaming soundtracks.

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