For many people, gaming is a luxury they just don't have time for. Life's busy. Many people, work, have families, run businesses, have other interests and commitments - squeezing in a few extra hours every week to sit down with some mates and roll dice can...
There was a time when I would have combats in a story just because I liked combats. The game actually revolved around them. The combats seemed to be the story. We would calculate bonuses very carefully, feats and abilities, the powers of swords, exact actions in every...
Combat can be awesome, or it can simply be one grind after another. But how do you keep each combat from blurring into the next? Even more so, how do you make it so that your players don’t just attack every obstacle and kill everyone...
I've been running an epic fantasy campaign with one of my mates via Virtual Tabletop for about a year now, and it has reached truly crazy-epic proportions. The game has become insanely fun. And one of the most fun things about it is that I...
When you're playing with an experienced group, particularly people you've played with for a long time, it is usually fairly easy to transition into Cooperative Storytelling. Your gamers are likely also GMs in their own rights, or at least find it very easy to be...
You remember a past long hidden to you, something hidden in the blackness of your mind, but suddenly dredged free: You stand amidst the blackened ruins of the once-great city of Nipirill. It has been attacked and ravaged by your armies. The strength of your...
AJ Pickett is one of the most ingenious and imaginative GMs that I've ever had the pleasure to game with. His legendary Rifts and Heroes Unlimited games have long lingered in my mind and his imaginative notebooks was one of the inspirations for me to...
Death is a tool to be used just like any other. Don't get squeamish! It's quite possibly the best tool you've got...
Getting players to continue their interest in a game is a bit like getting a reader to continue with your story. How do you keep them interested? How do you keep them thinking about the game and wanting to carry it on? The best way this works...
I've been stumbling around slowly learning how to make great adventures. You'd think it'd be easy, but it's not. Particularly if you don't take stand alone modules but instead let a story grow organically, based on the problems the players are faced with, and then...
I recently ran a few games at Aethercon IV, the Online Convention. As you might be able to tell from the name, it's the fourth year that it's been running, and I've been lucky enough to be part of it from the beginning. That alone...
I have been gripped by a gaming revolution. It’s not mechanics (though they help). It’s not setting (though this, too, makes a big difference). Rather, it’s playing style. Namely, I have totally changed my concept of action, and what’s interesting in a story/scenario/adventure. Instead of action taking...
I have been inspired by all the game design going on recently on Infected!, and with talking to a lot of backers of our Kickstarter (thanks everyone!), and thought I would write an article on exactly how I think a campaign of Infected! can be run to best effect....
Weston "The Wez" Prestage (also known as Agent Festaskull and Obsidian Blackbird McKnight, amongst other titles), was my first DM and the disseminator of all things RPG to a whole generation of young men who would otherwise have spent it in drink and women (though...
I had an amazing game last night, and it really inspired me to write some more about Dynamic Combats. We were playtesting our epic fantasy game Myths of Khoralla, and shit just got real. To cut a long story short, our hero ends up finding himself confronted with a...
I found this video the other day. It's a very interesting take on the practicalities of carrying weapons and armour in a medieval or classical period setting. What do you think? Is this realistic? More importantly, would this enhance or detract from your games? Personally, I...
Have you ever found that sometimes combats can seem to lack punch? They start to seem like “just another combat” that the players have got to get through. “Oh, it’s a goblin encounter, okay,” and then the players go through their well-rehearsed system of blasting...
There’s an old saying in writing: “Show Don’t Tell.” Essentially, this means that you should show what something is, or who a person is, by their actions, by examples, etc., rather than just talking about them. For example, you could say, “Joe is an angry man,” or...
When you first think of running large-scale combats, even battles, you may find the prospect seems exciting at first...
Villains are generally portrayed as dark, brooding, nasty individuals, with few redeeming traits. After all...
Initiative is a subject that has received a minimal amount of attention over the years, at least by a good chunk of the games out there. From what I've seen of Initiative systems they usually seem either way too static or way too clunky (hmm...
Like most of you, I've run a lot of combats down through the years, from all sorts of systems like Rifts (and the Palladium universe), AD&D, D&D 3.5, Pathfinder, Whitewolf and then a few smatterings of others. And one thing I've found is that combat is usually treated...
An article for Role Players not Roll Players Jet Liberson is one of the original playtesters of Immersion RPG, and has helped coax it along since its infancy. Passionate about RPGs, he is well known for his love of playing unusual (or sometimes outright bizarre) characters that...
I was recently running an adventure for a couple of avid gamers in a Star Wars themed setting. As republic soldiers, their mission was to transport a dangerous criminal from a remote holding bay on a jungle planet to a more secure facility closer to...
Free will of players in a game controlled by an all-powerful Game Master may sound like an impossibility. After all, at any point in time the GM can simply decide that something happens, and it will! Your character is happily walking along, and then a...
What is an Open World RPG? Quite simply, it is an RPG world that is unrestricted, unlimited, completely and utterly flexible and real to the players. By this we mean that the players aren't restricted by any set path. Sure they will follow a storyline, but that storyline is...
I'm sure you've watched a movie before today, and seen some epic combat in it, where the guys are smashing the hell out of each other, using lots of different moves, using the environment, and generally making an epic mess of the area. And like any...