I usu­ally like a bit of back­story for my player char­ac­ters. Player back­sto­ries can pro­vide pow­er­ful game ideas for the GM. I par­tu­cu­larly like the idea in Mouse­guard of hav­ing ‘ene­mies’ so that in the play­ers’ turn (the sand­box por­tion of a Mouse­guard game) you have some­thing to spring­board off of. Back­sto­ries have...

Will table­top RPGs of the future look more like Lady Black­bird? Here’s what Ryan Dancy said on this topic at Enworld: I think that com­mer­cially suc­cess­ful TRPGs of the future will be con­structed more like a fam­ily game – some­thing that can be unpacked, learned quickly, and played with lit­tle prep work. These games will give peo­ple a lot of...

I think it can be a nice touch to set player expec­ta­tions (espe­cially if it is a multi-session cam­paign you are plan­ning) about the nature and tone of the game you’ll be run­ning. One nice tool for this is GM Merit Badges which serve as a great check list of things to con­sider telling your play­ers about your GM’ing style. Here is my GM’ing style...

I’m con­sid­er­ing using the new Table­top Forge 2.0 beta which is in the works to run some Sav­age Worlds games. There are a cou­ple of Sav­age Worlds mechan­ics which aren’t cur­rently sup­ported by the tool (they are, by con­trast, sup­ported in Fan­tasy Grounds). Not to worry though — here are two workarounds which will give you a good...

What ele­ments are present in an ideal role­play­ing game ses­sion? The answer will vary of course, depend­ing on the par­tic­u­lar game and (more impor­tantly) the inter­ests of those play­ing the game. Given that many groups have play­ers with dif­fer­ent inter­ests, it’s impor­tant to under­stand dif­fer­ent player moti­va­tions. Based on...

I’ve used the vir­tual table­top Fan­tasy Grounds as played with out VTTs (vir­tual table­tops) such as RPTools. I really like them, but the hur­dle to get peo­ple to install soft­ware, open net­work ports, and deal with cross-platform lim­i­ta­tions can really dampen VTT adop­tion. Enter Table­top Forge. It is in Beta, and will work as an add-on to...

This is the first of sev­eral arti­cles I’m writ­ing with tips (some proven, oth­ers soon to be play-tested) on run­ning hassle-free table­top RPG cam­paigns with rotat­ing play­ers. Recently I started GM’ing for a group run­ning Space 1889 in the Sav­age Worlds set­ting. I had some misses dur­ing my first game (my 4 hour adven­ture got started...