Roll For Topic

Chris and Andy are joined by Jeremy Bai, a prolific translator and author whose RPG Righteous Blood, Ruthless Blades: Wuxia Roleplaying brings the wuxia genre to your game table! We begin by talking to Jeremy about his various projects, RPG-related and otherwise, before discussing different ways that you can make food, drink, and meals more …

Continue reading "Episode 114 — Making Food and Meals a Part of an RPG Campaign (with Jeremy Bai)"

Andy and Chris are joined by James Pozenel of Horse Shark Games to talk about the best way to handle hacking scenes in your TTRPGs (as well as others scenes in which one PC is the star of the show). James is uniquely suited to dispense advice on this, since he’s working on a very …

Continue reading "Episode 113 – Running Hacking Scenes (with James Pozenel)"

What do you need to know to run tabletop RPGs with kids? Guest GMs Liz Decker and Tim Saucer bring their experience organizing games for kids to a special roundtable discussion. Liz runs an RPG club at a local high school, and Tim incorporates RPGs into a summer camp for kids. Both have a lot …

Continue reading "Episode 112 — Running RPGs with Kids"

Does nostalgia for your youth, and the games you played as a kid, play an active role in the games you play today? And it’s impossible to talk about D&D nostalgia without taking note of the upcoming D&D movie. Listen as they share their hopes and dreams (or lack thereof) for Dungeons and Dragons: Honor …

Continue reading "Episode 111 – What Role Does Nostalgia Play in Your Games?"

How do you fine-tune the tone–whether it’s grim, comedic, or something else–at your gaming table? Chris and Andy talk about this, but not before they muse on the challenge of running murder mysteries in the TTRPG medium, among other things.

Family, friends, and loved ones of PCs, when they appear at all, often serve primarily as victims whose plight motivates the PCs. Are there more and better ways to make the PCs’ loved ones a part of the game? Andy and Chris discuss!

Have you ever struggled to stay focused on the campaign you’re running because you’re distracted by all the shiny new games on your bookshelf that you’d also like to be running? Andy and Chris talk about the challenge of avoiding “shiny object syndrome.”

Andy and Chris go back to their Roll For Topic roots and roll on the old Table of Topics for this one! They (briefly) discuss the OGL and D&D and what it all means to them before diving into just what in the world a GM should do when their players have no idea what …

Continue reading "Episode 107 — What Do You Do When Your Players Get Stuck?"

Chris is temporarily out for this episode, which means that there’s nobody to stop Andy and guest GM Matt Wilson from venturing down all kinds of historical tangents! Join us as we try to keep our enthusiasm for the Late Antique period in check, and reflect on the GMing lessons we learned in 2022 and …

Continue reading "Episode 106 — Old Year Reflections, New Year Ambitions (with Matt Wilson)"

In the last episode, we planned a Wild West adventure and “dungeon.” Now, we force a gang of hapless players through it! Guest players John, Ben, Toby, and Brandon team up to take on the sinister Snake Oil Kid and his gang. Will things go smoothly and according to plan? Or will they veer wildly …

Continue reading "Episode 105 — Actual Play: Snake Oil’s Last Score"