3 Early Warning Signs You’re Suffering From GM Burnout A GM replied to my recent Master of the 5 Room Dungeon email and said they’d lost the spark for GMing. I asked them for more details in case I can help, and am awaiting a reply. Meantime though, I’ve suffered from apathy and burnout several […]
Continue reading
6 Ways To Spice Up Boring Combats Combats offer a delicious nexus between dice-rolling gameplay, storytelling, roleplaying, and tactics. Alas, many battles become boring slugfests that offer no variety. Here are a half dozen ways to spice things up in your next fight. 1. Add Space Fighting in a telephone booth restricts options and gets […]
Continue reading
I’ve suffered through my fair share of homebrew disasters. For example, there was The Session Where Nothing Happened. The GM had been bugging me all week, bursting with anticipation of how awesome Saturday’s adventure would be. The weekend comes around. We roll up characters and started off in an infinite plane. We walked and walked, […]
Continue reading
Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1223 How To Keep Dungeons Interesting – 5 Ways How do you make dungeon crawling perpetually interesting? This was a frequent tip request made in December’s Dungeon23 poll. I struggle with this too, whether it’s an endless series of rooms in a megadungeon, a series of 5 Room Dungeons, or just a […]
Continue reading
Do you struggle being consistent with campaign prep? Do you suffer a bit from writer’s block when you do manage to start a bit of prep? Has prep become a fun habit for you, or do you still struggle getting the job done? I hope today’s Tiny Prep tip helps. If you are doing #Dungeon23, […]
Continue reading
RPT GM Steffen asks: Maybe you have a tip for a problem I’m having with prep. In my group, we sometimes play fairly open RPGs. Open in the sense of an open world. At the end of a game session, I don’t know how the players are going to approach a problem, and then I […]
Continue reading
Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1222 A Way To Make MegaDungeon Rooms Interesting An RPT GM asks: Facing the Dungeon23 challenge, I wonder how to come up with different rooms instead of falling into tired tropes or ending up with repetitive floors. My answer: roll for it! First, theme your megadungeon and its levels. Next, make yourself […]
Continue reading
Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1221 d12 Ways To Surprise And Delight Your Players And Their Characters Happy New Year! I hope your holidays were great. I spent mine eating way too much delicious baking. I wish I’d asked Santa for a bigger belt. The New Year always feels like a fresh start. So I am curious […]
Continue reading
Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1121 My Worst Adventure Yet Allo dfdfd, The last time I ran an official D&D adventure it was a disaster. Princes of the Apocalypse cost me $65 in Canadian maple syrup dollars. And the wheels fell off in the very first chapter. I love, love, love having gorgeous books on my shelf […]
Continue reading
Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1120 My Embarrassing Improv #Fail Hola dfdfd! Last time I told you how terrible my game was when I tried running the published adventure, Princes of the Apocalypse. That was a 255-page $65 disaster. But if you don’t use published adventures, what do you do? Building adventures is tough. Where do you […]
Continue reading
Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1119 My Secret For Effectively Building Epic Adventures Hi dfdfd, After crashing on expensive published adventures, I tried to go 100% improv and pure sandbox. That just burned me out even more. I realized I need to build my own adventures again, like I used to before life got so busy. But […]
Continue reading
A GM had this tip request: Any ideas of emulating/tracking a robust economy in osr style sandboxes? Good question. Here are a few tips and then I’ll end with some resources. Create a Treasure Budget I call this Treasure Crawl in my sandbox creation checklist. Forecast at each level or tier, to the projected end […]
Continue reading
Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1220 Three MegaDungeon Tips So, in the coming weeks I’ll be sharing some megadungeon tips and resources. These will be for any megadungeons, not just Dungeon23 stuff, to keep it as useful to as many RPT GMs as possible. And today I have three tips for you based on questions from RPT […]
Continue reading
d12 Forgery Adventure Hooks Let’s commit some forgery in our campaign. Here are d12 ideas. But before we get into that, why would we want forgery in our game? What benefits do we receive, and how can we wield forgery as storytellers? Easy Hooks Little Phingers goes to shake the noble’s hand. Almost too late […]
Continue reading
Create Extreme Environments In 3 Steps It’s pretty chilly here right now. But good news: it’s warmer than it was yesterday! Haha. So I took the screenshot above on my phone while thinking we should add extreme environmental conditions into our adventures more often to take gameplay to 11. Creating extreme conditions is not difficult […]
Continue reading
Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1219 Brief Word From Johnn We played session #5 of Basilica yesterday. The old memory muscles for Basic D&D slowly return, as does the OSR mindset, which I’m really enjoying. It’s wonderful not turning to the rulebook every time to figure out what to do or how to adjudicate a player action. […]
Continue reading
Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1218 How To Improvise When Players Do Combat Stunts in OSR RPGs Bonjour, Johnn! Last session a player went way outside the rules. He wanted his character to leap through the air onto a giant bird’s leg, climb up the tarsus, then release a magical belt attached to the beast’s limb. This […]
Continue reading
Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1217 3 Alternatives to PC Drinking Contests Last weekend we played session #04 of my Basilica campaign. We’re using Old School Essentials and my homebrew world of Duskfall. And this session we did a new thing called Stars & Wishes. I got this technique from Jonathan, who wrote today’s ideas for fun […]
Continue reading
Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1216 A Brief Word From Johnn Alas, the week got away from me, so this is a rare weekend edition of Roleplaying Tips. I’d like to give you one piece of advice and then move on to today’s villainous tips. The advice comes from a great Zoom consultation meeting I had last […]
Continue reading
From Johnn Four Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1215 Brief Word From Johnn Thank you to everyone who sent along birthday wishes. I had a great day and got to spend extra time working on my campaign, which is always a treat! In Wizard of Adventure news: Watch this video on YouTube where I walk through the […]
Continue reading
Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1214 How To Keep Players of Unconscious & Dying Characters Engaged When a character drops in combat, the fun stops for that player. While they can cheer their friends on, they can no longer join the fun. Different systems have different rules around death and dying. Regardless of ruling, here are some […]
Continue reading
Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1213 I mostly run sandboxes these days. That means I wrangle a lot of details. After a few sessions I’ll have dozens of Pages and Log Entries in Campaign Logger. After a year, they’ll be in the hundreds. Here’s an example from Wizard of Adventure ExileInParadise’s Sword Coast campaign: And here’s a […]
Continue readingI wanted to give you a heads-up that we are migrating your data to the new version in the latter part of September for you. The original Campaign Logger, which we call Legacy, is here: https://legacy.app.campaign-logger.com/ The new Campaign Logger, which we call vNext, is here: https://app.campaign-logger.com/ (You can see a growing list of new […]
Continue reading
Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1211 Brief Word From Johnn Check out this cool session pic from Platinum Wizard of Adventure Nemsoli: I asked Nemsoli what I was seeing, and he replied: What you are looking at is a Dwarven Forge 3d model my GM bought and painted. The two minis are clockwork owlbears he printed and […]
Continue reading
Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1212 Brief Word From Johnn Biggest Eruption In Over 100 Years Did you hear about the volcanic eruption that happened at Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha’apai last January? It’s probably the biggest eruption that’ll happen in our lifetime – the biggest since Krakatoa in 1883 – but due to its remote location it […]
Continue reading