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Sell me on the best events... The best GMs... The best games or game systems to try... The most fun things you did in the past.

I normally buy myself a few treats for GM's Day. This year, I'm uncertain what to buy. Please make suggestions on how I ought to spend my money.

So, what I would like is suggestions for game systems that are easy to run and which have extremely good introductory adventures. My daughter is away in college and is very much missing her gaming group from high school, but sort of realizing that its likely that if she's going to game with her...

A nerd forum I once upon a time was highly active on upgraded its forums recently (by which I mean, a few years ago, because it has been a while since I was active) and in the process dropped a lot of its historical threads, particularly those of the period I was active. As a result, poof, a...

I've ended up avoiding battle mats for the last 3 years. For those of you using virtual tabletops like Fantasy Grounds or Roll20, what is your experience? What virtual table should I be investing in for the best battle mat experience for traditional dungeon crawls?

On term that I use a lot is “Illusionism”. The standard definition of “Illusionism” is GM’s offering player’s a game choice which appears to matter but which does not in fact matter because the GM uses his role as secret keeper and as narrator of the fiction to hide the player’s lack of agency...

Goblonia was published in September of 2022 and is one of the best Indy games I’ve ever encountered. In terms of the desirability of having this in your collection, I’d put this up alongside classics like Dogs In the Vineyard, Ten Candles, or Dread. While it’s not the most original game you...

I just realized that ChatGPT is familiar with the "Seven Sentence NPC" methodology and is capable with guidance of producing seven sentence NPCs that fit named constraints. While the current version shows a lot of limitations, this might well soon be a game changer for me in the reoccurring...

I don’t have this concept fully realized. Unlike many of my posts, I didn’t have a ready-made essay in my head because I’d already worked out for myself what I thought about this subject. But inspired by a comment by @UngainlyTitan that there was no such thing as Good DM advice, just Good DM...

For the past 2 years or so I've been running a D6 Star Wars game in the which the PC's are guild bounty hunters in 15BBY, during the very early days of the Empire after the Clone Wars where the galaxy is still optimistic about the promises the Empire brings for peace, justice, security, and...

So I want to try to tackle the linear fighter/quadratic wizard problem under my own terms. This is going to take a while. I realize as I sit down to write this that I could require 20 pages to even describe what I’m thinking. I believe that there are solutions, but they require moving the...

One of the things that has always bothered me about every edition of Call of Cthulhu is the fact that the profession list is always both incomplete and greatly unbalanced, with many supplemental professions simply being better than the normal professions the game originally began with. To that...

So, recommendations on how to set up a functional online RPG? Never even considered it until the fate of the world was on the line. Details would be welcome.

Everyone experiences emotions at the table. That’s why we play. But not all emotions are healthy or wanted. Most experienced Role Players can probably recall times when they experienced unwanted emotions, or when the emotions that they had experienced in play like frustration, disappointment, or...

So, I decided to take a break from GMing, after a steady 10 years of doing prep week in and week out, and graciously one of my players with only a little bit of prior GMing experience stepped up to the job. After discussing what we wanted to do, the group decide to play a Pathfinder AP, and...

So, I've been doing randomly rolled hit points basically forever. I've also tended to do max hit points at 1st level to make it easier for me as a GM to create an interesting heroic adventure for the mundane tier while minimizing the chance of random unavoidable death. But I've long been...

I have just finished a year long CoC campaign. It ended much as you might expect, with a near TPK and the mentally shaken badly wounded survivors fleeing out of a doomed New England town ahead of unendurable horrors. I can't say that I was fully satisfied with the campaign. Part of that is...

I started playing in the early 80's and much of that set my preferences as a DM for content. Part of that of course is owing to the fact that the 1e designers got to grab the low hanging fruit and do the obvious things that first come to mind when you think of fantasy. In terms of monsters...

I'm always impressed by the ability of the PC's to not only get in legal trouble, but to compound their legal trouble by behaving absolutely bizarrely, often in an effort to avoid legal trouble. I have some knowledge of the law, specifically for this sort of thing, but invariably the PC's...

Call of Cthulhu very famously declares that knowledge of archeology or the Dewey decimal system is at least as important for ensuring the survival of investigators as being well armed. This is supposedly because of the alien, inscrutable nature, of the foe and its nigh immunity to the weapons...