A chronological listing of every post The Angry GM has ever… posted.
A supporter asked a question and I leaped into action. What do you about the part of the game after the adventure’s done but the characters still have to make it safely home? Is there a way to make that not suck? Well, sadly, no, there isn’t. Sometimes, you just have to do the sucky thing. But your game can take it. Trust me. And trust you too.
I would love to actually talk about the third heat today and explain what the hell I even mean by that, but I can’t, because too many smart people asked me whether character building is a kind of gameplay and whether it would therefore count as some kind of heat of its own. Might it not be the fourth heat. Spoiler alert: yes, but no.
Welcome to the start a new hacking miniseries. Years ago, I build a basic time-keeping mechanic that let you introduce random events into your adventures based on how efficiently how your players adventures. As great as it was, though, it only highlighted the need for a real, comprehensive, core time-keeping mechanic that would work in all modes of play. Well, I built just such a system. Years ago. I just kind of forgot to tell you. So I’m here to rectify that in classic The Angry GM style. By walking you through the over-analyzed design in way too many parts.
Let’s try something a little different. Let’s have you write the article. Seriously. I’m going to pose a question and invite you to share your answer in the comments. I just need about 1,750 words to pose the question just right. There’s more to it than just asking whether it’s okay for players to read the Dungeon Master’s Guide. A lot more. Once you all give your answers, I promise I’ll give mine.
I love rolling dice as much as anyone. That’s why I love roleplaying games so huggy much and why I won’t buy any game that takes the Game Master’s dice away. But you can’t build gameplay challenges on dice rolling alone and that ain’t just me talking. In the second essay in my three-part series on proper gameplay and challenge design, we’re going to talk about why naked die rolling isn’t gameplay. According to actual experts.
It’s time close this Stupid Narration Tricks series once and for all. We had some fun, but it’s time to move on. In this final entry, I’ll share the two tricks I left unshared last week. Because, now that you’ve learned how to hide details in plain narrative sight, you’re ready to use repetition to make patterns and break them. Assuming you’re good enough.
In this penultimate lesson in my Stupid Narration Tricks series, I want show you the first of three tricks used by George R. R. Martin to hide important clues in plain narrative sight so that you can give your players a chance to spot important details and solve mysteries without falling back on die rolls and obvious expository reveals. The final lesson, next week, will cover the other two.
I love open-ended creative problem as much as anyone. It’s why I love tabletop roleplaying games oh so huggy much. But it’s too brittle to rely upon as core gameplay and that ain’t just me talking. There’s years of cognitive research about how people engage with open-ended “insight problems” showing that they’re just not a great thing to build gameplay around. That’s right; I brought receipts for the first in this three-part series about a more comprehensive approach to challenge design that allows for open-ended creativity and dice-rolling without letting either break the gameplay experience.
After showing y’all how to map a pretty good dungeon, I got some lip from some readers who don’t understand the difference between “maps as art” and “maps as game design,” and think you can design a good game in a stolen map. I also got told off from someone who thinks “you don’t have to show your players the map” means “I never have to map an adventure properly again.” So let’s talk about mapping like real gaming adults, shall we?
Why are some parts of tabletop roleplaying games so weirdly hard to handle: social interactions, traps, wilderness travel, downtime, and lots of other crap that should be core fantasy adventure gameplay. The problem isn’t bad mechanics, but missing mental models. There just aren’t any conceptual tools that help Dungeon Masters and players understand how the world works, make strategic choices, and actually play the parts of Dungeons & Dragons that shouldn’t be nearly as hard as they are.
A Dungeon Master does not merely draw a dungeon. Not if they care at all about actual, good game design. I’ve already showed you how to plan out a pretty good Dungeons & Dragon dungeon adventure. Now I’m going to show you how to make a pretty good dungeon map. And, as a bonus, how to turn a realistic floor plan into a good gameplay experience. It’s all to do with a trick called blockout.
In this series, I’ll show you homebrewer Dungeon Masters of any skill level how to use actual, good game design to build a pretty good dungeon adventure for Dungeons & Dragons or your system of choice.
We Dungeon Masters often describe our roleplaying game worlds like neutral, all-seeing narrator robots, and that means we’re wasting a lot of potential. Fantasy authors use this trick of picking viewpoint characters to provide sharper, more useful, more flavorful narration filtered through their characters’ expert lenses. Of course, that would never work at a Dungeons & Dragons table. We couldn’t possibly use viewpoint characters to punch up our scene-setting narration. Or could we?
Good gameplay starts when the players want more they can have. Whether you’re designing a game system, an adventure, an encounter, running a combat, or adjudicating a trap, you’ve got to understand why you can’t let the players’ goals align.
Players love haggling in Dungeons & Dragons, but haggling mechanics usually suck, players suck at it, and modern roleplaying games treat shopping like a trip to a modern mall. Fortunately, I’m here with a better way to handle shopping trips and barter exchanges. You might even find some tricks to sharpen your own house-ruling and system hacking if you pay attention.
Why do Dungeon Masters get so weird about encounters, randomness, and determinism. Whether you’re talking about Passive Perception, keyed encounters, quantum ogres, or wilderness encounter placement, most DMs just freak the hell out about knowing outcomes in advance or plotting encounters with anything other than precise geographical and temporal coordinates. Don’t worry, guys; you aren’t railroading just because you’re not running a full-on holodeck sim.
We Game Masters never think about narrative points of view. We just default to the thing we’ve always done. Years ago, I suggested that it was time to switch from calling players you to a third-person approach. It was great for pacing and clarity, but it also changed how players connect to their characters. But is that a problem? More importantly, have you ever considered how your narrative point-of-view affects your game?
A two-person party isn’t half a party, it’s a broken player group with a broken social dynamic. And don’t even get me started about one-player games.
People like to dump on D&D’s pass-fail core mechanic, but not me. I love it. It just needs a few tiny tweaks from time to time.
You can’t run traps well if you don’t handle vision, light, senses, and searching properly. Which none of us do. Some of that can be blamed on the game system, but some of it is down to us Game Masters just doing a crappy job with our descriptions.
It’s time for Angry to open the mailbag and answer some questions that have been sitting around for too damned long. So let’s talk about how to run crappy modern mega-adventures and how to reboot a dead campaign for new players.
Many of us have run campaigns well past the date we promised to end them and far beyond the ending we planned for them. But everyone was having fun and we were running our best games, so who cares, right? Well, maybe you should care. But maybe not care as much as I’m going to scream that you should. Because I am kind of nuts.
I’d love to teach you my stupid narration tricks, but not until you’ve proven you can handle normal narration tricks. Start drilling, kids.
What if you put dimensional shackles on an arch-hag? What if she puts them on herself? Why would she never do that? Why don’t you know how to read statblocks right?
Would you like to rely less on maps in your game, create more work for yourself, and upset your players? Of course not. Enjoy this advice no one asked for or would ever follow.
It’s Ask Angry time. Tyler wants to know how to build an adventure for complete roleplaying newbies, so I’m sharing my awesome template for first-time adventures. I just hope he actually has the chance to use it.
As a Game Master, you are an author, but that doesn’t mean what most people think it does. What it mostly means is that you can learn a lot of stupid narration tricks from authors. And video games.
Apparently, the idea of earning experience points with gold was a pretty hot topic. I’ve been asked to follow up on my previous take, so here that is.
It’s time for the last piece of the four-part intro to the project that will eventually lead to a good, fun dungeon adventure. So let’s learn about path-depth and checkpoints.
How do you build a good monster hunt that feels like an actual monster hunt? It’s do-able, but you have to be careful not the make your game the Battletoads of D&D campaigns.