Travis Miller's Blog About Sword & Sorcery Fiction and Classic Fantasy Adventure Gaming
There are several games on the market with a design intent of preventing bad game mastering. These games have a rule or mechanism that can be applied to almost any situation. The system can be rules heavy and provide a rule for nearly all the situations one can imagine. It can be rules-light with a …
Continue reading A Problem That Can’t Be Defeated By Game Design
It isn’t entirely clear to me how much influence bloggers, podcasters, message boards and discussions occurring on social media sites have on the games that actually get played and how they are played. I know there is some influence I just wonder how much it is. Game designers and publishers are often participants in these …
A frequent critique I see is that old games must suck because more people are playing a recently published game. The argument goes, "If that old game is so good then why isn't it as popular as the new game?" There are reasons people play newer releases of games that have nothing to do with …
Continue reading If That Old Game is So Good, Why is Everyone Playing the New One?
As a game master, I try to tell my players as much as I can. If I think there is a bit of knowlegdge that is common to a group of characters, I tell them. Some game masters would say I tell them too much. The reason I err on the side of too much …
There are some games which have the stated design intent of creating "satisfying narratives." This outcome is unlikely. Why is that? Intentionally creating good stories is hard. People spend decades of their lives devolping this skill. People spend thousands of hours writing, workshopping and taking classes to develop the skill of creating a single well …
Something I started a few campaigns ago that has worked well for me was to make my random encounter tables weighted toward certain results. There are several ways you can do this. You can do a d100 table and make certain outcomes more likely and others less likely. The ancient dragon only comes up when …
A brief character background with the broad strokes of what happened to a character prior to them showing up on the stage of the campain can add to the enjoyment of the game for both player and game master. It provides some context. It can help the player immerse themselves into the role of their …
Grumpy Wizard 
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