Wizards Offers Grants for College D&D Clubs

Back in January, Wizards of the Coast started a program called What’s Your Role? whereby college gaming clubs can apply to receive a grant of $50-$1,000 directly from WotC.

Eligible clubs have to be officially registered with their college or university, and D&D has to be the “primary focus of the club’s gameplay.” WotC says that they’ll issue at least 15 grants (they have $20,000 to spend), and all you have to do to apply is answer a few questions from their online application, the main element being a 500-word statement of purpose. The deadline is May 15th, 2007.

If the timing is right for you (i.e. you’re in college right now), this would be an excellent opportunity for a GM with a regular group to expand their field of players, bring new gamers into the hobby or even just arrange a regular place for local groups to play.

I wasn’t part of an official gaming club in college, but with a shift in focus (we played all sorts of things, not just D&D) my high school RPG club would easily have met the requirements. I’m sure we could have found some cool things to do with the money.

This is a great concept all around (particularly from a community and branding standpoint), but the thing I really like about WotC’s idea is that it’s portable: $20,000 is a lot of cash, but it’s not so much as to be out of reach of other large gaming publishers. White Wolf, Mongoose and company, I’m looking at you. (Via InQuest Gamer magazine.)

When an Adventure or Character is “In Check”

Here are two sentences that you might consider adding to your group’s social contract:

If a PC is one small step away from death, let that character’s player know where they stand — to borrow a chess term, tell them that they’re “in check.” And if something your group is about to do is going to bring the adventure — or perhaps the entire campaign — to a screeching halt, take a quick break, share that with your players, and come up with a solution.

This quick bit of advice is in the same vein as ben robbins’s post about passing the ball, GameCraft’s thread about multi-directional feedback and the idea of talking things out when a PC’s life is on the line.

When it comes to in-game events that can have serious (and often unintended) negative consequences, sometimes there’s just no substitute for a quick metagame discussion to keep your game flowing smoothly.

Want Bored Players? Give Them Chores

When you GM a campaign, it’s fine to make the occasional task a chore for the PCs. This is best handled with a quick description of how much of a pain in the ass it was, followed by moving on to something fun.

But you should never make anything a chore for your players.

Read more

Free Dungeon Tile Mapper

The Wizards of the Coast website offers a free utility called Dungeon Tile Mapper for GMs.

Starting with a blank grid, you drag and drop tiles from WotC’s various Dungeon Tiles products (which are quite pretty). Once they’re on the map, you can move them around, rotate them, etc.

You can save and print the maps you create, and there’s also a downloadable version available (2.92 MB .zip file). Pretty nifty.

Treasure Tables Guest Post Contest

The Treasure Tables Guest Post Contest has just been launched.

Originally suggested by VV_GM in our GMing Community forum, this contest is open to all members of the TT forums. (Not a member? Joining the forums is free and easy, and gives you access to a friendly, insightful community for 24/7 GMing discussion.)

The topic is deliberately open-ended: What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as a GM? The top three entries will be featured as guest posts here on the TT blog, and all entries will become part of our GMing Wiki (and possibly collected in a free uber-PDF, too).

The contest deadline is April 23rd, 2007. If you’d like to share your GMing advice with hundreds of other GMs, this is a great opportunity to do just that. I hope you’ll enter this contest, and I wish you luck!

Running RPGs You’d Rather Play

Don, one of the other GMs in my regular gaming group, is onto something in his latest post, Right Games, Wrong GM:

In taking stock of the games that I am currently (or will be) playing and/or running, a fairly obvious disconnect that I hadn’t realized before struck me: we tend to play the right games but they’re run by the wrong people. That is to say, we run games as a surrogate for playing them.

Wow — I’ve never thought about this, but it’s true. I’ve done this plenty of times, most recently in 2005, when I ran an Eberron campaign in part because I knew I wouldn’t get a chance to play in the setting — GMing a campaign that was set there was the next best thing.

As a GM, I know I find it difficult to run an RPG that I’m not jazzed about. There are times when my players have asked me to run something that I have no interest in, and I think it’s for the best when I say “No” in those cases. I’d rather disappoint them once up front than several times later on down the line, when the game doesn’t live up to their expectations due to my lack of interest.

But what about the middle ground, the games I’m not jazzed about but am also not opposed to GMing? I can see a lot of value in saying, “Sure, let’s give it a shot” in those cases. Food for thought, and something to consider when my group picks our next game.

What do you think of the “Right Game, Wrong GM” phenomenon? Have you experienced it? Has your group ever addressed it explicitly when you’re deciding what to play next?

Courtney Solomon to Direct Split-Screen Forgotten Realms Movie

Courtney Solomon, “acclaimed” “director” of Dungeons & Dragons: The Movie, has been picked to helm a film based on the Forgotten Realms, one of the longest-running and most popular fantasy settings around.

Here’s the combination nifty part/kick in the teeth: It’s going to be split-screen, with the movie on one side, and Solomon’s D&D group playing the campaign of the movie on the other side — and Vin Deisel is cast as the GM.

So what could be a cool concept — seeing a D&D game literally translated into a movie, real-time, with Hollywood’s most famous gamer in the GM’s chair — is going be wind up being a huge waste of time, thanks to Courtney “Fuck You, Gamers” Solomon. Why does Wizards keep bending over for this guy? (Via Gaming Rep0rt.)

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