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 Getting Players to Care About Lore
Posted: Wed, 05 Feb 06:06:19
Category: Running Games, Descriptions, GMing - Advance

How to get players paying attention to your campaign lore. A great question came up in last night’s super secret GM coaching session: How do you get players to pay attention to, and care about, your lore and world details? Use AIDA as a Hook Tool First, we want to capture players’ attention. Aiki shared […]

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 Peer Deeply Into the Map…
Posted: Wed, 29 Jan 04:21:58
Category: World Building, Agile Gming, GMing - Advance

A map is higher bandwidth than text. With text we take in one word and one page at a time. But a map shows words, locations, terrain, continents, and villages, all at once. The secret ingredient to getting the most data out of detailed maps and remembering them easily, almost without trying, is to peer […]

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 5 Room Dungeon Outline Generator
Posted: Mon, 27 Jan 02:32:17
Category: Adventure Building & Campaigns, 5 Room Dungeons, Gming - Beginner

In awesome news, my mom’s final radiation treatment was yesterday. We had a special dinner to celebrate and she is doing very well. My wife also had her second chemo treatment yesterday, and those are rough. But she is strong and doing ok. Related, I had a stack of Pathfinder 2E books I was selling […]

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 A Surprise Bad Day in the Forest
Posted: Thu, 23 Jan 03:44:18
Category: Adventure Building & Campaigns, Design, Encounters

So I’ve had this strange reading project for the last two years. I’ve mentioned it before. I have Dragon Magazines from Issue #55 to the final print issue. It’s time to part with them, so I decided to read each one, one more time. In so doing, I started piling up issues that I want […]

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 Maps Are Not Overrated
Posted: Tue, 21 Jan 02:46:21
Category: Adventure Building & Campaigns, Adventure & Campaign Building, Gming - Beginner

I asked GMs in my coaching program what their top insights were for 2024. The insights could be big or small. That’s because, even if it’s something simple, it’s always great being reminded of the basics, fundamentals, and first principles. Anyway, GM Ray said a 2024 GMing insight of his was that maps are not […]

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 Do Puzzles as Barriers Suck?
Posted: Thu, 09 Jan 03:09:58
Category: Adventure Building & Campaigns, 5 Room Dungeons, Adventure & Campaign Building

Hujambo Johnn! I received these great comments from RPT GM Jay about puzzles: I recently read something (I don’t think it was you, but I don’t remember 100%) giving a scathing take on using puzzles as barriers rather than the much simpler (and possibly more effective) lock-and-key. I had just made an abandoned wizard tower […]

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 Level-Up Teamwork & Streamline Play with a Group Caller
Posted: Tue, 07 Jan 02:05:57
Category: Running Games, GMing - Advance, Players & Characters

Sannu Johnn! I hope you had some great holidays. Mine were quiet, just how I like’em. Got some gaming in too! A couple of quick Wizard of Adventure updates first: Ok, on with today’s GMing tip! I was chatting with Roleplaying Tips Discord moderator and D&D 2E GM, Auke, and he says he uses a […]

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 Ideas for Dungeon Ecosystems and NPCs
Posted: Mon, 06 Jan 16:16:21
Category: Adventure Building & Campaigns, 5 Room Dungeon, Design

Roleplaying Tips GM Thomas P. shares some great ideas below in response to my recent believable dungeon ecology tips.  (Note, I added the headings — those aren’t Thomas’s fault, haha.) Hi Johnn, I have been loving the deep dives you write and this one looking into creating believable dungeon ecologies. Your ideas about food chains […]

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 Mastering the Moment
Posted: Thu, 02 Jan 01:50:21
Category: Running Games, Agile Gming, GMing - Advance

Happy New Year! I hope you enjoyed a wonderful New Year’s Eve. Mine was excellent — I had a great sleep. Getting old, lol. Got something a bit personal for you today about my GMing credo. I have, at the top of my Roleplaying Tips writing file, this line of text: I play the Infinite […]

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 Kill An NPC Every Session
Posted: Tue, 17 Dec 2024 02:00:08
Category: NPCs & Roleplaying, Agile Gming, Running the Game

Let me clear up some potential misconceptions about, and make some amendments to, my kill an NPC every session rule. For example, from the RPT Discord: Hey all, I have been working to bring a new npc each session and then to also kill off one npc per session as Johnn has suggested. I find […]

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 Use Charisma as an NPC Personality Generator
Posted: Tue, 03 Dec 2024 01:32:39
Category: NPCs & Roleplaying, Design, Gming - Beginner

There’s a great article in Dragon #243 about using charisma to determine personality. It supplied a small seven row table with examples. I love this idea. While definitions of charisma vary, it makes sense that it will affect an NPC’s personality, or at least, their surface personality. Further, tying a few personality traits to charisma […]

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 Another Fun Way to Get Passionate About GMing Again
Posted: Fri, 22 Nov 2024 03:51:33
Category: Running Games, Gming - Beginner, Inspiration

I recently sent out my #1 tip on how to beat GM burnout. Many replies came back advising to play for awhile to get a fresh perspective on the game. This is excellent advice! In fact, I did just that. Twice. It’s been a tricky year for me with a broken foot, several bouts of […]

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