A chronological listing of every post The Angry GM has ever… posted.
Maybe this is just me being an angry, 40-something, gen x grognard, but gamers today have lost touch with some essential skills. Skills that those fancy core books USED TO teach you. Like mapping. And calling. But this one’s about mapping.
A lot of people have been asking me how to use maps at their realspace, physical gaming table. Especially if they aren’t independently wealthy DIY gadget heads. The problem is, modern modules and virtual tabletops have confused everyone about the use about maps in games. Fortunately, I’m too old to know about that crap, so I’ll show you how maps are really done.
Bonus content! After I spent over 5,000 words telling you how to use maps at your game table in a practical, useful way, I’m going to spend 2,800 words telling you how NOT to use maps at your table. And why NOT.
In this installment of the increasingly sporadic Ask Angry series, someone asks me how to build a transforming dungeon based on a five minute cold open to a TV show that’s been turned into a half-assed licensed product by everyone’s favor half-assers: Wizards of the Coast. And, as usual, I finished assing it for them. It is fully assed.
I did an interview for the Investigation Check podcast! Check it out. And look for upcoming livestream content and new articles next week after I’ve recovered from Gamehole Con.
I have a rule against ranting about my players on my site. But that doesn’t mean I can’t use them as an example when they do the same thing that literally everyone else in the world does and I want to rant about everyone. At least I hope that’s how it works. At least, I hope my players don’t read this.
You know what? I’m sick of dealing with all the overly complicated, overly precise mathematics of encounter and custom monster design in D&D 5E. So I’m going to design an easier way to handle all of this. Unfortunately, I have to rewrite the whole Monster Manual to do it.
You know what? I’m sick of dealing with all the overly complicated, overly precise mathematics of encounter and custom monster design in D&D 5E. So I’m going to design an easier way to handle all of this. I just hope I don’t have to rewrite the whole Monster Manual to do it.
Finishing my look at how I designed the first adventure of my new campaign, I describe how I designed the second scene of Flight to Elturel as a moving parts adventure full of humanity and conflict and s$&%.
Everyone wants exploration in their game and everyone tries to put it there, but almost no one gets it to feel right. Probably because no one can even define exploration. Until now.
If you’re having trouble handling wilderness travel, maybe the problem is you forgot how to use narration and action adjudication to pace your game. Just like every other average GM out there.
The Tension Pool was such a nice, simple mechanic. Why’d you GMs have to make it so complicated? Is it because I didn’t explain how to use it? Or where to build the complexity? Hint: you put the complexity in the Complications!
Tracking ammo sucks. Tracking encumbrance sucks. Tracking food and water sucks. But maybe, just maybe, there’s a good reason to do it anyway. As long as the game system doesn’t undermine you.
Continuing my look at how I designed the first adventure of my new campaign, I describe how I designed the first scene of Flight to Elturel and the three encounters that made it up.
GMs tend to make a lot of bad decisions for good reasons. One bad decision a lot of GMs make has to do with tracking ammunition. Or not tracking ammunition.
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.