Today’s #newbieTuesday post is all about “fitting in” as a new player at the table. Somewhat ironically, with tabletop role playing games now becoming “cool,” joining the table as a new player may seem somewhat akin to the disorienting feeling of sitting at a different lunch table in the school cafeteria. Similarly, you may get…
Today’s #worldbuildingMonday post centers around the concept of “railroading” and best practices around keeping your use of it in check. For the uninitiated, “railroading” essentially means forcing the players down certain plot paths and/or taking specific actions they otherwise may not have intended. And there’s various degrees of railroading, from fairly necessary/trivial in order to…
Today’s #ifthiswereaTTRPG comes from, in my opinion of one at least, one of the greatest movies of the 20th century: It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s a Wonderful Life is an extraordinary film for many reasons, far too many to explore here. So today’s post will explore at a high-level the series of scenes where Clarence,…
Today’s #newbieTuesday post is all about a player’s right to “spotlight.” To set the table, spotlight is the concept of direct attention from the Game Master to a player’s character. And that attention can manifest itself in myriad ways such as investment in that character’s plot thread, getting powerful and/or personal items, having non-player characters…
Today’s #worldbuildingMonday post is about the thought process behind selecting the difficulty of your story’s tabletop role playing game campaign. We do a deeper dive into the best practices for delineating the level of challenge your story presents to its players while not compromising on its narrative. Of course, the vast majority of TTRPGs use…
Continuing from last week’s Isaiah the Gray #TBTRPG story, Isaiah calls out: “Jedi! Come, be sensible. We do not wish you any harm but must insist we talk face to face.” In the cockpit of his ship Corban sits for a moment. He turns to FUK-U and says: “There is an immense source of Force…
Today’s #ifthiswereaTTRPG post comes from the Disney movie Mulan. At the army camp, Captain Li Shang puts a test to his clearly unfit-to-fight troop: using the heavy golden weights – “Discipline” and “Strength” – climb to the top of a high poll and retrieve the arrow at its top. Naturally, letting the weights be weights…
Today’s #newbieTuesday post is about the portrait you see of the tabletop role playing game/Dungeons and Dragons community and experience you see in memes. To be clear, I love memes. I’ve probably spent an unfortunate amount of my life browsing meme after meme. So I’m certainly not coming after memes with today’s post. Instead I’d…
Today’s #worldbuildingMonday blog post is all about best practices for staying true to the internal rules you’ve created for your world for when you add new rules. Nearly every story world has a consistent, foundationational bedrock of rules that govern how it works. Take for example again Romeo & Juliet: the Capulets and Montagues will…
Today’s #GMAdvice is all about the art of distributing attention, otherwise known as spotlight, among your players. The best place to start is to disavail you or anyone else from the notion that “attention” is what players are seeking. Attention is a far too generic term that gets more play than it ought to in…