Splitting the Party: 5 Approaches (Apr. 2006)

Treasure Tables is in reruns from November 1st through December 9th. I’m writing a novel as part of National Novel Writing Month, and there’s no way I can write posts here while retaining my (questionable) sanity. In the meantime, enjoy this post from our archives.
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Splitting the party is something that every GM will have to deal with at some point. Sometimes it’s a pain in the butt, sometimes it goes smoothly — and there are 5 main ways that you can handle it.

Let’s discuss all of them: 2 lousy approaches, 1 neutral approach and 2 good ones.

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PC Backgrounds: Pressure Doesn’t Make Diamonds (July 2007)

Treasure Tables is in reruns from November 1st through December 9th. I’m writing a novel as part of National Novel Writing Month, and there’s no way I can write posts here while retaining my (questionable) sanity. In the meantime, enjoy this post from our archives.
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After responding to Corrosive Rabbit’s thread about character backgrounds yesterday, I realized that I wanted to go into more detail on this topic.

I’ve been GMing since 1989, but it’s only been in the past couple of years that I’ve formulated this approach to handling PC backgrounds. I’ve never put the whole thing to the test, but I’ve used most of the pieces to good effect — and seen them used by great GMs, too.

The two most common tacks I see GMs take (and have taken myself) are requiring lengthy character backgrounds and not requiring PC backgrounds at all. The problem is that five pages of background may not be useful, but zero background means zero GMing fuel for you.

This approach falls somewhere in between those two, and hits the high notes that I’ve found to be most useful.

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Overloaded: Stuff and Info (Aug. 2006)

Treasure Tables is in reruns from November 1st through December 9th. I’m writing a novel as part of National Novel Writing Month, and there’s no way I can write posts here while retaining my (questionable) sanity. In the meantime, enjoy this post from our archives.
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The game I’m currently playing in (Trinity: Al Sadima) is very background-heavy, and we’ve gotten lost in the sea of information several times. This can be frustrating, although it’s a very fun game overall.

Similarly, years ago when I played through part of D&D’s Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, we actually had to use a quartermaster, several pages of notes (referencing module page numbers) and waaaay too much time to keep track of all the stuff we picked up. This was one of the reasons we stopped playing the game.

In both cases, things that are generally good — game information and cool gear — became problems. How can you prevent information and stuff overload?

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Scheduling Your Gaming Sessions (Apr. 2007)

Treasure Tables is in reruns from November 1st through December 9th. I’m writing a novel as part of National Novel Writing Month, and there’s no way I can write posts here while retaining my (questionable) sanity. In the meantime, enjoy this post from our archives.
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Like many of the organizational aspects of gaming, as the GM you’ll usually be the one taking the lead when it comes to scheduling your group’s sessions.

There are five basic approaches to this task — let’s take a look at each them.

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Evoking Emotions at the Gaming Table (Aug. 2006)

Treasure Tables is in reruns from November 1st through December 9th. I’m writing a novel as part of National Novel Writing Month, and there’s no way I can write posts here while retaining my (questionable) sanity. In the meantime, enjoy this post from our archives.
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Most good games evoke emotions, but some emotions are much easier to work with than others. When you try to get your players to feel a certain way, you run the risk of making someone upset — this can be very dicey!

There’s a line to walk when trying to trigger emotional responses from your players, and where exactly that line is depends on the emotion in question and the folks in your group. There are three categories: simple, challenging and nigh on impossible.

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Nine Steps to Help You Run a Great One-Shot Adventure (June 2007)

Treasure Tables is in reruns from November 1st through December 9th. I’m writing a novel as part of National Novel Writing Month, and there’s no way I can write posts here while retaining my (questionable) sanity. In the meantime, enjoy this post from our archives.
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When you’re going to GM a one-shot, there are nine steps you can take to make sure things go smoothly.

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Game Master, Referee, Storyteller: What’s in a Name? (Feb. 2006)

Treasure Tables is in reruns from November 1st through December 9th. I’m writing a novel as part of National Novel Writing Month, and there’s no way I can write posts here while retaining my (questionable) sanity. In the meantime, enjoy this post from our archives.
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Here on TT, I use “Game Master” (or more often, GM) to apply to everyone who runs RPGs, even if I’m talking about a specific game that uses a different term (like Referee or Storyteller). It’s the most common, most widely understood term, which makes it a good fit for this site.

But many RPGs change that up, and call their GMs something else entirely — is there any significance to what the GM is called in different RPGs?

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Getting Inspired to GM a Game (July 2007)

Treasure Tables is in reruns from November 1st through December 9th. I’m writing a novel as part of National Novel Writing Month, and there’s no way I can write posts here while retaining my (questionable) sanity. In the meantime, enjoy this post from our archives.
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There are lots of ways to get inspired to run your next game. For me it nearly always starts with a flash of inspiration — a partially-formed idea pops into my head, and I think “I have to run that.”

But that’s far from the only way to get things rolling. Here’s a short list of sources of inspiration, and a couple of big GMing questions to go along with it.

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