Category: Gaming Trends

I get anxiety – often. I usually do a pretty good job of pushing those anxious voices out of my head and moving on with life, but November is especially rough because it is the anniversary of family deaths and some other well-rooted pieces of my past that ramp my anxious voices up to 11. The first part of this November I spent more days than I would like sequestered away from the world and listening to my anxiety-driven voices. The problem with anxiety is […]

Is this going to be more work? If you are considering running an online game for the first time you may be asking yourself this question. The purpose of this article is to try to answer it, and perhaps put your mind at ease. We’ll look at the work involved before, during, and between sessions. In the big picture, it’s not really more work, just different work. Let’s take a look. BEFORE A SESSION Most of the work for online games has to be done […]

This is the first of what I hope to be a regular series of articles on the ‘classic’ stories that inspired early roleplaying games. More specifically, I intend to read these stories (many of which I haven’t read, or read so long ago as to have forgotten them) as a modern Game Master and see if there’s anything in them that still resonates today, 41 years after the first commercial roleplaying game hit the shelves. Today I’ve decided to start with the very first story […]

Con season has begun; Walt’s already been to Origins, I enjoyed my first Kublacon over Memorial Day weekend, and the big summer shows, GenCon and DragonCon, are still to come. Summer can be a busy time for GMs, giving you even more sessions to prepare for than normal. (Hopefully, a con will offer you a chance to be a player, especially if you’re not getting to play regularly.) I got into Feng Shui at Kublacon, which I’ve long been interested in trying out. I had […]

Recently my wife posted an article on Facebook about how different parenting was when we were kids and now. I’ve seen several similar articles and sentiments in the past, most of which boiled down to “our parents made us play outside more often.” Such articles reminded me of my early days of gaming, where a group of friends and I would want to play only to find that we had no place to play. Our parents wanted us all out of the house. I began […]

What’s old is new again, almost magically. Back in 2009, the people around me were falling in love with Pathfinder–particularly for the slimmed down rules contained in one core book. It felt like a reset–a chance to get back to the core of D&D adventure in a way that had been obscured by D&D’s extensive publishing throughout D&D 3.5. Pathfinder’s trying to capture that feeling again, with a new Core Campaign that resets player options to the core rule book. It’s a chance to create […]

D&D’s fifth edition has released all of its core pieces; a standalone starter set, the core three books (a Player’s Handbook, a Monster Manual, and a Dungeon Master’s Guide), a GM’s screen, and some adventures (Hoard of the Dragon Queen and its sequel, The Rise of Tiamat). Mike wrote a final Legends and Lore article about “the end of the beginning”—the core books are out, 5th edition has been fully launched. I didn’t participate in many of the playtests, so the edition was new to […]