Bard of Valiant

Previous Entries: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
In any game the leader can only go where the players are willing to follow, whether it be a Guild Leader in World of Warcraft or a Game Master of a tabletop role-playing game. If the players won’t follow, you have no game. And there are really two [...]

Image by Stuck in Customs via Flickr

A few updates:
The Bard RSS feed has now moved to http://feeds2.feedburner.com/BardOfValiant and the link on the left has the new feed.
Also, I’m going to be going through some changes here over the next two weeks. I’ve been able to acquire a domain name and web hosting so the Bard [...]

By this time, having read Part 1 and Part 2, you should have some idea of what your style is and where at least a few of your weaknesses are. If you’re like me, at one time or another you’ve looked around and wondered if you should even being doing this job or not. Sometimes [...]

As a Bard of Valiant, I try to write about actual processes I use as a Game Master that work in concrete ways to make my game better. Hopefully by passing these methods on, it helps make your game better, too. In this spirit, these series of posts will be about how I actually used [...]

These entries will be lists of links I’ve found useful recently from other blogs. For almost all of these,  I actually used it in some way to make my games better and will write here how I went about doing so. At the very end, I’ll include links back to those who linked to me, [...]

In Part 1, we discussed why leadership skills matter to a Game Master and his gaming group. In this article, we’ll take a look at some different styles of leadership and how they pertain to game mastering.

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The GM is the leader in any given party, regardless of what player has stepped up to inform him of their actions. No one leads a party or a game like the Game Master will. His influence is by far the most pervasive on any gaming table. With that in mind, using leadership skills can [...]

One of the hardest things about rpgs [sic] isn’t prep, or out-maneuvering fire-breathing dragons but keeping a group of players engaged in what you are doing on a long term basis. – Advanced Gaming & Theory

Part of the challenge of any game is that you can lose. People tend to be competitive in many endeavors, [...]

This series addressed creating villains and using some popular concepts in goal setting to make them more 3-dimensional and realistic as well as how to use that to create goals for adventures and campaigns. I had included a poll as well but it seems to be broken and has been removed.
Part 1: What does the [...]

Up to this point (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) we’ve pretty much taken care of the meat of how to set good villain-sized goals and work them into adventures for your party. Here are some tips to make sure you villain makes for a good game.
Be as specific as possible.
You don’t need all [...]