After showing y’all how to map a pretty good dungeon, I got some lip from some readers who don’t understand the difference between “maps as art” and “maps as game design,” and think you can design a good game in a stolen map. I also got told off from someone who thinks “you don’t have to show your players the map” means “I never have to map an adventure properly again.” So let’s talk about mapping like real gaming adults, shall we?

Why are some parts of tabletop roleplaying games so weirdly hard to handle: social interactions, traps, wilderness travel, downtime, and lots of other crap that should be core fantasy adventure gameplay. The problem isn’t bad mechanics, but missing mental models. There just aren’t any conceptual tools that help Dungeon Masters and players understand how the world works, make strategic choices, and actually play the parts of Dungeons & Dragons that shouldn’t be nearly as hard as they are.

Why do Dungeon Masters get so weird about encounters, randomness, and determinism. Whether you’re talking about Passive Perception, keyed encounters, quantum ogres, or wilderness encounter placement, most DMs just freak the hell out about knowing outcomes in advance or plotting encounters with anything other than precise geographical and temporal coordinates. Don’t worry, guys; you aren’t railroading just because you’re not running a full-on holodeck sim.

You can’t run traps well if you don’t handle vision, light, senses, and searching properly. Which none of us do. Some of that can be blamed on the game system, but some of it is down to us Game Masters just doing a crappy job with our descriptions.

Many of us have run campaigns well past the date we promised to end them and far beyond the ending we planned for them. But everyone was having fun and we were running our best games, so who cares, right? Well, maybe you should care. But maybe not care as much as I’m going to scream that you should. Because I am kind of nuts.

Would you like to rely less on maps in your game, create more work for yourself, and upset your players? Of course not. Enjoy this advice no one asked for or would ever follow.

No, characters do not break down doors and every time you let your players say they do, you ruin my game design. Stop it.

I ran a crappy encounter and rather than accept the blame, I’m going to blame not just the system, but the fundemental underlying fabric of all roleplaying gaming ever. And I’m not even going to solve the problem. Happy Thanksgiving.

Time for me to be a cranky old grognard and yell about modern technology again. Except, actually, that’s not what I’m going to do at all. I mean, I am going to yell, and I am going to be cranky, but it won’t be what you think.

In this throwback to my classic Up Your GMing Level style advice, I provide a simple… ish way to adjudicate and narrate protracted, time-consuming actions that don’t need a bunch of moment-by-moment gameplay.

This is a nasty, ugly, mean-spirited rant but lots of you need to hear it. Let me tell you what the word “one-shot” actually means and why you’re an asshole if you fight about it.

Much as I really want to move on from the End the Goblins scenario design example, people keep asking really important questions that deserve good answers. So today’s lesson is how the final design of End the Goblins might provide the players with the information they need to win it.. And how little information that actually is.

It’s exactly what it says on the tin.

Here’s a little Christmas rant for Mendel and all of the rest of my fans who want to know how you can deconstruct and subvert like the true master of fantasy literature, George R.R. Martin, the greatest fantasy author of all time who is better than Tolkien in every way. Merry Christmas, losers.

How do you breathe life into a campaign world? It’s a question with a thousand, rambling answers. Here’s one of them.

The title is a lie. I’m the complete idiot and this feature will not help anyone run a good Play by Post game. I’m just giving a very long, rambling, overly detailed response to a very simple question I had no business answering. Really… don’t read this.

There’s this argument that rages all over the internet about whether it’s offensive for players to suggest to others what they should do and whether it’s okay for players to bring suboptimal characters to the team and I want to explain why everyone’s wrong and you’re all asshats.

Last time, I told you why you shouldn’t try to run an open-world campaign based on your favorite open-world video game and that you can’t. This time I’m telling you why you don’t have to.

Every time a new open-world video game comes out — or gets updated with DLC — I get inundated with emails claiming that game finally did open-world gaming right and how we should model all our TTRPG campaigns every on it. Please stop.

Someone once asked me, “Is game balance worth a damn?” I don’t remember who or why or when, but I remember the question. And now I’m gonna rant an answer.

To bring the Character Arc-Pocalypse to a close, today I’m writing about Character Arcs. For real this time.