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…
This week’s #GMAdvice post is all about how GMs should be balancing player character creation with what they (the GM/DM) “know is coming” in the story. Risking repeating the obvious, character creation is process of translating/transcribing a player character from an idea to their statistics/abilities/backstory on paper. Each tabletop RPG system is different, and there…
This week’s #GMAdvice post is all about spending your time wisely. Regardless of whether you’re a child or an adult, when you and your friends & family sit down to play a story together, that time and space is precious. Even if you have a weekly game going, never take that experience for granted –…
This week’s #GMAdvice post is all about the process of weaving character strengths and flaws into the tapestry of the story. A crucial part of engaging the players in a tabletop role playing game, in playing stories, is to ensure that their characters’ traits, good and bad, are nurtured and pinged within the flow of…
This week’s #GMAdvice post is all about the process, prior to beginning a TTRPG campaign, of each member of the table verbalizing what you each want out of the story you’re going to be playing. In your pre-session, this act of stating what your hopes, wants, and/or goals for the story are in front of…
Today’s #GMAdvice is all about the important distinction between being a guide and being a leader. A common tendency for GMs when they’re seeing chaos at the table is to try and lead their way through the “problem.” They turn to railroading or unreasonably hurting/killing/over-punish players to try and get everyone back on track. They…
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…
In the tabletop role playing game community, there is some significant debate over whether GMs/DMs should be considered storytellers. For a debate over semantics, there sure are a lot of heated opinions so I will steer clear of poking the hornets. Instead, I invite the participants to focus on what telling a story really is…
Today’s Friday #GMAdvice is all about how to react when the players inevitably “go off the rails.” If there is a Golden Rule of being a Game Master of a tabletop role playing game it’s “design and facilitate a player-centric story.” Players are the lifeblood of played stories – without them, no matter what level…
Today’s #GMAdvice stems from a fantastic article by Hayley Gordon with Storybrewers (@storybrewers on Twitter) that centers on the topic of narrative authority in TTRPGs. The example Hayley uses to set the table is an adventuring party who has just entered a cave and has been thrust into combat. The traditional model is the the…