Running Your Most Horrible D&D Adventure Ever
Running a horror adventure in D&D is a terrible idea. But if you absolutely MUST and I can’t stop you, at least I can keep you from f$&%ing it up too badly.
This, That, or Other (Part 1): Why Design the Problem and the Solutions?
It’s not enough to create open-ended obstacles in your game and hope your players will come up with some clever way to defeat them. Never create a problem without creating several solutions.
The Session Zero Blitz (Part One of One): How to Even Session Zero
A good campaign starts with a good Session Zero. But how do you even Session Zero? In the third part of this one-part series, I’ll tell you.
The Session Zero Blitz (Part Preface): Engage!
The secret goal of every Session Zero is to evaluate the players at your table and figure out what the hell they actually want from you. Fortunately, players aren’t that complicated and there’s an easy way to classify them. But it’s not the system you think.
Wishing and S$%&ing: Campaign Startup Dilemmas
Starting a new campaign isn’t just about building a world, coming up with some story details, and telling the players what characters to make. It involves resolving dilemmas and making hard choices.
Hide and Seek: Traps
There’s lots of things GMs might hide in their adventures. For example, traps. But how does D&D handle traps? Why does D&D suck at handling traps? And how should it handle traps?
Angry Information Management (Part 2): Facts, Implications, and Distractions
Information in your game can take many forms. Any by many, I mean three. It can three forms. And this article is all about them. And a whole bunch of other stuff.
Angry Information Management (Part 1): The Role of Information
As a GM, apart from not killing idiot players who deserve it, your primary job is to communicate information. And that means you have to be able to manage information.
Through a Glass Darkly: IC, OOC, and the Myth of Player/Character Seperation
Let’s talk about the mythical distinction between players and characters. Players are characters. Characters are players. And once you accept that, it’s a lot easier to run a fun game. Warning: this gets ranty.
Plotty Plot Plotting (For Adventures)
If you get over the bulls$&% notion that planning a plot is somehow railroading, you’ll discover just how powerful plot threads are as tools for designing adventures and campaigns. In this article, we’ll discuss the basics of plot points and how to build simple and complex adventures around them.
How to Start Starting a Campaign: Preplanning the Premise
How do you start a campaign? Well, that all depends on what you mean by “start.” There’s lots of ways to start a campaign. Let’s start by talking about how you start starting a campaign. Preplanning and premises.
Glue: The Binds that Tie Your Campaign Together
Every campaign needs something to hold the players together. That’s because players are constantly trying to blast apart. It’s like nuclear physics. Which is why you need gluons. Or glue. Or tortured, mixed metaphors. Whatever.
Don’t Roll the Dice When You Can Hide Them Instead
We play games because we don’t know how they are going to turn out. And games use several tricks to keep us from knowing the outcome. The problem is GMs only ever use one of those tricks. And it’s the worst one.
The Italian Campaign: On Shape and Glue
Designing a campaign is like ordering dinner at The Olive Garden. Except for the parts that aren’t like that at all. Which is most of the parts. Anyway, let’s talk about campaign structures, about the Shape of your game and the Glue that holds it together.
Campaigns, Settings, and the Angry-can Church
As Henry VIII once basically said, “I’M POPE NOW!” That’s right. Welcome to my church. Now, let’s get dogmatic about campaigns, settings, and adventure paths.
The Big Picture: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Game Mastering
This is it, this is my everything. This is why I’m such a great teacher. This is everything I know about RPGs and GMs and the secret order and structure that underlies them.
Villains and Characters: Villains AS Characters
Villains are stories, but they are also people. And that means they have personality traits and fears and hopes and dreams and interactions, right? Well, if you want a good game, you don’t want too much of that crap.
Villains and Plots: The Villain AS Plot
When is an NPC not an NPC? When it’s a villain. Because villains are more than mere NPCs. Because villains create plots. And I don’t mean evil schemes. I mean stories.
Antagonizing Your PCs
While not every NPC is a monster, every monster is an NPC. And that’s what this is all about. NPC antagonists. The violent and the non-violent. We’re talking enemies today.
In With the New: 10 Gaming Resolutions to Improve Your Game Mastering in 2017
Are you looking to run better games in the New Year? Do you need ten New Years Resolutions to fail at in 2017? Then look no further. I have ten resolutions I guarantee are unlike any others you’ve seen from OTHER crappy gaming blogs.
Getting There is Half the Fun
They say that the journey is its own reward and that getting there is half the fun. Yeah? Well, not in D&D. Overland travel in D&D sucks. But here I come to unsuck it. Or to help you just get rid of it altogether. Either way is fine. Just pick one.
Resistance is Futile: Assimilating Your NPCS (Into Factions)
People like to make a big thing out of factions, guilds, collectives, churches, cults, and organizations. But they don’t need to be complicated at all. In fact, they are remarkably simple. You just need a little lesson from Star Trek. You know, before it got crappy.
The Angry GM’s Marvelous Mechanical Miscellany for Ad Hoc Adjudication and Improvisational Invention
The hardest thing any GM has to do is come up with stuff on the fly. Especially when that stuff needs mechanical rules behind it. Fortunately, you have this Marvelous Mechanical Miscellany for Ad Hoc Adjudication and Improvisational Invention.
Who’s Driving This Adventure Anyway
Few Game Masters think to ask who is meant to drive the plot in the adventure they are writing. Which is a shame, because there are lots of ways an adventure can be driven. And by lots, I mean two. There are two ways. And understanding them can help make your adventure writing easier.
A Plot, B Plot; One, Two, Three Plot (An Ask Angry Special)
It started as a simple question about how to juggle two plot lines. It became an entire treatise on building campaigns with multiple plot arcs. This article is the first ever article under the category “How to Build a F$&%ing Campaign.”
The Unexpected NPC
What do you do when your players force you to turn a nameless, faceless nobody into an actual NPC? What do you do when they don’t even start with a nameless, faceless nobody? How do you make NPCs out of nothing?
Tip: Interact with NPCs to Receive Quests
Everyone knows that the easiest way to start an adventure is to just have some damned NPC show up and tell the PCs what to do and how to do it. After all, that’s what MMORPGS do and it works for them. So why not do the same in D&D? Because Quest Givers can be so much more than expository text. Don’t waste that potential.
Here Comes Tagalong: Henchmen, Allies, and DMPCs
Tagalongs: NPCs that join the party. They are often derided, frequently misunderstood, and rarely used well. Because people are dumba$&es. Which is sad because Tagalongs are a GREAT Tool for your GMing Toolbox!
What Even is an NPC (And How to Do Them Right)
Building compelling NPCs is a tricky, tricky business. And it’s made even trickier by the fact that people don’t even REALLY understand what NPCs are. That’s a shame, because good NPCs are literally the key to emotional investment in games.
Previously, On The Angry GM: The Art of the Recap
GMs suck at giving recaps. They give too much information or too little information or the wrong information or they make it boring or they let the dumba&$ players do it or they do it by e-mail. Recaps are a very powerful that no GM understands, let alone uses well. Except me. Because I’m a genius.