Whether you’re a brand new or super experienced in tabletop role-playing games, we’ve all run into the challenge of how to describe to others what playing stories is really like. Today’s #newbieTuesday post aims to empower folks of all experience levels with the tools to break through the barrier of understanding when you’re trying to…
Discovering what motivates your various NPCs is a critically important step during your tabletop RPG worldbuilding. And when you really dedicate the time to identify and flesh out the source(s) of those motivations, you’ll more often than not find it to be both a fun & enlightening process, taking us in directions we may not…
Today’s #newbieTuesday post is all about the “chaos” at the table and how you, as the brand new player, can have a helping hand in its organization. It might be counter-intuitive to think that, as the newbie, you would be the one to set the pace and direction of the new activity you find yourselves…
This week’s #ifthiswereaTTRPG comes from a show I’ve been watching on Netflix called “Another Life.” As always, spoilers ahead! Another Life is a Netflix series about how a crew is sent to the Pi Canis Majoris star system in a hyper-advanced ship after an alien artifact from that region of space lands on Earth with…
This week’s #newbieTuesday blog post is all flexibility. Specifically, the flexibility in the type of stories you’re empowered to play. New and/or prospective tabletop RPG players most oftentimes associate TTRPGs with fantasy stories, like the ones born out of Dungeons and Dragons. Or perhaps they have a friend who loves Warhammer and think we’re all…
This week’s #worldbuildingMonday blog post is an extension of the character mapping process from a few weeks ago. This week, let’s delve more into that process and better flesh out how, within the character map, plotting out character arcs is a crucial step in this process as well. For the uninitiated, a character arc is…
This week’s #ifthiswereaTTRPG post comes from the legendary 1956 musical-comedy The Court Jester starring Danny Kaye, Glynis Johns, and a fantastic supporting cast. As always, spoilers ahead! The Court Jester is one of my all-time favorite comedies. It features moments of true genius and never fails to make you smile. Danny Kaye is an all-time…
This week’s #newbieTuesday post explains the traditional balance between role playing (RP) and combat in tabletop RPGs. Modern TTRPGs got their start as glorified war game simulations and eventually, in the 70s and 80s, evolved to incorporate role playing elements. RP and combat became a type of Yin and Yang of the tabletop story world.…
This week’s #worldbuildingMonday post is all about how to best treat the players’ backstory as threads in the overall tapestry of the story. Like we’ve discussed in weeks & months past on this blog, the players are the lifeblood of any tabletop RPG. Their choices, words, and actions are the story’s gravity, the source of…
This week’s #GMAdvice post is about the importance of being even-handed in your judgments as GM/DM. No matter how thorough the rule book for the tabletop RPG system you’re using, there are going to come times when a situation is more or less up for interpretation. Naturally, players care about what the ultimate result is…