Thursday 8 August 2024

RPGaDAY Eight: An Accessory you Appreciate

Day Eight: An Accessory you Appreciate

Simple, this has to be Justin Alexander's ENNIE award winning "So You Want To Be A Game's Master".

I've long been a fan of The Alexandrian blog (also ENNIE award winning), and this book, which expands on many of his blog articles and presents them in a sensible progression, rather like a series of tutorials, is excellent.
It certainly does a better job of explaining how to be a GM than anything else I've read, rule books included.

Given the popularity of Dungeons and Dragons, it's not surprising that the first section uses that game to show the procedures a GM needs to use, and introduces systems and exemplars to help, and the advice is suitably generic to apply to nearly any RPG.

A lot of this used to be covered in rule books, but, taking D&D again, there's very little in any of the main books now to help new GMs. Perhaps there's an assumption that people already know the basics. Perhaps there's a reliance on players and GMs watching streamed play sessions. 
What I've read in other RPGs suggests that this is common to most rule systems.


But it's when he moves on to other topics that the book really proved it's worth to me. Topics like urban adventures, hex and point crawls, NPCs and, especially, the Three Clue Rule, have really helped my GMing (and I'm old/stubborn enough to believe that I know it all and can't be taught anything new).

If you want some idea of his style, check out his blog, specially the Gamesmastery 101 series
He even has a YouTube channel now.

Honourable mention goes to an old AD&D accessory, The Official Dungeon Master Decks: Deck of Encounters, Set Two. 
This is a box of cards, each one containing the seed for an encounter. Symbols indicate details such as terrain, climate and danger level and the back of the card roughs out the encounter.
There's enough detail to run it, and it's kept generic enough to fit most worlds. There are even some multipart quests.
I regularly draw a card to give me inspiration, and although I don't think I've ever run one exactly as written, they have inspired many memorable moments.


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