How to Start a Gaming Club

Tying in nicely with Wizard of the Coast’s RPG club grant program, Roleplaying Tips is featuring an article by Katrina Middelburg-Creswell about Starting and Running a Role-Playing Games Club.

Katrina is a middle school teacher who started a gaming club at her school five years ago, and she has lots of practical advice about what she did, how she did it and why it worked. She covers a lot of ground, and even if you’re not looking to start a school-based club, there are some great tips here.

There’s also a whole section devoted to teaching potential new players how to play RPGs, which Katrina recommends doing by way of mini-conventions. Good stuff all around.

Ziggurat Con: Donate RPG Books to Troops in Iraq

Jae Walker (gamerchick in our forums) asked me to post about Ziggurat Con, and I was happy to oblige.

The inaugural Ziggurat Con will be held at Camp Adder/Tallil Airbase, Iraq, on June 9th, 2007, and is open to all allied troops and personnel, as well as civilian military contractors. Problem is, there aren’t any good places to buy gaming books in their neck of the woods, and that’s where the good cause comes in: it’s tough to run con events without books.

If you’re so inclined, please consider donating RPG books to Ziggurat Con. There’s a list of games they’re planning to run on the con page (although all games are welcome), along with the address where you can send donations.

Update: There’s now an event list in the comments below that might help you decide what to donate. And from SPC Amberson, the con organizer, “We would love PDF versions of our favorite books.” (Thanks, VV_GM!)

I keep politics out of my posts here on TT, but I don’t view this as a political issue. These folks are fellow gamers in an incredibly shitty situation, and they want to game — that’s a good cause if there ever was one.

(I opted to order my donation via Amazon. Apart from having a deep stock at good prices, they offer helpful tips on how to make sure orders shipped to military addresses get where they’re supposed to go.)

Can Old RPG Standbys Still Amaze?

If you’ve been gaming for long enough, you’ve seen plenty of campaign elements more than once: giant rats and skeletons in low-level D&D games, sinister corporate goons in cyberpunk scenarios and the like.

When you first started playing, those things might have been pretty amazing. I know they were for me — when everything’s new, “old standbys” aren’t old to you. But what do you do when they become standbys?

How do you breathe fresh life into game elements you’ve probably used several times as a GM, and that your players may have encountered dozens of times before?

In a book, the author can just write “Seeing the advancing skeletons, Pippin was frozen in place. How could the dead be walking? And how could he possibly hope to stave them off?” In an RPG, Pippin would just hit them with his sword (or even better, his club).

Is there a way to avoid that? And is avoiding it desirable, or is it just me?

Campaign Builders’ Guild for Homebrewers

The Campaign Builders’ Guild is a resource site and community for GMs with a simple goal: “…to help with the creation of GM-created, homebrew campaigns.”

The CBG has been around for just over a year, and is still fairly small — but it’s also quite active. The forums are at the heart of the site, with Homebrews and Campaign Elements and Design leading the way. Since the CBG started on the WotC forums, a lot of their discussion is focused on D&D campaigns, but they’re open to all systems and genres.

I’ve never seen a community centered solely around this topic, and I dig the CBG’s tight focus — homebrewing is a rich niche to explore. (Via EN World.)

Plot Storming Community

Plot Storming is a new community geared towards helping writers and GMs brainstorm, develop and workshop plots. From their intro:

Suffering from a creative block? Enjoy plot development or world building? Have a skeleton, but need the meat? Love swapping ideas with other writers? Then Plot Storming is for you! Bring your ideas, characters, plots, and worlds, and we’ll “storm” it. We enjoy helping develop and refine ideas so writers and gamers can create a better story and world.

It’s a very young site, but it looks promising. I particularly like their Synergy program, which allows members to have their own sub-forums set up for group creative projects.

(Via TT forum member KeshFerrar’s signature. As an aside, if you run a site that’s helpful to GMs, don’t hesitate to tell me about it — I try to ferret out links like this one, but I’m bound to miss at least a few!)

NPC Stats: Full, Partial or Loose?

I have a theory that when GMs stat out NPCs, those stats tend to fall into three categories:

Which approach — or approaches — do you prefer? Why? And what does that say about your GMing style?

A Crucial Tenet of RPG Prep and Worldbuilding

Campaign Details: When ‘a Lot’ Becomes ‘Too Much’, a recent Save My Game column by Jason Nelson-Brown, has some incredibly accurate, succinct advice for GMs:

“…Your players, for the most part, are not nearly as interested in your complex plots and elaborate setups as you are.”

I couldn’t agree more — and this is something a lot of GMs overlook (at times, myself included). This tidbit comes a close second (substitute “any RPG” for “D&D”):

“The tragedy of D&D is that sometimes we confuse time and effort with interest or think that the amount of time and effort we spend somehow earns us a certain degree of interest.”

Other advice follows — including, interestingly enough, an explicit reference to hashing out a social contract to address these issues (and others). That’s something D&D, and RPGs in general, should do more often.

Constructive Metagaming in RPGs

There’s a fairly widespread attitude among gamers that can be summed up like this: “Metagaming = Bad.”

This should really be “Some kinds of metagaming = Bad, for some gaming groups.” Or even better, “Many kinds of metagaming = awesome, for nearly any group.”

Why? Because there are at least two kinds of metagaming — the one that’s generally bad, and the one that’s nearly always a good thing.

Read more

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