Rule of the Dice

I am gearing up for a new campaign and in the process of finishing all the fun bits and pieces. This is my favorite time, just before the show starts and the lights come on. I am trying very hard to create a campaign that will execute maximum awesome with minimum stress. I try to follow three simple rules when I create a new campaign and get ready to throw my players into it. 1) Your players are your campaign - Make the campaign for your players, not for you. Its that simple. 2) Create stories, not a story - Its always a temptation to go all Lord of the Rings with a campaign. DON"T.... you are not Tolkien and this isn't Middle Earth. Creating an epic over-arching super story that binds the characters into an amazing epic adventure is almost always doomed to fail. Create many stories for your world and let your players own ambitions create the epic story. 3) Make the campaign intriguing not cool - If everyone is an uber-cool ninja gangster, and there are a thousand co...

This is a re posting. I am still too busy to do a real post, but someday soon real life will no longer interfere with my blogging life. I wrote this post originally as my first post for the RPG Bloggers network and then foolishly backdated it by accident, so I'm pretty sure a lot of people haven't read it. The post sums my play style and general philosophy of role playing. To me, world and campaign building are the meat and potatoes of role playing. I am a homebrewer through and through. I hardly use any published material, as a matter of fact the amount of RPG books that I own can fit neatly on one small shelf. On the other hand the amount of homebrewed material that I have wouldn't fit neatly into a large room. Creating worlds and campaigns is what I do best, and its what I love most about gaming. I have used many game systems over the years, but I find myself becoming more indifferent to the system with age. I've always found that you can argue the virtues of a g...