PC Parents: Most Often Absent, Dead or Gone

Chalk this up in the Oddball Observations category, but I’ve noticed that more often than not (and regardless of system or genre), in most PC backgrounds parents are:

  1. Not addressed at all
  2. Dead
  3. Living, but not likely to be involved in the game

Is that just a quirk of my personal GMing history, or have you noticed this too? And if you have, why do you think this is? Do you specifically encourage your players to give you family histories?

What Was Your Strangest GMing Experience?

Positive, negative or just plain weird, what was your strangest, most unusual experience as a GM?

What made it so odd, and what happened afterwards?

TT is in moving mode from 4/19 to 4/25. There’ll be a new post every day (as always), but I won’t be able to respond to comments or email until we’re settled in at the new place. See you in a few days!

First Time GM Jitters

I know I just did a forum roundup yesterday, but this question from alexandria2000 is just too good to pass up: I’ve got a serious beginning GM problem - I can’t do it!.

Helping GMs is what TT is all about — if you’ve got a moment, jump in there and give her a hand!

Forum Roundup: GM-friendly RPGs, Contest and D&D: Broken or Not?

It’s been awhile since our last forum roundup, and there are four threads going on right now in the TT forums that I’d like to highlight.

Here’s a quick peek at the potential broken-ness of D&D, GM-friendly RPGs, our current contest and a question for the community.

• D&D’s Broken-ness?: Is D&D broken? What makes an RPG broken? How can you fix the broken bits? Friendly discussion of hot-button topics is one of the hallmarks of our forums, and this thread is no exception.

• What makes a game GM-friendly?: Publishers, take note — there are a ton of good suggestions here for how to make your gaming books as usable, useful and accessible to GMs as possible.

• Treasure Tables Guest Post Contest: GMing Advice from TT Members: Our current contest ends this Monday, April 23rd, so you still have a few days to get your entry in. Winning entries will be featured here on the TT blog as guest posts, and all entries will be collected on the GMing Wiki (and possibly as a PDF, too).

• Want a forum for requesting TT posts?: I think this is a great idea, but it hasn’t gotten much play. If you’d like to be able to request TT posts and articles on specific topics, let me know here.

TT is in moving mode from 4/19 to 4/25. There’ll be a new post every day (as always), but I won’t be able to respond to comments or email until we’re settled in at the new place. See you in a few days!

How to Encourage a Player to Try GMing

Asking your players to give GMing a try is a good idea, but I’ve found that a lot of players are nervous about the prospect.

But when the end result is a player who gets to see another side of gaming, and has a good time in the process, it’s well worth taking some steps to give them the boost of confidence that they need.

And let’s be honest here: We can always use more GMs!

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Caffeine and GMing

In much the same way that what you eat on gaming nights can have an impact on the game itself, caffeine can have obvious effects on your GMing.

If you need it and don’t get it, you’re tired (that’d be me — I’m a caffeine addict all the way). If you don’t need it but have some anyway, you could get jittery. If you have too much of it, it can make you feel weird.

It’s not a terribly profound question, but I’m curious about the caffeine habits of other GMs. When you GM, do you use caffeine to keep you going?

Is Worldbuilding Pointless?

Novelist M. John Harrison has nothing good to say about worldbuilding in sci-fi stories:

“Worldbuilding is dull.”

“Above all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism.” (Via Boing Boing.)

I’ve read sci-fi (and fantasy) novels where the entire focus is on worldbuilding, they definitely smacked of mental wankery on the author’s part. But I’ve also read plenty of kickass sci-fi (and fantasy) novels that heavily emphasize worldbuilding — I don’t agree with Mike’s premise. Would Tolkien’s books have been nearly as enjoyable if he wasn’t a passionate worldbuilder?

That said, even though I’m a big proponent of not building more of your campaign worlds than you need to, reading Mike’s post was a bit of a kick in the teeth. I know the parallels are inexact, but worldbuilding for a story and worldbuilding for a game do have a lot in common — and in both fields, it’s an enjoyable activity for the author/GM. And while I think he takes it too far, he does have a point.

After thinking about it a bit, what I take away from his post is that “enjoyable for the GM” doesn’t necessarily equal “enjoyable for your players.” I’ve never been a hardcore homebrewer, so this could just be my personal GMing biases coming out, but I believe worldbuilding should be done in moderation.

As with any aspect of GMing, if you focus on any one element to the exclusion of all others (worldbuilding included), you’re doing your players a disservice — and your game will suffer for it.

What do you think?

GMing Milestones: How Many Are There?

This idea isn’t fully formed yet, but lately I’ve been doing some thinking about GMing milestones. The thing that’s most interesting to me is that I see quite a few that cross genre, system and stylistic boundaries, and therefore apply to all GMs.

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