Category: Role of the GM

As the GM, are you the gamer in your group who is most up on new and upcoming releases, errata, web forums, blogs and news sites related to your game(s) of choice? And if so, is there any connection between being your group’s most dialed-in gamer and being the GM? In my case, I’d say...

Back in high school, I gamed with a GM who openly encouraged us to bribe him with things (like snacks) for XP and other in-game privileges. Fifteen years on, man, that seems weird. Or is it? Is this secretly commonplace outside of high school? It’s got such a Knights of the Dinner Table vibe...

Here on TT, I use “Game Master” (or more often, GM) to apply to everyone who runs RPGs, even if I’m talking about a specific game that uses a different term (like Referee or Storyteller). It’s the most common, most widely understood term, which makes it a good fit for this...

Meeting Facilitation and Gaming is an absolutely fascinating post over at The 20′ by 20′ Room — “one of the problems with typical rpgs is the fact that the GM is usually the meeting facilitator for a gaming group.” I can’t believe I’ve never thought of it...

Chris Chinn, of Deep in the Game (one of the best RPG blogs around), recently wrote a post entitled An exercise for the viewer at home. In it, Chris excerpts a snippet of text from the intro to Exalted that reveals a lot about the assumptions underlying that RPG. I love this idea (thanks, Chris!),...

I had a chance to game with Tavis Allison, the president of Behemoth3, at this year’s GenCon, and after the con he asked me if I’d write about their latest project, Otherworld Excursions, here on Treasure Tables. I agreed, for three reasons: Tavis is a very nice guy, we swapped a bit...

Sounds like a pretty dumb question, right? Or at least a question with a very obvious answer: the GM creates scenarios, runs the game and plays the NPCs. That’s true, but those are pretty broad descriptions — particularly that middle one, “runs the game.”Let’s break...