Against the Odds If a session ever went 100% how I expected and completely according to both my plan and the players, I think my brain would cease to function. The infinite improbability required for things to go that smoothly […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
All Part of the Plan As a Dungeon Master, your plans seldom go as expected. The players *always* do the unexpected. However, most of the time, their actions are relatively expected, and not so completely out of the blue that […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Randomised Monsters I haven’t exactly done this, because I always choose monsters based on the environment and story. I did “balance” an encounter based solely on the number of minis I had available. I just kept throwing gnolls at the […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
BorderLands: Session Four With one of my players on vacation, I have twice as long before my next game. I’ll still probably spend close to the same length of time seriously preparing: just under a week. It’s a little like homework; […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Hasta La Next Round I mock but it’s really not too hard for a DM to swap in reaction to a better witty response. As retcons go, that’s super easy and doesn’t really affect play much. Unless the remark is […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Party vs Party At the time of writing I’m planning a mini-campaign of Madness at Gardmore Abbey, converting the 4th Edition adventure to 5th Edition. Which, so far, has been pretty darn easy. The encounters copy over fairly well, all […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Triacontahedron Time They do make d30s, which are typically a rhombic triacontahedron for you geometry buffs. So that’s always an option. This strip comes from a line spoken by Perram (aka Jefferson Jay Thacker), a host of the excellent Know Direction […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Pisa Has Nothing On It Sometimes you just need to do something with your hands at the game table. Something to keep busy while the focus of the adventure is on another player or your character is so stunlocked they’ll […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Rolling Insight I think half the reason gamemasters have a screen is so they can hide their face while anticipating a building climax or looming twist. It can be hard not to subtly guide observant players down the right path […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Gaming History It’s hard separating player knowledge from character knowledge. It can be very easy to “guess” what your opponent is and prepare accordingly, even if the characters shouldn’t know. This sometimes gets dismissed by arguing that folks in the […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Random Number Generator Instead of talking about random number generation or dice towers, I’m ranting about some behind-the-scenes drama. Audio commentary stuff. This strip started off completely different. I’ve had the vague idea for a strip on ridiculous house rules […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Trapper Keepered It can be hard to keep track of details as a gamemaster. First, you need to remember the necessary details of the world, including those relevant to the adventure as well as random facts the players might ask, […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
