Game Mastery

Gnome Stew linked to this post on showing detail rather than telling it.  I quite liked it, especially the part on figuring out which details to show.   Well, I agree that you don’t need to show every detail.   I thought it left a little to be desired on how to figure out which details are worth expanding.  Thankfully I’m opinionated and you’re reading, so here are my thoughts on showing detail.
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An odd thing happened in the shower today. I had an interesting realization about the way I run my games. That wasn’t the odd part. The odd part is that I remembered it. Showers are not conducive to notebooks or iPhones, so most of my hygiene related epiphanies go down the drain.

Anyway, what I realized was that my style of writing complex games with lots and lots of subplots may actually be easier to write than the simplistic one plot at a time approach.
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Last post about 4e PDFs.  For realsies.

I wrote a script that adds margins to the PDFs produced by Character Builder.  It’s available as a website.  Just upload your PDF and download a new one with margins.  At some point I’ll add an option to control the margin size.

http://files.sagotsky.com/pymargins/index.py

A couple unrelated thoughts on fudging preferences and long term plot.

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I have trouble running NPCs.  It takes me a while to get into character and even longer to switch between characters.  This isn’t news.  I’d be surprised if less than 1/3 of the posts here mentioned  this fact.  It’s something I’m aware of and I’ve been trying to work on.
I was talking to one of my PCs today, expressing this problem, and we came up with a possible solution.  I don’t know if it’ll work or not, but it’s definitely worth trying.

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I always knew that the little things counted.  And I always knew that as a GM I sucked at giving out those little things.  One of my difficulties as a GM is that I don’t like to hear myself talk (and yet I never have that problem as a blogger – maybe I should run a game in Wordpress).  In my new game, which has struggled to get off the ground, I’ve been forcing myself to mention more of the little details.  What I didn’t realize was that while the little things always count, if used wrong they’d count as negative.

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For some odd reason the 4e character builder fails at making PDFs.  The margins aren’t right so when you print you lose a bit of data.   Here’s a workaround:

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I made a couple tools to help with my 4e game.  They’re of limited appeal and they’re still works in progress, but someone out there might find them interesting.

If you haven’t heard of vim or LaTeX (the typesetting system, not the material) this post doesn’t concern you and should be ignored unless you’re having a really boring day.

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Your expectations lose to player participation is one of the best GMing articles I’ve even read, even if the title is questionable.  Well, maybe it’s not one of the best, but it’s one of the ones I can learn the most from.  The article reminds us that in a table top game the GM is as much the lead writer as the PCs are.  Tabletop gaming is an interactive media for collaborative storytelling.  If I repeatedly make any mistake as GM it’s that I broadcast too much of my own story instead of letting the PCs tell theirs.

As a sidenote, all my links thus far have bene to Gnome Stew articles.  I really enjoy their blog, but sometimes I feel like I pimp them too much.  Any other good GMing sites worth of linking?

Google Wave has potential to be an awesome platform for online roleplaying.  You heard it here first.

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