DMing Advice Online (New Tag)

As part of a New Years's Gaming Resolution, if you will, I'm going to be somewhat reorganizing and revamping how I make posts here on this blog.  I've always been a bit frustrated by my unfinished series of DungeonCraft articles--but let's be fair here; part of the reason I never finished them was because the originals are readily available online over at darkshire (see the links page) and I was starting to feel a little stifled by idea that I should rigidly follow an already developed format.  This stifled feeling became more acute as I gradually started feeling that Chris Perkins' own DMing advice (again. see links page) was at least as good, despite not following a format, and despite topics coming up maybe a bit haphazardly or even randomly as he thought of them each week.  I also found a third collection of DMing advice articles (again--links) which didn't follow that format, but which was fairly chock full of interesting ideas here and there.

Of course, all three of them--some to greater or lesser degrees--frustrate me because they are so focused specifically on D&D, and the play assumptions that are implicit in that game.  That's not necessarily surprising, since I doubt they were ever meant to be anything other than that, and their audience as D&D players was pretty much exactly who they were hoping to reach.  Plus, some of them were more concerned with giving survey type advice--i.e., here's a bunch of different ways something could be done, with only very light treatment on pros or cons for each.

For me, that's not really what I had in mind, and attempting to do that really killed my enthusiasm for my own DungeonCraft tag.  So, I'm going to jettison it completely and do something different.  I'm creating an all new tag, FRPG for Fantasy Roleplaying Games which will specifically focus on GMing advice--in terms of worldbuilding, running the game, and everything else--but not D&D.  I'm not going to focus on any particular system either--in fact if I had anything like a long-term reader or something, it'd be obvious that I use a ruleset that's largely based on an existing D&D edition, just houseruled into a different feel.  Talking about, among other things, the kinds of things that you can expect to do and have happen in a game that rejects the D&D paradigm of play and the D&D paradigm of setting design.  I'm also not going to survey different ways of doing things, except in the vaguest ways possible.  Although I've removed the tagline from my blog, I still claim to be the most opinionated guy on the Internet, after all.  Instead, I'm going to focus on how I like to do things, why I like them, and how to make them work as best as I know how.

I also hope to have some regularity and discipline around my posts.  My goal is to make two FRPG posts a week, and two DARK•HERITAGE setting related posts each week.  Not saying I won't have other posts here and there as well, on other topics (or that I might now occasionally beat my goal on some weeks) but I'm setting that up as a minimum to keep my blogging more organized and more interesting to me and (hopefully) to readers.  And that means that I need to get cracking--even if I count this introduction as an FRPG post, it's already Friday, and I'd like to start off right by getting two in this week!

Any questions?  I've got a pretty long topic list already drawn up, but on the rare occasion that anyone would consider putting in a request for discussion, I'd be more than happy to accomodate.