A chronological listing of every post The Angry GM has ever… posted.
The D&D Level Editor that is the DMG would have you believe that an Adventure is just a string of Encounters that maybe all get placed on a map. But there’s something between Adventure and Encounter that good game designers use to great effect. And even though you’re probably not a good game designer, you can use it too.
Once upon a time, D&D featured complex morale rules. Then the designers realized the problem and simplified and streamlined them. Nah, I’m just kidding. They just said, “screw it” and threw everything. Because fixing things is harder than deleting them.
I have a dream. A dream of a TTRPG whose rulebook you could lose for a month without noticing.
Recently, I actually got to run a game! And that means I got to write an adventure! And since we’re talking about adventure design right now, I can use that adventure as an object lesson in adventure design.
I’ve been tinkering, off and on, with this Time/Tension Pool thing because my readers were smart enough to recognize a good thing even when I didn’t. And I’ve finally figured out a way to incorporate it into wilderness travel adventures.
Table-top RPG adventure designers can learn a lot from video games. But one thing they can’t learn from video games is how to cope with loss. That is, how to make loss and failure part of the game.
Every time I talk about experience points, people want to pick a fight about it. Well, this is my last word on XP: how to properly award XP in D&D 5E, regardless of what the rules say, and regardless of what other players and GMs say.
So, we all know that D&D is a game engine, not a game. But what parts of the game does the GM need to complete to bring it up the standards of Magic: the Gathering? Trust me, that question makes sense in context.
Without a goal, a game isn’t a game. And since D&D is a game without goals, that means it’s your job as an adventure designing GM, to set a goal.
If you want to understand Angry’s All-Encompassing Action Adjudication Axiom, it’s important that you know why we even dice. And why dice suck.
It’s been a long time since I answered some reader questions. So, let’s see how many of these I can get through without losing my freaking mind.
I should really know that I can’t just drop a comment like “ability scores suck in D&D and I would handle them so much better” without people demanding that I explain myself. Well, here it is. I’m explaining.
How is an adventure like a cake? Both of them are delicious baked goods that I love to eat, except for the adventure. But they are alike in that they need the right ingredients to be any good. And this adventure is all about cakes, adventures, and ingredients. Except it’s not really about cakes. I wish I had some cake.
Much as I would love to sit here and describe the various elements of a homebrew adventure, you’re not ready for that crap yet. You don’t even know how to plan, I can’t tell you what to plan.
I WAS going to rant about ability scores. But I accidentally ended up giving good advice about being inflexible for the good of the game. Sorry.
What if it turned out that everything I ever taught you about action adjudication was wrong? And that there was an entirely different way of looking at actions in role-playing games? Well, don’t worry. Nothing I told you was wrong. But there is another way of looking at actions. And sometimes, everything I told you is wrong. Sometimes, you’re not resolving an action, you’re taking a gamble.
Hacking a complex subsystem into a game requires you to work within the limits of the system. Sometimes, though, the system has some underlying patterns you can spot if you look hard enough. And those patterns help you make room for what you’re doing.
People keep asking me to revisit adventure building. And to make it clear and useful. Maybe spell out a nice, simple process. Fine. Let’s talk about building your own adventures from scratch. Again. Only better.
Hacking a complex subsystem into a game requires you to work within the limits of the system. Unfortunately, the system doesn’t always make it easy to find those limits. For example, let’s look at how D&D 5E might constrain my crafting system?
This month’s BS article focuses on… nothing. It’s an unfocused mess in which I ramble about three completely unrelated issues in modern game that are probably only a problem to me. Enjoy.
This isn’t for you GMs to read; it’s for you to print and hand to your players. That way, they can declare actions and play the game in a way that actually let’s you, you know, run a good game. Just let me talk to them. I’ll be nice.
There’s more to narrating combat than just flowery prose. Actually, there’s less. Combat needs less narration, more emotion, and more information.
We’re back to talking about crafting. And it’s time for more thinking and pondering and brainstorming. Sorry, kids, that’s what design is. It’s about thinking, pondering, and making things way more complicated for yourself.
The first thing every GM does when they decide to create their own setting is to start drawing a map. And there’s no reason for that. Except one reason. Which is why that’s the first thing I did for my Pathfinder campaign.
Here’s your monthly dose of pointless BS. Pontification about the non-problem of GMing agency which not only fails to answer the question, but also fails to even find a question to ask. But it does invite you to comment.
Accepting the disappointment that we’re going to have to stick with the obvious cliche of smashing ingredients together to make equipment as the basis of a D&D crafting system, now it’s time to figure out what those raw ingredients look like. And keeping it manageable.
There’s an advantage to letting the GM keep some secrets from the players. And a good game designer should help the GM keep stuff hidden.
It’s time to look at the crafting problem from the GM side of things. And to figure out what a good crafting resource might look like. And to disappoint everyone who was hoping I’d create a good crafting system.
With a crappy, generic pitch sold to my players, it was time to let them generate their characters. The problem was, they couldn’t do it on their own and I had to be involved. Ugh.
It’s time to actually start building a crafting system. And that means figuring out what the system should look like. Abstractly. Conceptually. Without doing any real work.