A chronological listing of every post The Angry GM has ever… posted.
True Game Mastery requires balance. True Game Masters know they can’t impose strict and arbitrary turn-and-time-based limits on their characters actions, but neither can they allow totally temporal anarchy. How do they manage complex strings of actions from multiple characters then? I’ll show you.
This is the start of a series of True Game Mastery lessons about running different kinds of Encounters. Except it’s not. Because Encounters aren’t what you think they are.
Just a little digression about magic: detecting it, identifying it, and why D&D’s answers to what can be detected are stupid as hell.
As I made a mess of that last True Game Mastery lesson on Problematic Actions — given the feedback anyway — I’m holding a special study session to answer your questions and clarify my points.
Action adjudication is pretty straightforward. Except when it’s not. And when a tricky action comes along, Mere Game Executors are stuck executing the game’s pre-programmed code like robots while True Game Masters follow the Three Laws of Game Mastering NonRobotics.
The Angry GM is answering more reader-submitted questions this week. And he ain’t holding back.
It’s tough to know when to call for a die roll and when not to. And no matter what anyone’s told you — including me — there’s no substitute for good, mature, adult judgment. So throw away your checklists and simple rules and trust your gut.
You know what players love? Discovering secrets. You know what GMs and game designers hate? Players discovering secrets. That’s kind of messed up; don’t you think?
True Game Masters know that nothing breaks a roleplaying game’s flow quite as much as the game’s rules do. So they take a methodical approach to keeping the rules in their place.
The Angry GM is answering your questions today. And he’s answering a lot of them.
A True Game Master paces the game with smooth narration, flowing seamlessly from scene to scene and moment to moment. Unfortunately, a TTRPG is a dialogue, not a monologue, and eventually the players get to kill the pace by talking.
Narration: the art of telling your players what’s what and who’s where. If you find yourself muddling to provide good Scene-Setting Narration, maybe it’s not your skills that are the problem, maybe it’s your lifestyle. Seriously.
True Game Masters take Ownership and Build investment. And those concepts are so vital to Game Mastering that I’m never going to mention them again. And what I do mention won’t make sense. Because GMing is nonsense.
I can’t teach you to be a True Game Master — yes, that’s my plan; I love doing the impossible — I can’t teach you to be a True Game Master without telling you what it means to master Game Mastering.
The New Year is a good time for reflection. Searching the past for the clues that’ll help you find a better future. So, this New Year, Angry invites you to think about why you even do this whole game mastering thing.
I ain’t a reviewer or a critic. I don’t trash things for easy laughs. I don’t do tier rankings. And I don’t do clickbait lists. In that spirit, he’s my list of the Five Best and Five Worth Things About D&D 3.5.
Hot take: fumble mechanics are more valuable than crit mechanics. In fact, crits are only valuable if the monsters are rolling them. But I’m only proving one of those things today.
Save the World campaigns are pretty divisive. Mostly because GMs always screw them up. Want an example of a great Save the World TTRPG campaign? Look no further than Chrono Trigger, a Super Nintendo game from the 90s.
When it comes to explaining roleplaying games, there’s a giant, glaring question no one seems to be able to sufficiently and properly answer. And that is: just what the hell does it mean to be a Game Master. And really, that’s the first question anyone must answer before they can teach anyone else how to run games.
Weather, lunar phases, dates, and seasons? Why keep track of that crap in your game? Well, there’s several reasons, but only one that matters.
There’s this discussion that happens anytime anyone brings up death, failure, and loss in RPGs online. About how RPG systems should be better at handling failure because it’s so vital in RPGs. And that discussion… is wrong.
Sometimes, a GM has to fit an entire gaming experience in a single, limited time slot. And a GM has to do some ugly, ugly things to make that happen.
Let’s complain about a how a twelve-year-old game’s brilliant ideas were marred by the language used to communicate them. Because that’s a GOOD use of my time.
Angry, asked everyone, how did you run that giant battle on the beach between the skeletons, the sailor NPCs, and the PCs? Even my players asked me how I did it. Well, I’ll tell you how I did it. If you’re sure you really want to know.
Once again, Angry opens the mailbag and answers some reader questions.
It turns out that it’s actually important for players to periodically describe their characters to the group. Unfortunately, players suck at everything. Especially describing characters. Fortunately, I wrote a script you can force them to follow.
It’s time for a Table Tale with a twist. This one’s about robot skeletons and skeleton skeletons and how I learned to stop worrying and start hating milestone advancement very slightly less.
How you start your game determines how it goes. And that doesn’t just affect you, it affects your players. Fortunately, Angry’s got a startup script you can install in your GM brain.
I’ve been pushing GMs to turn all the bookkeeping and character maintenance crap in D&D into a game of its own. Or rather, into a part of the game at the table. But many GMs have raised a question: what if their players don’t want to do that crap.
One of the most important Townbuilding tools, believe it or not, has to do with Training. And that’s why it’s such a problem that no one knows what PC Training looks like.