Sanity Loss Guaranteed

The second part of my N-part series on running a long campaign touches on the subject of character mortality. Put bluntly: How many damn times can my character die before I stop caring about the next one? It's a difficult question to answer of course and depends on every single group, player and game master. The trick is to get it just right, which you already knew before reading this, so I'll try to get a bit more specific. First, lets talk about the positives coming from player characters dying during your campaign. There aren't many, of course, but there's one important one. That is that the players won't feel safe and secure that their characters will make it through whatever bind they get into. It makes them keep on their toes and think through any decisions they make. In other words, they get more invested in the story because there's the possibility they'll have to pay the ultimate price. The main negative, apart from the obvious like you having...

While we are closing in on the end of our Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign I feel like I can start writing about it in general without running the risk of revealing anything new to my players. I'd like to talk a little bit about one thing that I've always struggled with while running longer games, which is motivation as a GM. It is vital to keep motivated to be able to keep the game running to its conclusion. I can't tell you how many times I've started a longer campaign just to have it fizzle out due to lack of inspiration and just general boredom. I will use our Masks campaign as an example, so here's a brief overview of it... - Our first session was played on the 10th of January 2017. - Our latest session was played on October 30th of 2018, and we still have at least a couple more to go. - To date, we have played 55 sessions, each one between 2.5 and 3 hours long. - We are spread out between Spain, Sweden and the UK so we use Roll20 and Discord as our tools...

Right. This is my first post in this series where I will write down random reflections and ideas about things that I have learnt while playing and game mastering for more than 30 years. To be fair, most of this I've learnt recently, or at least I have only begun to think about it consciously in the last year or so. Fourteen year old me just wasn't that interested in actually analyzing what he was doing. This post probably seems like GM:ing 101 for most of you, and not something you should discover after playing for more than 30 years. But hey, shit happens! When you run any game, short or long, you need to think carefully about when and how you present information and clues to your players. This could be the single most important, and hardest, thing to do as a GM. Some of us GMs are good at roleplaying our NPCs, some of us describe the settings and set the mood wonderfully and some of us are just great at coming up with interesting story lines and plot twists, but not a...