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Do This To Drastically Improve Communication With Players

When there’s good communication, it’s invisible. When there’s bad communication, everyone feels it. As an anti-social, only child introvert, I’ve always considered myself as having a low emotional quotient. I’m much more polite in writing. 🙂 At work I’ve been called direct due to my questions. Being direct is effective, in my experience. It helps […]

How to Create Situations With 5 Room Dungeons

We want to cue up situations, not outcomes. By that, I mean we don’t dictate the actions of the characters. That’s the players’ job. But as storytellers, we have a job to do too. We need to weave good tales from our setting, adventure plans, and gameplay as it happens. How can we do this […]

Story Sparks — A Way To Improv Better

Ever make a fire from scratch, without matches or gasoline? Every material has an ignition temperature where a spark lights it up. The shirt you’re wearing probably ignites around 267°C or 513°F. Wood is about 300°C / 572°F. And what about our encounters? What ignites them? More on that in a sec. To start a […]

My Monsters Sucked Until I Discovered This Special Approach

I realized last month I’ve been in a rut slinging boring monsters. This troubled me because boring foes = boring games (h/t to Slapchop). In my Terror in the Badlands campaign, for example, we had a crazy battle in a ruined underground city against a white dragon. It was tricksy with its moves, actions, and […]

Building Encounters On The Fly

Roleplaying Tip GM Dario asks, “How do you create encounters on the fly? Do you just have the DM tables at hand, roll a d20 a few times and voilá? Or do you have a specific procedure?” Thanks for the great question, Dario. I have a few tools for improve encounters: GM Agenda The first […]

Better Storytelling With Two-Sided Characterization, Part II

Last Musing we chatted about the importance of characterizing details you bring into gameplay. As you provide encounter descriptions, introduce NPCs, offer treasures, tell secrets, and convey the world to your friends, you can think about both variables of the equation. The first variable is about how you inject physical and emotional energy into your […]

Better Storytelling With Two-Sided Characterization, Part I

Better Storytelling With Two-Sided Characterization Characterization is how you roleplay the people, places, and things in your adventures. Here’s how to add panache, style, and zing via characterization to engage your players more and become a better storyteller. To me, it’s all roleplaying. But in the literary world, they call it characterization. When the PCs […]

Have Problems Improvising?

RPT GM Haukur posed this question to me: Hey there Johnn. I’m relatively new to DMing. I’m having some problems with improvising. Do you have any improvising tips on encounters and characters, if it’s not too much of a hassle, that is. Thank you. There are two kinds of improv we do as GMs: creating […]

A Simple But Effective Adventure Template

Sometimes all you need is a skeleton. With a few guiding bullet points, you become unblocked and inspired to create next session’s adventure. I’ve featured a couple of adventure design templates in the past, including the Hook, Line & Sinkers Mad Lib (March 2017), the Mad Lib 5 Room Dungeon Idea Generator (July 2017), the […]

New Trick Makes Combat A Nail Biter

Last summer I watched a video with a great tip on how to add more story and drama to my melees. I’ve been using this tip for several sessions now, and it’s made a big difference. However, this narrative tactic was tricky for me at first, especially because it’s all improv. I’m finally getting up […]

Your First Idea Sucks

Why do we fear improv?In my experience, GMing by the seat of your pants means facing embarrassment and frustration because of?