Sunday, July 27, 2008

First Post

My blog title is from the second comment made to this blog post where donny mused that if he started blogging he might call his blog "The fine art of the TPK". I thought about this and decided there's really no art to a TPK. If the DM wants an entire party to die, there's not a lot they can do about it - "Orcus and 500 high-level undead attack your 5th-level party en masse. Roll for initiative."

No, the art is in the near TPK. A good way to have a memorable game session is to bring the party to the brink of defeat and have them still pull out a victory.

How can a game master pull this off, reliably and repeatedly? I dunno, but I hope if I use this blog as a campaign journal for a while and chronicle a few of those moments (we've had a couple in the past few weeks so I have some catching up to do), maybe I can figure it out.

7 comments:

ChattyDM said...

Wow... superb 1st post... concise and to the point.

Best of luck with the new endavor!

Gregor LeBlaque said...

Hi Chatty,

Thanks for coming by - I've been reading your blog for quite a few months now.

I'm trying hard to be concise. I get tired reading giant walls of text.

Alex Schroeder said...

Concise for the win! :)

Gregor LeBlaque said...

Thanks for the compliment, Alex.

ChattyDM said...

Wait..... I write giants walls of text!

=)

Gregor LeBlaque said...

I wouldn't say that, Chatty. This isn't really a wall of text. It has lots of little paragraphs and a few section headers to break it up.

For an example of a wall of text I was going to pick on my wife's blog, but she's been getting better about her rambling ways lately (especially in her few RPG-related posts). I think her posts can still get a bit over-long, though (but then, she thinks most of mine are ridiculously short).

ChaoticBlackSheep said...

I like my giant walls of text. I like to illustrate my point with examples while also exploring counterarguments to show that nothing is so limited as to be viewed in only one way. And I like to offer solutions to perceived problems rather than just complaining about them. I at least try to explain myself if I don't have any solutions so that readers can understand where I'm coming from based on my own experiences.

Alas, I suppose I am rambling now. :)