Recent Blogs Posts

Do you remember what happened a minute ago? Of course you do! Do you remember what happened three weeks ago? Maybe not the small details, right? Welcome to the continuity problem - the disconnect between the players and their characters caused by the gaps between game sessions.

As I’ve mentioned before, sometimes it’s a challenge for my group to play on a regular schedule. We strive to play ever other week, or every third at worst, but sometimes life intervenes and the ...

Or, The Tom Sawyer Principle

It takes a lot of work to run an RPG campaign. And all of it falls on the shoulders of the GM. There’s nobody else the GM could even call on for help – or is there? Let’s look at a little concept I call The Tom Sawyer Principle.

Did you ever read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain? Early in the book, Tom skips school. As punishment, his Aunt Polly makes him paint a huge fence on Saturday, which is everyone else’s day off. Tom ...

When my group started playing D&D via Fantasy Grounds, several of my players were keen to resume the old campaign rather than starting a new one. That campaign had featured several long-term storylines, and the party had gotten fairly involved in one of them. This had apparently left quite an impression on the players, and they were eager to see that story to its conclusion. I was more than happy to acquiesce to their desire, since I had always been curious about how the storyline ...

In my last post I talked a bit about how I use a database of NPC’s in my campaign. Today we’ll delve into the details. We’ll talk a little about the platform and the software, then we’ll get into what information needs to be included. We’ll finish up by talking a little more about other ways to use it.

Throughout this discussion I will refer to our collection of NPC data as a “database”, even though we may or may not really be using relational database software to store the information. ...

Very early on in my DM days (1980) I realized that I was terrible at making up fantasy names on the spot. It often happened that a PC would unexpectedly strike up a conversation with some blacksmith’s apprentice or farmer’s wife, and all of a sudden I would need a name for an NPC for whom I had no details whatsoever. Every time, my mind would freeze up and all I could come up with were painfully normal names.

Me: “Uh, the apprentice’s name is, uh, um, Fred”
Player: “Fred?

...