A chronological listing of every post The Angry GM has ever… posted.
Want to share the joy of pretending to be an elf with that poor, sad, non-gamer in your life? Want to help your GM suck a little less at running games for you and your friends? Want another book to shove on yourself and forget about? Want to send a random a$&hole on the Internet…
This is bulls$&%. The article you’re about to read I mean. Total bulls$&%. I’m not just saying that because it’s one of my occasional bulls$&% articles. It is that. But it’s probably the most researched, outlined, and carefully planned bulls$&% article I’ve ever written. But it’s still just a bunch of rambling, pontificating crap. Me…
Two weeks ago, I started building what I called Baby’s First Dungeon. I didn’t call it that because it was meant for newbie players, but because I was showing newbie homebrewer GMs how to scratch-build their own dungeon adventures. If you haven’t read that first article yet, go back and read it now. Because this…
Little change in plans this week. As should be clear from the title of this article. You’re going to have to wait another week for the conclusion of Baby’s First Dungeon. Sorry. It ain’t the dungeon planning that’s slowing it down. It’s all the graphics I need to show you how to draw a crappy-a$&…
Because of the way it was written, this article doesn’t have a Long, Rambling Introduction™. The whole thing was kind of written like a Long, Rambling Introduction™. It’s pretty stream of consciousness. A mix of me explaining s$&% and thinking through s$&% and showing you the results. I didn’t outline it. I just started writing.…
I’ve decided it’s not enough for me to teach you how to run less-worse games. Now, I’m doing your job too. I’m teaching your players how to play role-playing games. Not the rules and mechanics. No. I’m teaching them how to actually do stuff in the game: take actions, portray characters, interact socially, explore the…
Originally, I had this Long, Rambling Introduction™ about how I made a little extra cash in high school by reading Tarot and constructing astrological charts for people. Which is true. And I highly recommend every GM learn to read the Tarot. Yeah. Seriously. That is actual, honest-to-f$&%ing-goodness legitimate GMing advice. Learn to read the Tarot.…
You wait patiently for one week. Then, on the morning of Wednesday, October 13, an Angry article appears! It reveals Angry’s Secret Step-by-Step-ish Wilderness Travel Adjudication System! And that’s the problem with real life. You’ve got to actually wait through the passage of time. No time for a Long, Rambling Introduction™ today, though. We’ve got…
Basic RPG turn order. It’s easy when the actions are easy. But when the actions are big and complex, it’s still easy. You just have to know how to handle arbitrary s$&%.
Come along with me on a rambling journey regarding training requirements in RPGs, whether it’s okay to make a world that doesn’t level up with the players, and how to make the campaign you want to play. Sort of.
Now that I’ve posted the Final, Definitive version of the Tension Pool rules, I never have to talk about it again. So, let’s talk about it again by responding to feedback! Whee!
Here it is. At long last. The definitive, comprehensive, actual, final Tension Pool rules. Well, final until I change them again.
In the fifth and first post-final lesson about Angry Open-World Gaming, I tell you how to populate your world with stuff to do and how to help your players find it all.
This is my first ever Memo to the Players. Specifically, your players. I’m taking time out of my busy life to do your job. To teach your players how to play D&D right. And I’m not talking about rules and mechanics. No. I’m teaching them how to actually do stuff in the game: take actions,…
In this month’s Ask Angry mailbag, I answer a bunch of questions about my AOWG and the AOWG series in general.
Why doesn’t anyone know how to play D&D? And why does anyone think they can teach someone else how to play a game they don’t know how to play? And should I fix the problem? Or am I just full of bulls$%&?
In the fourth and final lesson about Angry Open-World Gaming, I tell you how to prep for each and every AOWG session… after you’ve finished running it.
I promised I’d write a whole article about that Player Do List thing. So here it… isn’t. Because I can’t. But I wrote you a better article about something that’s related to Play Do Lists but it’s also way better. Not that you’ll think so.
It’s time to open the Ask Angry mailbag again. But, just for funsies, let’s see how many questions I can answer without exceeding too much my normal allotment of word count.
This random pile of bulls$&% isn’t just me ranting at my current batch of players, I promise. It’s just me telling all of you how and I run my game the way I do and what I would rant at my players if I was ever going to do that.
In the second half of the third lesson about Angry Open-World Gaming, I tell you how to blow smoke at your players’ faces and call it exploration.
In the first half of the third lesson about Angry Open-World Gaming, I tell you what it means to explore a world and also what the single most important list in your bag is.
Today’s lesson about how you all break your games and then ask me to fix them. Specifically, it’s about how all the little, fiddly rules that don’t seem to do anything are actually the key to interesting, meaningful, fun gameplay.
All it took was one word from one image from one hastily scribbled list in last week’s article to find out that you’ve all learned nothing from me in the last twelve years. That word was quicksand.
In the second lesson about Angry Open-World Gaming, I reveal what’s in my gaming bag whenever I show up to run a session of my open world game.
Another month, another mailbag. This one’s all about making yourself a better GM. And nothing else. How much work to put in. How to work efficiently. And how to change your gaming habits for the better.
This one’s what I call a shower article. Mainly because people complain when I call articles like this, “articles I s$&% out while I’m s$&%ing.” The idea’s the same though. The article’s the result of an idea that came to me while I was dealing with some biological need or another. I wasn’t specifically working…
In this, the first of four lessons about how to run your own open-world game just like Angry, you’ll learn why your brain is just too damaged to run a good open-world game. Again.
Let’s talk about this Angry Open World Game thing. We all knew this was coming. You knew it. I knew it. The moment I said, “I could tell you all how I’m running my open-world campaign, but I know you’re not really interested,” you knew I was playing “dance for your article.” And you should…
I figured out to run exactly the sort of open world game I wanted to run. The perfect game for my players. I just forgot to tell them that.