What Do You Get out of Playtesting

I’m about to run my GenCon game for the first time for some friends at a local game day (also known as excuse to get together, geek out, play games, and drink). We try and structure these like a Con with 2 or three 4 hour blocks of games. It’s nice because it simulates what […]

How Do You One-Shot

My home group has a tendency to miss weeks. Honestly, we try and get together once a week, but work and family and vacations and family and probably work again make it difficult. Besides defaulting to a board game or just calling it for the night, we’ve found running a one-shot is a good alternative. […]

GenCon 50 – Rescue the Love Boat

One of my favorite days of the year is Opening Day (baseball – for those who shun the sports ball). It is for me the epitome of hope and new beginnings. Coming a close second is the opening of Event Submissions for GenCon. *** I’m not including birthday, anniversary, national holiday, etc – too easy […]

GenCon 50 – Planning for Games

It’s always an exciting day when I get an email from GenCon. Especially one announcing Event Submission. This year I’m cutting down on the number of events that I’m running because I’m bringing my two boys. I’m sure I’ll have another post on that later. I’ve decided to just run one scenario twice, instead of […]

Review – Adventures in Middle Earth Players Guide Part 2

Part one of this review covered mostly character creation. Part two covers some of the basic rules of system including, Journeys, Shadow, Audience, and Fellowship. Journeys The idea and concept of journeys are basic to both roleplaying games and Middle Earth. However, I find the mechanical rules confusing and restrictive. There’s too much calculating pluses […]

Weekly GMing – Talky Sessions

What do you do if you know that the next gaming session is going to be “talky” with little to no chance for combat? For me this means two very different things in planning for the session. First, there is more opportunity for improve or different directions for the PCs to take, including that most […]

More Gaming with Kids

Surprisingly ( and wonderfully), my boys and I have kept our weekend sessions going for the past four weeks. In that time I have a few more tips and lessons learned from playing with kids. Don’t tell them I called them kids, they are 12 and almost 14 – but still kids to me. The […]

Gaming with Your Kids

I think it really started after I took Dominic (my youngest son) to see Acquisitions Incorporated in the theater. He almost immediately wanted to make a character. This got my older son Rowan interested, and now that you have two kids with a character each you have to start playing. It’s a rule of geek […]