Game Mastery

observations

Does technology help or hinder?

by on Jun.08, 2011, under observations, tech

Been a while since I posted.  It’s not that I haven’t felt like writing, but that all my writing has been for game instead of about game.

That aside, I’m curious about what the role of technology has been in other people’s games.  I’m not sold on character builders yet, but I really like text search in a PDF.  But I’m having some other problems that might be costing me more time than text search is saving.

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Show me, don’t tell me

by on Aug.15, 2010, under GM, links and articles, observations

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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Counterintuition – save time planning by writing more plots!

by on Aug.04, 2010, under dnd, game theory, GM, observations, organization

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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Your taste in fudge and maintaining long plots (unrelated).

by on Jun.15, 2010, under dnd, observations

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

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Nurturing NPC growth

by on May.05, 2010, under dnd, GM, observations, self improvement

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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The Little Things That Count

by on Apr.06, 2010, under observations

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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Random Observation

by on Dec.08, 2008, under observations

I’ve never had a cleric in a game I ran.  Long term anyway.  One player got her bard ousted from the group for being too much of a bitch.  She came back with a friendlier cleric, but that was two sessions before the game ended so it hardly counts.  And I had a cleric in the rotating GM campaign, but since I wasn’t the only GM that counts even less.

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