The Bard has a Stage!

Image by Stuck in Customs via Flickr

A few updates:

The Bard RSS feed has now moved to http://feeds2.feedburner.com/BardOfValiant and the link on the left has the new feed.

Also, I’m going to be going through some changes here over the next two weeks. I’ve been able to acquire a domain name and web hosting so the Bard will be moving from a WordPress hosted site to it’s own space! YAY! A Stage of My Very Own! I’ll leave a pointer here for it when that happens. I might have a few growing pains so please be patient.

In the meantime, regular posts will continue although in February, I’ll be going from 3-4 posts a week to 2-3 posts a week -every 3 days for a regular post, instead of every other day. Short posts like this one won’t affect that schedule.

Game Masters and Leadership Skills: Part 3

By this time, having read Part 1 and Part 2, you should have some idea of what your style is and where at least a few of your weaknesses are. If you’re like me, at one time or another you’ve looked around and wondered if you should even being doing this job or not. Sometimes it feels like my faults far, far outweigh my blessings.

If you’ve felt like this, a quiz like this one can help you decide whether or not to continue trying to do the job. Designed to measure the motivation of business leaders, alot of the questions certainly apply to those of us who try to herd kittens by running role-playing games.

And motivation is the real key here.

Interlude: Putting Elements Together I

As a Bard of Valiant, I try to write about actual processes I use as a Game Master that work in concrete ways to make my game better. Hopefully by passing these methods on, it helps make your game better, too. In this spirit, these series of posts will be about how I actually used something I posted about to improve my game so maybe you can use the process yourself.

As commented here, I really love the name “Veil of Convenient Illusions” as written about by Wyatt. I also recommended something Chgowiz found, the stock.xchng for finding cool images you can use in games. Well, I now know what the Veil will look like by randomly viewing images there.

I still have no idea what it does but by putting two things I’ve found on different blogs, I’ve come up a very cool and interesting magical item. Click on the picture for full impact.

Interlude: Short Takes 01/26/09

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

These entries will be lists of links I’ve found useful recently from other blogs. For almost all of these,  I actually used it in some way to make my games better and will write here how I went about doing so. At the very end, I’ll include links back to those who linked to me, if any.

Currently the players are on the hunt for the Veil of Convenient Illusions, which was last seen somewhere in the Constitutional Democratic Monarchy of Estalasia. – Wyatt

If you haven’t yet read Wyatt’s attempt to plan a skill encounter,

Game Masters and Leadership Skills: Part 2

In Part 1, we discussed why leadership skills matter to a Game Master and his gaming group. In this article, we’ll take a look at some different styles of leadership and how they pertain to game mastering.

Game Masters and Leadership Skills: Part 1

Image via Wikipedia

The GM is the leader in any given party, regardless of what player has stepped up to inform him of their actions. No one leads a party or a game like the Game Master will. His influence is by far the most pervasive on any gaming table. With that in mind, using leadership skills can help you develop better adventures more efficiently.

Interlude: Character Death

Image via Wikipedia

One of the hardest things about rpgs [sic] isn’t prep, or out-maneuvering fire-breathing dragons but keeping a group of players engaged in what you are doing on a long term basis. – Advanced Gaming & Theory

Part of the challenge of any game is that you can lose. People tend to be competitive in many endeavors, not just games, and they want to win. If they know they can win, most games, and roleplaying games are no exception, become boring and stale very quickly. The very real risk of losing keeps a game fresh and interesting.

While most roleplaying games are not the game master versus the players, they are the players versus the environment.The environment challenges

Real Villains & Goal Setting: A Summary

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

This series addressed creating villains and using some popular concepts in goal setting to make them more 3-dimensional and realistic as well as how to use that to create goals for adventures and campaigns. I had included a poll as well but it seems to be broken and has been removed.

Part 1: What does the Bad Guy™ want and what does he need to get it?
Part 2: Timing and the Plot Device™
Part 3: Breaking up Large Goals into Adventures
Part 4: Tricks and Tips for Villain Goal Setting

Read more for a form for Villain Goal Use.

Real Villains & Goal Setting: Part 4

Up to this point (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) we’ve pretty much taken care of the meat of how to set good villain-sized goals and work them into adventures for your party. Here are some tips to make sure you villain makes for a good game.

Be as specific as possible.

You don’t need all the detail right now but the more you can

Interlude – Pictures

If you haven’t seen this post by Chgowiz, go! And make sure you check out his lightboxes. Very cool!