Bard of Valiant

Last night our party faced a god. This was the whole goal of the current adventure, something everyone knew was coming for several weeks and was looking forward to last night.
Well, I thought everyone was looking forward to it. It turned out there was a huge discrepancy between how I, as the Game Master, viewed [...]

Don’t invite new people to the game without asking anyone else and then tell the game master the hosts invited them.
Believe it or not, this happened to us last week.
Phil needed to catch a ride home from work and called a friend for a pick-up. On the way back, the friend (whom I’ll call “George”), [...]

Jade at Evil Machinations asks, “What are the best and worst things about being a GM?” First, let me say I love this blog’s tagline “…No scenario survives contact with the PCs … No system survives contact with the GM“. So true!
However, the question itself reminded me of a Twitter conversation I had recently. theFreeRPGblog [...]

First, read Chgowiz’s post on a near TPK (total party kill for those not “in” with the jargon). About halfway down you’re going to find the phrase “I felt like a failure.” I read that and felt punched in the stomach. I know that feeling, the feeling a GM gets when he knows just how [...]

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Nix131 made a comment on this post about a different type of Ioun stone, saying that making them more integrated into a characters gear took away the disadvantage of owning them. Ioun stones don’t take slots (I assume he’s referring to 4E D&D) and are therefore very powerful and potentially unbalancing. The fact [...]

I’ve created a PDF copy of the entire series Game Mastering with Leadership Skills. You can get it here. This one includes additional material based on and extracted from comments left in the articles. Thanks, Lemming!

Sphere: Related Content

This series is about using leadership skills to improve your own skills as a Game Master.
Part 1: Introduction Why leadership skills matter to a GM.
Part 2: Leadership Types A different point of view.
Part 3: Motivation Why do you bother running games?
Part 4: Practical Leading Going where players want to follow.
Part 5: the Assistant [...]

Previous Installments:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
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. – Bard of Valiant
And one of the things the Game Master has a huge influence in is who is playing [...]

A lot of the things I’ve talked about in part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4 will help anyone be better at running games of any kind but let’s face it, we all have day jobs and doing these things is going to add to the investment in time and effort developing a [...]

Posts I’ve found of use lately:
I voiced my wish to see some chance of spell failure in D&D in my recent post about Fantasy Magic. Having been called out by Bonemaster I have put together my suggestions as to how to use spell failure. – 6d6Fireball

D6 Fantasy, the system I’m using to develop Project Valiant, [...]