What’s a one-shot adventure? What’s a single-session adventure? And how is writing them different from writing any other adventure? In this Ask Angry, I answer those questions and also reference The Last Starfighter!
Like Quark closely examining Morn’s hidden stash in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode Who Mourns for Morn, if you look too closely at the treasure system in D&D, you’ll find someone has extracted all of the value and there’s nothing left but worthless gold.
The hardest thing any GM has to do is come up with stuff on the fly. Especially when that stuff needs mechanical rules behind it. Fortunately, you have this Marvelous Mechanical Miscellany for Ad Hoc Adjudication and Improvisational Invention.
Few Game Masters think to ask who is meant to drive the plot in the adventure they are writing. Which is a shame, because there are lots of ways an adventure can be driven. And by lots, I mean two. There are two ways. And understanding them can help make your adventure writing easier.
This week, I ponder the question of when it’s okay to take control of a character away from a player thanks to a question from a reader with a really dumb name.
Sanity mechanics? What are they? How do they work? Are they even necessary? Can we make them better? Let’s Ask Angry!
This week, I tackle two different questions related by the theme of, umm, players doing things. Yeah. First, how to handle two players going at the same time in combat. Second, how to handle players doing things between adventures.
In this week’s Ask Angry, Brendan asks Angry how to get the PCs to run away from monsters so that he can run a sandbox game without any structure. And I tell him how to build a better campaign instead.
Once again, we’re digging into the massive well of Ask Angry questions to see if we can’t squeeze 5,000 words out of an interesting question. This week, let’s write an honor system for D&D!
Let’s answer some more reader questions this week! How do you build a calendar for your game? How do you keep a “save the world” plot arc from consuming your entire campaign?
It started as a simple question about how to juggle two plot lines. It became an entire treatise on building campaigns with multiple plot arcs. This article is the first ever article under the category “How to Build a F$&%ing Campaign.”
It’s almost time to map our dungeon. By that, I mean, I WANT to start mapping our dungeon. But, like everything else in this giant project, we have to figure out how best to do something before we start actually doing it.
What do you do when your players force you to turn a nameless, faceless nobody into an actual NPC? What do you do when they don’t even start with a nameless, faceless nobody? How do you make NPCs out of nothing?
This article is about basic probability, dice, and statistics in D&D and other RPGs. I love this s$&% and I think it’s important and useful to understand. So, let’s use math to answer some questions about dice rolling in RPGs. Or not. Next week, I’m back to talking about NPCs, so you can skip this one if you want.
Everyone knows that the easiest way to start an adventure is to just have some damned NPC show up and tell the PCs what to do and how to do it. After all, that’s what MMORPGS do and it works for them. So why not do the same in D&D? Because Quest Givers can be so much more than expository text. Don’t waste that potential.
It’s time for yet another Ask Angry blitz! And the first two questions I answer are a little bit of site news. And then I answer real questions. Yay!
Tagalongs: NPCs that join the party. They are often derided, frequently misunderstood, and rarely used well. Because people are dumba$&es. Which is sad because Tagalongs are a GREAT Tool for your GMing Toolbox!
Well, it happened again. Another week on Twitter, another fight about why metagaming is bulls&$%. But what is metagaming? And why is it a waste of time to worry about it? Well, I’ll f$&%ing tell you.
Good game design is about understanding incentives. But incentives aren’t enough. Rewards only encourage good behavior. To discourage bad behavior, sometimes you need to beat someone with a stick.
Building compelling NPCs is a tricky, tricky business. And it’s made even trickier by the fact that people don’t even REALLY understand what NPCs are. That’s a shame, because good NPCs are literally the key to emotional investment in games.
Encapsulation: the art of designing around nonexistent systems and filling in the blanks later. It’s an important skill, but there comes a time when you have to fill in the blanks. Say, by designing a random encounter system for your megadungeon.
Is GMing like riding bike? How important is replayability in video games? Why do I hate gnomes? These aren’t exactly the questions people have asked, but these are the ones I ended up answering.
It’s time to clear out more of the massive backlog of Ask Angry questions. Today, I tell people how to pull off some interesting campaign ideas about aberrations and amnesiacs. And also we talk a lot about what makes horror horrible and why I hate Lovecraft.
Better late than never! It’s time for the third Ask Angry Megablitz! I answer questions about group size, mismatched player levels, and letting the players pick their adventures.
GMs suck at giving recaps. They give too much information or too little information or the wrong information or they make it boring or they let the dumba&$ players do it or they do it by e-mail. Recaps are a very powerful that no GM understands, let alone uses well. Except me. Because I’m a genius.
They say “variety is the spice of life.” But that’s because they are dumba$&es. Sometimes, the best thing you can do for a game experience is to impose restrictions and limitations.
Tabletop RPG sessions are a lot like TV shows. The problem is the one very important way in which they are not at all like TV shows. If you always want to leave your players hungry for more, you have to learn how to structure your SESSIONS like episodes, NOT your adventures.
I know you should never give an opinion about an ex- in a public forum, but it’s been six years now since I broke up with 4th Edition and it’s time to talk about why our relationship had to end.
For all their clever plans, a game designer can only create mechanics. Create them right and the players will experience the grand plan in all its glory. But RPG designers have a lot of screwed up notions when it comes to this simple truism. They don’t even know what game mechanics actually are.
It’s time to wrap up our tour of the entire megadungeon. And with that, it’s also time to wrap up preplanning and figure out where to go from here.