About Roleplaying Tips.com
Hello fellow game master,
Thank you very much for visiting and for your interest in RoleplayingTips.com. My name is Johnn Four and this site and the Roleplaying Tips Weekly e-zine have been running since November 1999.
I started this site for a selfish reason: to improve my own game mastering skills. I thought if I shared my own tips and experiences then others would send in tips of their own. It is amazing the tremendous response this little project has received....and my GMing has improved greatly! I hope my subscribers' games have benefitted as well.
My goal is to make this site the Internet's premier resource for game masters all around the world. You have a lot of knowledge to share, whether you know it or not, just from your life's experiences and skills, if not from actual experience at the game table. Please subscribe to the Roleplaying Tips Weekly newsletter (low volume & SPAM-free), enjoy the tips, and share some of your own for everyone's benefit.
Contact Johnn
Johnn Four, Owner & Publisher
About Johnn
Well, let's keep this part mercifully brief, shall we? I read a joke recently and laughed about how a roleplayer's dice were now old enough to vote...but then my dice received their registration card in the mail and I stopped laughing.
My favorite system is Dungeons & Dragons. It was the only system I played for many years and it became "hard wired" into my brain. The same with my players. Consequently, if we decide to play on the spur of the moment, it takes us just a few minutes to whip up characters and begin rolling initiative - just like playing craps at the casino, it all depends on the roll.
I started roleplaying in elementary school when my grade 5 teacher let a student run a game for the whole class. He had pre-made 20 characters, handed them out and cracked open good ol' B2 - Keep On The Borderlands. Within the hour 14 kids were off doing their own thing and six of us stuck it out. I remember getting paralyzed and then slain by a carrion crawler. Cool. So we played during lunch breaks thereafter until the DM moved out of town.
Then my friend received a D&D boxed set for Christmas and I started DMing. I was hooked and bought the AD&D books soon afterwards. By that summer my friend had 50th level characters named Merlin, Conan and Thor, and we were going through the monster manual in alphabetic order slaying every type of monster on the way. LOL.
My philosophy on RPGs is that they are similar to gambling at a casino online - you never know what awaits you. Game master tips help you hone your skills, but it's also worth trying to find your own strategy, such as in a game of roulette when you make your final move at the last second.
About the Web Site
This is a high-content, low frills web site. I spent a lot of time planning, storyboarding and thinking about how I would design these web pages. I also had a lot of excellent feedback from friends and readers--especially Doug B., David M. and Jason D.
- I'm a big fan of usability and based much of the navigation and layout on the principles of Jacob Nielson. His site and articles can be found at: www.alertbox.com. Basically it boils down to that fact that you come here for information. And while I'd like to impress you very much with sassy graphics and cool programming, you would soon get tired of the download delays and browser incompatibility issues and leave.
- Many of my subscribers and visitors are from outside of North America. North Americans have been blessed with flat rate Internet connections, but other parts of the world pay by the minute or second of connectivity. So, I made this site very fast to download:
- Few graphics
- No frames
- Simple tables and layout
If you are from outside of North America, I'd recommending getting a free subscription to the e-zine, which is text based. The e-zine usually about 30k in size, is limited to three small ads per issue, and is plain text. You will save time and money, and not miss any game master tips, by getting a weekly e-mail rather than frequently revisiting the web site.
- Site maintenance is very simple. During my research I found many web-zines and e-zines which got to issue 2, 3 or 4 but then stopped. The biggest dis-service I can do for you is to start something overly ambitious, gain your interest, and then quit. So, by keeping things simple I am able to continue writing tips and re-publishing the tips you send me reliably, consistently, every week.
Do you have any questions about Roleplaying Tips or Johnn four that weren't covered here? Drop me a note. Thanks!
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