GenCon Registration Day

Today’s the big day for GenCon registration — make-or-break day for thousands of gamers looking forward to this August’s festivities.

Will registration be a better experience than it was last year? Peter Adkison, the owner of GenCon, says it will be — I hope he’s right.

While you sit in front of your computer, finger poised over the refresh key, let’s chat about the con. Are you running an event? Are there GMs you’re looking forward to gaming with again? GMing-related products you’re excited about?

And once the frenzy is over…how did your registration go?

Manage Your Campaign With Google Tools

Amaril, author of the brand-new blog The Immaterial Plane, emailed me about Enhancing Your RPG Games with Google, his post about the many ways you can manage, organize, plan out and otherwise spruce up your campaign with Google’s free tools (thanks, Amaril!).

You can get some of these same benefits by blogging your game sessions or using a wiki to manage your campaign (see the free PDF Using a GMing Wiki: It Slices, It Dices for lots of ideas), but before reading this post I’d never considered just how many game-related tasks you can handle using Google alone.

This post is a quick read full of good ideas, and the synthesis is impressive. I hope to see more great GMing content on The Immaterial Plane in the future.

Two Kinds of Gaming Group: Which Kind is Yours?

Frank Filz’s comment on yesterday’s post brought something percolating to the surface of my brain: in terms of composition, there are really only two kinds of gaming group.

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Doomsday Approacheth: Choosing the Next Game

My gaming group is coming up on the end of one of our two ongoing campaigns, and I’ve started getting the first tingles of dread. My group has more trouble picking games than a blind cat-herder would have trying to tend to his clowder of kitties.

If it goes the way it’s always gone in the past, this process will take several hours, frustrate all four of us to one extent or another and have a decent chance of not making everyone happy.

Does that sound like your group? If so, let’s pool our resources and try and come up with a better approach.

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Mastering Your GM-Fu at GenCon 2007

Zachary Houghton (formerly of RPG Blog), Vicki Potter of Tabletop Adventures, myself and Phil Vecchione of DNAphil.com will be running Mastering Your GM-Fu at this year’s GenCon.

It’s a free seminar dedicated to the craft of GMing, first run at GenCon Indy 2006. Last year, it went very well — we had a packed house, we answered a ton of great questions (it didn’t feel like two hours!) and it seemed like it was genuinely helpful for a lot of the GMs who attended. Running it again this year was any easy decision for all four of us on the panel — it was a blast.

Mastering Your GM-Fu is SEM00052 in the event registration listings, and will be taking place on Saturday, August 18th from 2:00-4:00 PM. We only have 100 open seats, and based on last year’s attendance we’re expecting to fill them all.

There’s been some discussion of a Treasure Tables meetup at GenCon, but in case that doesn’t wind up happening, I’d love to meet as many TT readers — lurkers, regulars and forum members alike — at this seminar as possible. I hope to see you there!

GMing Commandments, Axioms and Conflict Resolution

In judging the Guest Post Contest, we arrived at a three-way tie between TT forum members brcarl, mephistus and twwombat for 3rd Place. This guest post presents all three 3rd Place entries (in alphabetical order by username). Congratulations, twwombat, mephistus and brcarl!
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Resolving Personality and Play-Style Conflicts in Character, by brcarl

A recent lesson for me had to do with conflict. Sadly this conflict didn’t have nice hard-bound rules to reference and dice to roll to resolve the issue. This conflict had to do with personalities and play-style. The most interesting part, however, is how it got resolved.

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Communicate: Understand the Lessons You Will Teach Each Other

This guest post by TT forum member Ramza was the 2nd Place winner in our Guest Post Contest, which posed the question “What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as a GM?” Congratulations, Ramza!
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With each session as you advance your campaign, your group will develop in a number of ways. You should take the time to understand the impact that each of you has on each others’ development. This is critical not just for the game master, but for everyone at the table. It can be especially important when a group adds a new player.

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