A chronological listing of every post The Angry GM has ever… posted.
Yes, another Ask Angry, but it contains an important apology I must deliver to all of my Mere Adventure Builders before I write you an article about designing adventures around days and rests and things.
It’s time for me to answer a question from my Ask Angry mailbag. This one is about the proper and correct use of Passive Checks for Intelligence-based skills in D&D. Regardless of what the rules might say.
I lied. Everything isn’t a Scenario. Also, Santa isn’t real. But Scenario Design is as real as Christmas and it’s just as magical.
In this Ask Angry Mailbag, I address several important topics, such as when I edit people’s messages, which books in my collection are the lightest, and whether I care about my readers opinions. I also answer at least a few questions I was actually asked.
Remember that long-ass rant I posted about why I thought it was worth rewriting the turn order and initiative system in modern D&D even if you didn’t? Well, guess what? I went and did it.
Yes, I know Initiative doesn’t matter but, like, what if it did matter? It really should? Whose fault is it that it doesn’t? How can I fix it? More importantly, who can I scream at about it?
Now that you’ve learned how to break a scenario design into hierarchical levels, I can show you how to spot — and plan — a scenario’s shape. And what that means. And why its good.
I may have put True Campaign Managery on hold, but I’m still delivering on my promise to teach you how to resolve table conflicts like a True Campaign Manager. Settle in; it’s a long ride.
In this throwback to my classic Up Your GMing Level style advice, I provide a simple… ish way to adjudicate and narrate protracted, time-consuming actions that don’t need a bunch of moment-by-moment gameplay.
More True Scenario Design and more on structure. Actually, the real structure discussion starts here. Last time, I breathlessly yelled about what makes good structure good and bad structure suck. Now I’m actually going to show you structure. I’ll even outline a crappy adventure you can finish for your own use if you suck at tone and genre.
Let’s celebrate the start of the year’s back nine with an inspiring and uplifting message about how you misunderstood everything I said about everything about whether or not you suck and you suck for that. Or, to say it another way, let’s talk about real, human Game Masters balance good design with practical prep and polish.
It’s time to open a new chapter in our True Scenario Designery journey. So let’s talk about how scenario structure is like the beams and masts that hold up a confection shaped like an animated porifera. You heard me.
This is a nasty, ugly, mean-spirited rant but lots of you need to hear it. Let me tell you what the word “one-shot” actually means and why you’re an asshole if you fight about it.
Much as I really want to move on from the End the Goblins scenario design example, people keep asking really important questions that deserve good answers. So today’s lesson is how the final design of End the Goblins might provide the players with the information they need to win it.. And how little information that actually is.
In this Ask Angry installment, I tell Randall — and all of you — how to make your world a nice place players want to be nice to. Unless they’re assholes.
Basic game mastering tricks anyone can use? Promises of brevity broken? Alliterative potty jokes? Sounds like classic Angry.
This rambling rant covers a lot of ground about the many hats a Game Master has to wear and why you shouldn’t worry about worry about open-endedness or creativity when you’re writing adventures. Seriously.
In this informal little digression from the main True Scenario Designery lessons, I’ll help you suss out the difference between goals and challenges. Because, as some of my supporters are about to learn, they’re easy to confuse.
This is the rant about why Game Masters need to shut up about Min-Maxing I didn’t publish two weeks ago.
It’s mailbag time. Two questions this month: how to run an open-world game for too many people with too-short sessions and whether PbtA games can provided meaningful experiences.
This is not a rant about why Game Masters need to shut up about Min-Maxing. This is the lesson about player motivation that threatened to eat that rant. The rant is coming soon.
I promised you a big honking example of how to design an adventure with goals, challenge, momentum, and inertia in mind. This is it.
In this month’s Ask Angry, I explain the rigors of using the Investigate skill to give players information without ruining mysteries and rant about how mechanics are never actually interesting.
It’s exactly what it says on the tin.
It’s that Ask Angry time of the month. Today, I answer a totally polite, reasonable question about player instruction with absolutely unwarranted levels of insults and abuse. Enjoy.
Here it is, as promised, only three weeks later — I said weeks; did you hear days — the last part in the What Do You Do When You Lose the Plot miniseries. This is the part where I tell you my secret five-step recovery plan to bring any project back on track when it’s gone off the rails. As long as it’s a gaming project. This isn’t life advice.
It’s time for us to start talking about how True Campaign Managers handle the arduously awful process of Character Creation.
Today, I teach you about the second of a pair of complementary gameplay dynamics vital to making winnable — and losable — adventures that feel great to play.
This is the second part of a personal story about how I lost the plot in my current campaign and how you can to. That still has nothing to do with plots and outlines and stories and everything to do with totally burning yourself out.
I want to tell you a two-part story about what’s going on with my AD&D 2E campaign because I’ve lost the plot and the campaign feels doomed and I have to fix it and I’m hoping that by telling you this story, I’ll help you launch a campaign you’re excited to run and then fix it when it inexplicably goes to shit for no obvious reason. If you’re one of the players, don’t panic; I’m being hyperbolic. Mostly. Kind of.