Hola Game Master! Here’s a callout to a tip buried in the recent How to Make Haggling Fun piece I did: “Players’ Guide price is the floor, street price is double that.” Raise your merchant, equipment, and services prices to give you haggling room and siphon more party treasure. Game Master Rafael sent me a […]

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Just picked up Level Up by Courtney Campbell. It’s a small book of tables on random topics. And the first table I started reading spawned an article idea. The table is titled “Top Ten Dungeon Resources” and has this description: Well, you’ve got a dungeon. And you’ve got all these factions. Apparently they all live […]

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Over on ze Discord, Al Dente wants to noodle on mystery resources: Hey! I’m trying to get better at designing mystery scenarios for investigative games like Call of Cthulhu. I was wondering if you guys could suggest any resources i should check out @Loz replied: GURPS Mysteries could be a good source. I remember their […]

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Game conventions too loud to hear? Old Man Masha asks about this on the Discord: I recently ran a convention with 15 tables. I spaced them so that the chairs would be 4 feet apart after people sat down. But many folks complained about the noise. Can anyone here give me tips on how to […]

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How can you get started with D&D 5.5/2024 without spending any gold pieces? New community member GW asks: Hi everyone. I learned about DnD but thought it was going to be too hard way back in about 8th grade, so that was like 1989. The books and the rules were very different than they are […]

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My friend in high school tricked me one time. He was GMing me 1:1 in a new campaign. I was following a Kenku. We played for an hour and he described the desert. And nothing happened. Just following the kenku. So, finally, I say something along the lines of, “This is boring.” My friend cracked […]

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“I despise haggling. I’d much rather have a bot handle it.” – A GM on the RPT Discord I hear that. Yelling numbers at players isn’t fun. I’m not sure when, but I stopped haggling for transaction purposes. Now my merchants want information instead of gold. It’s partly how I make villains seem three steps […]

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The Tiny Prep group hit a milestone the other day. We’ve got a streak going of 150 consecutive days! Congrats to the GMs getting their campaigns ready for next session, five minutes at a time. Speaking of Tiny Prep, I saw this question on the Discord from Game Master EwokTaintPuncher (ahem): Doc recently told me […]

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Use the Beaufort Scale to help make wind and storm rulings easier. I grew up on a street called Beaufort Avenue. When we moved there, it had no curbs or sidewalks. And it dead-ended a few blocks down the road. And we had some fantastic wind storms. The walnut tree became weather’s weapon during gales. […]

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Hola Game Master! GM’s Log #9: How to Build Legendary Magic Items was just published, and it cloaks my atomic unit of prep in the guise of juicy loot. What started as a quick way to outline NPCs in the 2010s has become my universal GM tool for instantiating any kind of game piece: NPCs, […]

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So I’m a cheap bastard. That’s number ten on The Gamemaster’s Hall Of Shame: Monty Haul’s Top Ten Cousins all the way back to Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #3: 10 Minnie Haul Players in previous campaigns joke about it. I like to pretend there’s no treasure chapter at all. Mice must’ve eaten those pages. But the […]

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Happy Canada Day! While swatting mosquitoes and sipping cool bevvies, let’s look at a dilemma that community member Sir Tainley poses about explaining the strength of commoners in certain game systems: I’m designing a world for a D&D 5e clone. I want magic to be reasonably common, and taught in the universities. But, powerful enough spells […]

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