Want to learn how to run your first game? Bring your GM skills to the next level? Build an adventure? Start a campaign? Start here to learn everything The Angry GM has to teach you about running and creating games.
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.
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.
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.
It’s time for me to answer the same basic GMing question I’ve been answering differently every few years for the last twelve: when should you resort to using the rules and the dice to resolve things.
It’s time for the first real article about Narrative Theory for GMs. The topic is conflict in traditional narratives and in RPGs.
Now that I’ve confused all of y’all thoroughly about plot structure, let’s start a new series on narrative theory for game masters. That can’t possibly go wrong.
In the SECOND part of my TWO part so far series on plotting a campaign, I explain what plot structure is and why it’s useful. You know, before I do any crazy s$&% like trying to tell you about Korean narrative structures and their applicability in exploration-based campaigns.
Let’s appropriate us some culture! Let’s use a 1500-year old Korean narrative style to plot a better pretend elf game!
All you need to start a campaign is a bunch of a characters and a first adventure, right? That’s what I said. But if you’re going to start a campaign with an ongoing plot, that’s not true is it. Yes. It is. Come on a road trip with the Tiny GM and I and I’ll show you how.
I’m in the midst of starting a new campaign. So it’s a good time to look at how to start a new campaign. Especially when you don’t have the time to do a full Session Zero.
A long time ago, I tried to write a blog post about how to run good mysteries in D&D. But then, I got distracted and became The Angry GM. Ten years later, D&D has become even worse for running mysteries and I need to fix it to finish my latest project. But this isn’t about mysteries. It’s about using proficiencies right in 5E.
Let’s see if I can piss off even more people in this follow-up to my article on resolving social actions by telling people they’re using Insight wrong.
When it comes to designing a dungeon map, there’s more than one way to skin a kobold. The key is picking the right way to flay.
Looking for a comprehensive guide to running a great social interaction encounter? Well, this article isn’t it. But it is the preamble to it in which you get a comprehensive guide to resolving social actions.
Ideally, your game will have a perfect one-to-one ratio of players to characters. But sometimes the characters split up or a player skips a game or someone gets killed. What do you do then?
How can you possibly populate an entire world with relatable NPCs and role-playing them effectively? You can’t. Because you suck. But here’s how you can fake it.
Homebrew adventures work so much better with custom-designed monsters. So let’s design some kobolds for my kobold adventure.
Come into my shower. Lather up. Rinse off. And let your bored brain do a bunch of heavy lifting to make your adventure and scene design easier.
If you want to break your addiction to encounter rules and mechanics, there’s just two things you need to learn. Two things I should have taught you years ago. Sorry.
Why can’t you run a complex, engaging encounter with nothing but a paragraph of prose description and a copy of the PHB handy? Because you’re a system junkie, that’s why.
All right, you asked for it. Let’s use the Amazing Adventure Building Checklist to actually build an amazing adventure. First step is steps one through five. It makes sense in context.
Before I use my amazing checklist to show you how to design an adventure the Angry Way, I have to explain what the Angry Way is and why it’s so much better than the Crap Way.
What makes a NPC likable? I don’t know. But I do know what makes an NPC seem like an actual human thing worthy of human feelings. We call that relatability and this whole article is how to pull that off.
People have been asking me for years to teach them how to create and run games that their players actually emotionally give a crap about. And I’ve been avoiding answering for years. But now I’m ready to tell you how to make players care.
Have you been forced to abandon real-world gaming due to current global events? Have no fear, Angry is here to tell you to run an online game. Just in time for the global lockdown to lift. You’re welcome.
I’ve been dared to do the impossible: write a simple, adventure-building checklist AND keep it short. Can I pull it off? Do bears s$&% on the Pope?
The biggest obstacle to starting a homebrew campaign is having to build a world. And the biggest obstacle to running a good game is actually building the world. You’re better off just not worldbuilding.