Have you been using my tips to create your own original content? Do you want to publish your content? Do you want to maybe even SELL your content? Great. Just don’t get your a$& sued. Fortunately, the OGL and the DMs Guild can help. If you know how to use them.
It’s time to take a whirlwind tour of the megadungeon. What does one think about when one starts sketching out the basis for a huge megadungeon map? Everything, of course. Seriously. We think about EVERYTHING.
In the first ever Ask Angry Superblitz, we’ll answer a bunch of questions that have been piling up in the ole inbox! Enjoy!
From spreadsheet to flowchart to map. It’s time to take that bubble diagram and make it resemble an actual physical space. But figuring out how to do that is tricky. Fortunately, I’m an incredible genius who never ever makes mistakes that result in days of lost progress and an article that basically amounts to “I have no update this week, so let’s spend five thousand words talking about my f$&% up.”
The problem with players is that they always want to run around and do things in your game. Things you weren’t ready for. Or ask questions you don’t have answers for. And sometimes, even your own brain will turn against you and demand you add a crazy idea to your game. So how do you change the story of your game on the fly?
Sometimes, you just have to throw a bunch of work away and start over. And sometimes a bunch of work will just come out of you with no rhyme or reason when you least expect it. Both are as much a part of the design process as anything else.
What do you do when the rules fail? Well, you’re the GM, so you’d better do something! The game is waiting! You need to make a call! Hurry up and make something up.
Before we can start drawing maps to any sort of scale, we need to know what our scale is. How BIG is a room in our megadungeon? Why is it that big? And does EVERYTHING need a size? What even is the point of a map?
We tell a lot of funny stories about gaming. But just because a story is funny doesn’t mean its good advice. In fact, most funny stories are funny because they aren’t good gaming. It all comes down to tone.
You can’t run a dungeon with a spreadsheet. You need a map. And when all you’ve got is a spreadsheet, you’ve got to turn that into a map. But maps take a lot of work.
Improvisation is the single most important thing that can utterly ruin your game if you f$&% it up. It’s also widely considered to be unteachable by f$&%ing sissies who are afraid of working at things. Not me. Let’s embark on a series to teach you how to improvise, why it’s important, and why you shouldn’t.
Have you ever wondered why players let their characters die? And why every fight must be a fight to the death? Its because hit points are stupid and people don’t die at 0 HP anymore. But don’t worry. I fixed it.
Pacing: it’s one of those words that everyone thinks they know. And they don’t. Let’s talk about Pacing, Flow, and how to build a good pace into your adventure.
Is darkvision overpowered? Underpowered? How are races even balanced? And what the hell is Al actually TRYING to ask me?
Lots of things piss me off. But one thing pisses me off more than any other for the purposes of this article: when people ask me how to punish PC death. Isn’t death punishment enough? Why do GMs have such a hard time dealing with death?
Tabula rasa is the philosophical belief that every player enters your game stupid. And if you don’t want them to stay that way, you’d better learn how to use your scene-building knowledge to manage information.
Mazes suck in D&D. They just do. But you can’t say a thing like that and NOT have some f$&%er demand you explain how to make them not suck. Fine. Let’s take the suck out of “mazes suck.”
What do you do when you make a mistake? How do you fix it? Should you fix it? How responsible are you, really, for protecting the PCs from the world?
Let’s travel back to a bygone era when the modems were measured in bauds and the online role-playing games didn’t have any graphics and discover how old The Angry GM actually is and how much of a massive nerd he is. Oh, we’ll also learn the basics of designing RPG scenes.
Every creator eventually has some dips$&% ask them “where do you get your ideas?” It’s a stupid question. And it’s the reason more people aren’t creators. Do you want to know where I get my ideas? I make them! From my brain!
Settle in kids for the longest, most complicated bit of the Megadungeon yet. Because this is our season one finale. When we’re done, we’ll have our gates and story beats set out on our big ole masterplan and we’ll even fill some of the backstory as a bonus.
It’s time for more Megadungeon spreadsheets. Actually, it’s time for THE spreadsheet. The only one that really matters. The one we’ve been building toward. The MASTER PLAN. And it puts together EVERYTHING we’ve figured out so far. And it’s so big, it’ll take two articles to finish it.
In this Ask Angry, I explain what it means to be a critical gamer, how I can recommend a system I don’t like, and why I am so damned critical of Fate.
From crunch to fluff and back again. Today, we’re working on the last large-scale bit of planning we need to do before we just start designing the adventure: the plot. And that’s where fluff and crunch come together.
Every adventure needs a beginning. Yeah, I know, it’s exactly that kind of brilliant insight you can’t get anywhere else. So, let’s talk about opening scenes.
We’re doing a double feature today. Yes, that’s right, I’m solving TWO dilemmas. It’s An Angry GM Double Problem Episode. An Angry DP. How do you learn a new system and who owns the rules?
We’ve been focusing on the mechanical structure of the dungeon. But there’s another thing that’s just as important. The dungeon’s story.
“Angry,” they say, “why don’t you show us your game notes! Angry, teach us how to prep. Show us the way.” I CAN’T DO THAT! STOP ASKING!
Have you ever had a player declare an action only to have another player try to stop them by force? GMs HATE the phrase “no, wait, I stop him from doing that.” How do you handle it? Let me tell you.
A long, long time ago, I promised to teach you a cool, simple system for designing and running social interaction encounters. Well, today’s the day. And it’s only a few years late!