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Many people try to design really tough monsters for RPGs, but that’s often a consequence of the boss monster mentality, suitable for computers, not tabletop. I like to focus on surprising the players, and here’s how. Picture courtesy of Pixabay Something that's near and dear to my heart...

At a recent “GMs meeting” someone posed this question: What do you do if you’ve allowed a player to acquire something that way overbalances the campaign? Picture courtesy of Pixabay. First I have to say, I have not done this (or if I did I’ve repressed something that happened long ago, and it...

The Mighty Jingles (on YouTube) described what he really disliked about Far Cry 5 New Dawn (video game). The game took away player control at vital junctures. I wonder how often this happens in RPGs, and offer some reasons why it does. With a poll! Picture courtesy of Pixabay. I watch a few...

Despite the fatuous "get off my lawn" comment and the equally-useless "how does this get used on this site" waste of time (typically meaning "I disagree vehemently", oh well), this has been a really interesting set of comments. It would be a good place to start for anyone wanted to write a...

In my articles from the early 1980s I often characterized the typical D&Der as a hoodlum (hood). You may know them by many other names: ruffian, bully boy, bully, bandit, mugger, gangster, terrorist, gunman, murderer, killer, hitman, assassin, hooligan, vandal, and more. Has anything changed...

The most widespread (by far) RPG has been Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), though in quite different forms. And Dungeons & Dragons tends to be dominated by magic users, or more broadly, spell casters. Why is that? (I’m going to ignore that the original players of D&D were wargamers and they were used...

This is a misunderstanding of agency: "The wider the field of choices, the harder to make those choices it becomes for the players. The rule system itself is a constraint on both player and GM agency... and it works because it reduces near-infinite choices to a manageable few." Agency isn't...

Lanchester’s Power [Linear and Square] Laws mean that combat in science fiction RPGs will usually be fundamentally different than combat in fantasy RPGs. Or the designer will have to somehow compensate, as in Star Wars. Image by Andrea Wierer from Pixabay F. W. Lanchester, a polymath...

“Player agency” refers to the player being allowed by the game to do things in the game that have real consequences to the long-term course, and especially the result, not just for succeeding or failing. Some campaigns offer a lot, some only a little. Are players just following the script or do...

I’m a categorizer and always have been. Categorization leads to illumination, but the danger in categorizing is that every play style might seem to fit only the extremes of each category. In this article, I try to categorize the various RPG styles of play in a logical manner. Picture courtesy...