True Mechanical Managery: When Death Comes Calling II
It’s time to finish the lesson on Character Death Policies by telling you how to write your own damned policy and not telling you to just steal mine.
It’s time to finish the lesson on Character Death Policies by telling you how to write your own damned policy and not telling you to just steal mine.
We’re taking a short, one-lesson break from the syllabus to talk about your Character Switching Policy and also to talk about making your decisions based on actual frigging reality.
Today, I’m continuing the discussion about game mechanics that wreck campaigns unless you’ve got a plan for them before they come up. Today’s mechanic: Character Death.
It’s time I have a little bit of an intervention because, frankly, some of y’all are starting to scare me with your approach to this whole True Campaign Managery thing.
In this follow-up on Experience and Advancement Systems, I teach you how True Campaign Managers actually evaluate such systems and set a policy that works for their campaign. It’s easier — and harder — than you might think.
When True Campaign Managers decide how to practically implement their game system’s Experience and Advancement System, they’ve got to know what the system’s for and what’s at stake if they implement it wrong. That’s what this half-a-lesson is all about.
It’s time to set up a new True Campaign Managery lesson module. Over the next several lessons, I plan to teach you how to properly manage your game’s mechanics. But first, I’ve got to teach you what that means.
The topic so nice, I wrote about it twice. This is the follow up to that first lesson about yelling at your friends for their crappy attendance to your pretend elf game.
In this True Campaign Managery lesson, I talk about the single most fun aspect of Game Mastering: yelling at your friends about showing up on time and punishing them for ghosting you. Whee!
True Campaign Managery lesson time! Again. In this lesson, I’m going to teach all y’all how to host a meeting. Any meeting at all. Including game sessions. Which are meetings.
In the second of two office-hours discussions, I rant about what it means to actually exercise good judgment and how it’s got nothing to do with building checklists or worrying about hypotheticals.
We need to have a frank, open, and difficult discussions about why I keep calling Game Consent Surveys horseshit. Or rather, I need to explain and you need to shut up and listen.
In this True Campaign Managery lesson, I explore the idea of a Session Zero and whether it’s worth hosting one? Spoiler alert: usually no.
Now that you’ve decided to start a campaign and ignore your players’ input — you master of selfishness you — it’s time to start having visions.
You can’t run a campaign without starting a campaign. And you can’t start a campaign without making ten thousand choices. And of all those choices, it’s the second one that’ll get you.
You can’t manage a social gaming club that provides your friends with hours of fun unless you’re willing to be a selfish prick. Trust me; if there’s one thing I know, it’s being a selfish prick.
With this new, ongoing series of lessons, I — the Angry GM — intend to teach you everything you need to know to keep a Campaign alive until you grant it the sweet mercy of death.