Today’s #GMAdvice post is all about listening. Listening is a skill like any other and one that can certainly be improved. Applying that skill as a GM toward your players both individually and as a group is a critically important part of being a storyteller (or, more accurately, a story facilitator). In my experience, the…
Today’s #GMAdvice centers on how GMs can manage their player characters’ backstory. Backstory is history, baggage, and major experiences a character has had before the game/story begins. It’s oftentimes a incredibly fun and engaging process for the players to undertake prior to playing the game. Some players banter and discuss their options, others are more…
We’re using today’s #GMAdvice post to make a surprise launch of our new series: GM Round Table. GM Round Table will be an ongoing series where we sit down with GMs and get a feel for their approach to playing stories, their sources of inspiration, how they invest in players, how they got started and…
Today’s #GMAdvice stems from a fear we hear from even super experienced GMs/DMs and that’s the pressure to “do voices.” In just about any story that will be told during a role playing game, characters will come across NPCs – non-player characters – of all shapes and sizes. And the unfair burden that some GMs…
Last week’s Game Master advice centered on the idea that you should be tailoring your story to the players at the table. Today’s tip takes that advice a step further by breaking down sessions and campaigns and designing arcs for your characters. For the uninitiated, a session is synonymous with episode in the RPG world…
With the shift of classic #tbtRPG posts to Thursdays, we’ll be dedicating Fridays to advice for Game Masters/Dungeon Masters/Storytellers. By far the most importance advice you’ll likely ever receive in this space as a GM is “tailor your story to the players at your table.” It cannot be overstated how critical it is that you…
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…