RPG a Day 2024: Day 24

RPG a Day 2024, day 24: Acclaimed advice?


Over the years, I have amalgamated a great amount of GM advice, from the books themselves, from playing with others and seeing different styles, from reading books of advice, be it Robin's Laws of Good Games Mastering, the little book of Keeper Tips, or the Ultimate RPG Guide series by James D'Amato.

All of which I recommend, and have taken things from.

If there is once piece of advice that I can remember clearly when and where It sunk in, it was back with MERP. One thing that the rulebook tries hard to get across was game balance. Now I do not pretend to believe that what I thought of as game balance back then and what I believe now are the same thing at all, but that concept of game balance was required for a game as swingy as MERP, and it meant that even back then, I wasn't throwing things at players that they couldn't handle. This was a game that was really trying to tell the GM that in a case of GM vs Player, the GM can always win, and therefore should be careful to make it a fair fight. In the 80s and 90s, this was news to many GMs. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Necronomicon Dissection: Part 6, Purchases

Image
Ok, so there were many reasons for going to a Con like this, but one of them is surely to pick up on products that you can't get elsewhere, or without spending too much on postage. With this in mind, I think I was actually quite restrained in my purchases. First off, I had a list of books to buy at the Chaosium stand (although I did spend my Cult of Chaos credit, and won one of these through the Extra Life Charity event prize draw). I was able to get the following: Pulp Cthulhu Two Headed Serpent Grand Grimoire of Cthulhu Mythos Magic Doors To Darkness Dead Light Another tip to the vendors hall led me to find a couple of second hand book stores, who had all the kinds of books you'd want to find at a Con like this, including: H P Lovecraft : The Shadow over Innsmouth and other Stories of Horror, as well as a copy of August Derleth's: The Reminiscences of Solar Pons. The Necronomicon Press stand was there, where I hooked up with a copy of TED Klein's: The ...
Read more

RPG a Day: Day 7

Image
Question 7: What was your most impactful RPG session? Hmm, from which side of the GM screen? I guess I'll answer from both points of view. As a player : There was once a Buffy game played in Edinburgh called The Watch House  (it was only a matter of time before that game came up, no?). There are two sessions that stick in my memory. The first is the one where my character was possessed by his evil ancestor. The second was the breaking of the 4th wall episode, where some of us played our characters, the actors who played our characters in a TV show, and finally, played our versions of the actual players for another character at the table. It sounds confusing, but it was a hell of a lot of fun, and fun is the reason we're at the table. These sessions stuck with me, as they opened doors to my understanding of what you can do at the table, when the other people at the table are in it for the same reasons as you. As a GM/Keeper : Scaring the Players. A Call of Cthulhu ...
Read more