5 Steps to Encourage a Player to Roleplay

I recently got an email from Jeff King asking me for help with an age-old gaming problem: What can you do about a player who just doesn’t seem interested in roleplaying their character?

Jeff’s situation isn’t unique, and there are 5 steps you can take to tackle this problem.

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Negative Reinforcing Loops in RPGs

Team blog attacks of opportunity has started a series of posts about applying systems thinking to RPGs, the most recent being Green Slime.

This post is about identifying negative reinforcing loops in your gameplay, and then using them to address obstacles to meaningful play. Sound complicated? It is, a bit — but it also looks like an interesting approach.

Interview with Clinton R. Nixon

Clinton R. Nixon is one of the co-founders of the Forge (along with Ron Edwards), and one of the sharpest and most dedicated RPG theorists around. He’s also the creator of FindPlay, a new online service for finding a gaming group, and the designer of games like The Shadow of Yesterday through his independent RPG company, Anvilwerks Online.

In the first of what will be an ongoing series of interviews with notable gamers here on Treasure Tables, I caught up with Clinton via email and asked him about FindPlay, his views on GMing and what connections he sees between designing RPGs and running them.

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Long-Term vs. Short-Term Play

Over on anyway, Vincent Baker recently wrote Long and Short, an excellent post about the merits of open-ended games vs. those with defined endings.

How do you approach endings (or, the ending) in your own games?

101 Days of D&D Project

Steven Jarvis (of sjarvis.com) has kicked off his 101 Days of Dungeons & Dragons project: For the next 3 months, he’s going to focus on mastering D&D, and write a post a day about the process.

He’s off to a good start (and the project makes me think of Martin’s Maxims for GMs and GM Workouts: Gimme Some Reps! here on TT).

Treasure Tables Joins the 9rules Network

I’m pleased to announce that Treasure Tables has joined the 9rules Network.

TT was one of the 509 sites that applied for membership during the network’s most recent round of submissions, and I’m thrilled to have become part of this nifty community. Coupled with having my link posted on Slashdot, the past week has been pretty exciting for TT!

Apart from displaying the pretty leaf logo, 9rules places no restrictions on their member sites (something that was, and is, very important to me). If you enjoyed TT before, you’ll enjoy it as a part of 9rules — I’ll still be posting the same mix of tips, ideas, advice and other resources for GMs.

Joining 9rules, however, means that TT is now part of a community of bloggers dedicated to making their blogs better — and that’s something I can really get behind!

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GM Workouts: Gimme Some Reps!

Awhile back, I saw a thread on EN World called DM personal training — and although it faded out pretty quickly, the idea really grabbed me.

Many hobbies have pretty obvious metrics by which you can track your improvement — but not GMing. If you’re into mountain biking, for example, it’s easy to tell when you’re doing better: If you’re going further, faster, on tougher trails, you’re getting better at it.

Not so with GMing — the best GMs can do is try to gauge their players’ enjoyment of their games, along with their own level of enjoyment, and ask for feedback from time to time (which can be problematic in its own right).

But are GM workouts a viable idea? And if so, what would a GM workout look like?

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6 Constructive Complaints

John Kim has been thinking about what bugs him in RPGs, and he’s posted Possible Rants — 1 full rant (”Freeform Traits”) and 5 summaries of future rants. All of them are constructive and thought-provoking, even in summary form.

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