Posts belonging to Category GM Advice
Posted by Ravyn on April 11, 2012
During Monday’s RPG Blog Carnival post about reasons why players might be avoiding a fight, I started with the most simple of all: it’s a character thing. People do play characters who aren’t interested in fighting in general, or for whatever reason aren’t interested in this fight in particular, and those characters are going to [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, GM Advice, Tactics |
Tags: Combat Avoidance, GM tips, roleplaying, RPG Blog Carnival | 
2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on April 10, 2012
Oh, come on, am I the only one participating in RPG Blog Carnival this month?
When I talked yesterday about reasons why a player might be avoiding combat, one of the points I mentioned was the possibility that the player just plain isn’t getting anything out of the fight itself. Regardless of how much we as [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, GM Advice, Tactics |
Tags: Combat Avoidance, GM tips, roleplaying, RPG Blog Carnival | 3 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on April 9, 2012
As I admitted in the opening post for this month’s RPG Blog Carnival (still open; post away!), I’m notorious for my combat avoidance; if there’s a way to get out of a fight, I will find it, and I’m likely to take it. But I know how important it can be to just run a [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, GM Advice, Tactics |
Tags: Combat Avoidance, GM tips, roleplaying, RPG Blog Carnival | 7 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on March 19, 2012
Not every character catches on with the player; I think it’s safe to say we all know what it’s like to play a character who just isn’t fun, whether that’s not fun yet, no longer fun, or never that much fun to begin with. Stinks, doesn’t it? While it isn’t specifically a GM’s job to [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, GM Advice, Tactics |
Tags: GM Advice, player/character difficulties, roleplaying, tactics | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on March 13, 2012
Most of us have seen something that qualifies as Serious Business. It’s not going to change the world, it’s not life or death, it might not even seem like anything more than a simple pastime, but to the people who care about it—the football fans who close their businesses when the two state colleges’ teams [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Plot, Technique, Thematics, World-building |
Tags: plot, roleplaying, serious business, World-building, writing | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on March 12, 2012
When we’re creating our stories, or choosing our game systems/settings, we’re generally given a choice: create a world of our own/use a fictional setting that’s already there, or use a variation on the world we actually live in. Real-world settings provide a certain familiarity and an existing structure, but while they have their benefits, they [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, World-building |
Tags: real world, roleplaying, settings, World-building, writing | 7 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on March 7, 2012
Let’s face it, assassins are ubiquitous; you have to work at it to find a genre in which they aren’t hiding behind a post somewhere. And since they pop up in a lot of plots, it’s important to know how to handle them in those plots: how to make sure the assassin gets done what [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, Plot, Technique |
Tags: foreknowledge, plot, roleplaying, Things You Might Want To Know When..., writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on March 6, 2012
It might have been played up just a bit too much in order to provide motivation. Or maybe it’s to justify the fact that everybody with a name, a backstory and/or an even remotely solid set of stats seems to want to get their hands on it. Whatever the reason, it’s clear that the item [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Motivation, Tactics, Technique |
Tags: artifacts of anticlimax, motivation, roleplaying, writing | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on February 23, 2012
“What kind of graduate program,” I ask, glaring at the computer screen, “doesn’t even make you write an essay?”
I’m still in the throes of grad school application, comparing the one I’ve been stalling on my app to with the one I’ve probably just been accepted in. Sure, the former is cheaper, but something’s been bugging [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, GM Advice |
Tags: GM tips, motivation, roleplaying, subtle hints | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on February 22, 2012
PCs have an absolute gift for not quite understanding what the word “impossible” means. If there’s something that can’t be done, it’s a better than even bet a PC has tried it. Sometimes, when they’re taking on impossible challenges, it’s something straightforward, like challenging an enemy who you know is far too strong for them; [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, GM Advice, Tactics |
Tags: plots, roleplaying, search plotlines | No Comments »