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Most gaming groups have sessions which have become legendary. Spectacular deaths, hilarious quotes, surprising plot twists - all of these may be reasons why a particular evening is talked about again and again. Sometimes they are told online, and others can be shown how awesome gaming can be in...

Dun Dun Dun.

A bit late, but a bunch of digital cartography tutorials for GIMP and Inkscape are up here.

Sounds interesting. Would you be willing to write this up for the War Stories Wiki? It's Dungeons & Dragons page is still waiting for its first entry... ;)

How is this railroading? The PCs are completely free to act as they want, and their actions can have a dramatical impact on the world.

You first have to get them to understand why a social contract is needed in the first place. Like I said, I'm assuming that these are either newbies or other people who simply haven't had any real experience with good role-playing. For example, if they derive their knowledge of RPGs from...

I prefer to think of it as showing them that playing murderous slayers is limiting themselves as role-players. If they are only rewarded for looting and killing, then what's what they will continue to do. But this way will teach them that other, less tangible rewards matter as well. Not they...

Dealing with sociopathic players was beyond the scope of my essay... In my current Exalted campaign, the player characters go out of their way to hurt as few people as possible. And strangely, they still seem to have fun with it.

For me, as the DM, "story" and "plot" mean looking over my notes from the previous session and thinking to myself: "OK, that's what the PCs did last time. Now, what could happen next as the consequence of their actions?" I do have some larger "background plots" in my campaigns - villains...

How else are they to learn the fundamentals of good role-playing? If nobody teaches them how to do it, then how will they know what role-playing is all about? So, if you are running a game for such players, are you having fun? And are they having as much fun as they could have, if they could...

I don't see it as "screwing with them" - rather as "showing them that they have real power to affect the world, and that their actions matter far more than just for their XPs and magic items." Everything that happens is a consequence of their actions. And their realization of this is the whole...

No, the implication is that their way is no fun for the DM. If they want the DM to be an encounter generator only, they might as well play an MMORPG. If the DM actually enjoys that kind of style, then more luck to him, but my essay was explicitly written for those DMs who would get frustrated...

Forked from: Stop being so paranoid Over in the other thread, it was discussed how to deal with sociopathic player characters - the kind of characters who see the world around them as nothing more than a source of XPs and loot, regardless of whether their activities would be considered...

Well, I do have a blog. (And I'm also willing to take tokens of appreciations in the form of experience points... ;) ) My general attitude towards GMing is that I allow the PCs almost complete freedom of action (within the limits of their actual physical/magical competence). They can try...

... Wow. That's harsh. I don't think that would have happened in any group I've ever played with. Is this kind of approach really that common in D&D? Killing other adventurers in cold blood for their stuff? Why should the militia know about this, as long as they take some care to conceal...

Nah, that's boring. And as the DM, I feel it is my job to get entertained by the antics of the players. And the best entertainment I get tends to come from springing surprises on them which seem really obvious in hindsight, but which none of them had anticipated because they were distracted by...

Sure, that's a possibility. But then at least you have a potentially fun fight instead of an evening of non-fun checking of every room for non-existent traps. And, of course, the fact that the party is apparently willing to slaughter another adventuring party in cold blood might have plenty of...

The same reason there aren't many cases of enslaved accountants - being a slave usually means you aren't very motivated to learn new things if only your owner benefits. Thus, menial laborers were the most common slaves throughout history.

It would probably make sense if they researched this field sufficiently so that they would be able to create the object on their own. Yes, all this is magic - but it doesn't mean that these rituals represent wish fulfillment... ;)

It hasn't happened to me before, but if the players ever showed excessive caution like that, I would be sorely tempted to do the following in a large dungeon complex: "You hear footsteps approaching." "We hide." "From your hiding place, you see what appears to be another adventuring group...