Sci-Fi Spaceships to Scale
Jeff Russell’s STARSHIP DIMENSIONS is a great sci-fi resource for GMs, as well as an all-around fun site to visit. It lets you compare famous sci-fi spaceships — everything from Cardassian Keldons to Imperial Star Destroyers — side by side and in scale with one another.
If you use Internet Explorer (hissss!), you can even drag the ships around on the page for more direct comparisons (which rocks on toast).
Look, Ma, We Have a GMing Wiki!
Last week, I did a soft launch of the Treasure Tables GMing Wiki — today is the official launch. The TT community has discussed the merits of a GMing wiki, and talked over what it should involve — and now, we’ve started one!
There are five sections at present: adventure seeds, GM software, GM types, index cards and RPG elevator pitches. It’s going to be rough around the edges for at least a little while, but I can’t wait to see how it shapes up. And that’s the key: How it shapes up is entirely up to you, TT readers!
This wiki has a lot of potential — hundreds of smart, motivated and articulate GMs read Treasure Tables every day, and pooling our GMing knowledge benefits the entire GMing community. All you need to do to contribute — add a new section, edit or clean up existing material, etc. — is make a free account on the wiki, log in, and go to town.
And I hope you’ll do just that!
1970s Space Colony Artwork
Boing Boing recently linked to a collection of awesome NASA-sponsored artistic renderings of space colonies. They’d make great backdrops and reference images for an old-school sci-fi campaign — they have the same vibe as many sci-fi bookcovers from the 70s and 80s.
See also: Space.com images, Star Wars deck plans and my recent space station PDF.
Player Skills: Different Perspectives
Over on Abulia Savant, my friend Don Mappin (who’s also in my gaming group, and is a longtime GM) posted a constructive rant about the underpinnings of yesterday’s TT post on player skills: What Do I Expect?
In a nutshell, Don suggests that focusing on a single “skill” — having fun — would be better for the gaming hobby as a whole. It’s a great counterpoint, and his perspective is an interesting one.
When it comes to players and GMs alike, I agree that passion for the game and the ability to have fun — and to be fun to have fun with — trump all other concerns.
I also see value in dissecting elements of both passion and having fun to find out how to best leverage that passion, and have more fun. Those camps aren’t incompatible for me.
In fact, I see three angles on this issue (so far): Joshua’s original list, which is heavy on RPG theory; Don’s rant, which puts fun over theory; and yesterday’s TT post on player skills, which is somewhere in the middle. That’s fertile ground for discussion!
What do you think?
What do You Expect from Your Players?
Over on his always-engaging blog Ludanta Retero, Joshua BishopRoby has posted a list of 64 player skills — things that players are expected to be able to do at the gaming table.
I’d like to use Joshua’s excellent (and unbelievably thorough!) list as a tool for discussing what expectations GMs have of their players.
So how about it — what skills do you expect your players to possess?
As a possible jumping-off point for discussion, think of the game you’re currently running, or of the last game you ran, and try to answer these questions:
- How many of these 64 skills do your players possess?
- Which ones do they use regularly?
- Of those, what are they best at?
- Which skills are they lacking?
- And lastly, which skills that they don’t use regularly would you like to see used more often?
I’m not interested in player-bashing — I think honest assessments of these four questions could lead to some intriguing conclusions. Feel free to ignore my five questions, too, in favor of the big one: What do you expect of your players?
Mythic Review: GMing in the Key of Improv
I saw an ad for Mythic a little while back, and it sounded fascinating. It’s both a standalone RPG and a supplement for other games, designed to allow you to create and run adventures with zero prep — and you can play it without a GM. I was intrigued, so I asked Word Mill Publishing to send me a review copy, which they were kind enough to do.
In a nutshell, Mythic delivers on its promise: It’s not perfect, but with or without a GM, Mythic gives you a nifty framework for near-zero-prep roleplaying.
Run Gray TiddlyWiki During Games
TT reader Gerald Cameron pointed me to Gray TiddlyWiki, a version of TW that’s well-suited for use during play. The main reason for this is the you can “fold up” individual tiddlers, keeping them easily accessible while leaving the rest of your screen open for other stuff. (TiddlyWiki as a GMing Tool covers TW itself in more depth.) Thanks, Gerald!
Organize Your Gaming Schedule
This past weekend, Sam, the GM of the Trinity campaign I’m currently playing in, mentioned Google Calendar as a way to plan your upcoming games.
It’s free, and the nifty thing about it is that if your whole group puts their calendars online, you can cross-reference them when you’re picking gaming nights.
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100% GMing
Treasure Tables is dedicated to game masters, offering GMing advice and ideas since 2005. I'm Martin Ralya, and I've been GMing since 1989 and writing for the RPG industry since 2004.