GM Mike

I remember seeing this mistake more often with newer GMs. The party finally corners the villain after hours—or sometimes months—of build-up. They win the fight fairly, everyone at the table is excited, and it feels like the perfect moment for the heroes to finally defeat the villain. Then the GM panics. Suddenly the villain teleports away. Maybe they reveal a second form. Maybe reinforcements arrive out of nowhere. Maybe an NPC appears to save them. And to be clear, none of those things are inherently bad. A villain escaping can be exciting. A second form can be memorable. A twist can make a fight even better. The problem is when those things happen because the GM simply cannot accept that their favorite creation lost. Players can usually feel the difference between an exciting twist and a desperate escape hatch. When you run tabletop games, you spend a lot of time creating things that exist to be challenged, bypassed, ignored, defeated, or sometimes completely destroyed by the players...

  I’ve always believed imagination is something everyone is born with. Like a muscle, it can grow stronger with practice, or fade away if you stop using it. For me, role-playing games have been one of the best ways to keep that “imagination muscle” flexing. When I first started playing tabletop RPGs, I didn’t think of them as a tool for creativity. I just thought they were fun. But over time, I noticed something interesting: the more I played, the more ideas I had. These days I work as a Dungeon Master for hire, which means I run games for people regularly. One thing I’ve noticed is that during sessions, my brain starts producing ideas faster than I can use them. A small moment, a quirky player decision, an improvised scene, even a line of dialogue,  can spark three or four new ideas for future adventures. Creativity feels like a row of dominoes: one idea falls, knocking over another, then another, and suddenly there’s a whole web of possibilities. Before I started running g...

When I first started designing The Last City , I knew I wanted a sandbox where the story would move on its own. I didn’t want to push players from quest to quest or pretend their choices mattered when they didn’t. The idea was to create a world that kept breathing even when the players were somewhere else — and that’s where the factions came in. I thought having friends and foes would help move the game and create conflict. Conflict is what moves a story, and in this case, it’s what moves the game. Factions make the world react. They give the players a reason to act and give the city a pulse even when the group is focused elsewhere. When factions clash, they create quests, diplomacy, shifting alliances, and unexpected opportunities. A city at war with itself doesn’t wait for heroes to decide what happens next — it happens on its own. It’s not that you can’t run a campaign without factions, but in a sandbox like this one, they make everything more interesting. They create opportunitie...

In a previous article, I talked about why roleplaying can feel like art therapy . This time, I want to lift the hood and explain what’s actually happening in your brain when you pretend to be a wizard. Because the truth is simple and fascinating: when you roleplay, your brain doesn’t just observe the story—it joins it. It reacts as if the things happening at the table are happening to you. And this isn’t poetic exaggeration. It’s measurable. It’s neurological. It’s real. Some of the most memorable experiences I’ve had as a Game Master are the emotional ones. When everyone at the table bursts into laughter at the same time, the moment doesn’t feel like something happening only in the fiction. It feels shared and real. The same thing happens in sad moments. When a character the group loves dies, the mood in the room shifts. People fall quiet, lean back, or sigh in a way that isn’t performative. It’s not simply acting; the emotion is genuine. That happens because, neurologically, imagi...

  You don’t always expect it. Sometimes you just make a character for fun — maybe you picked the class because it sounded cool or because your group needed a rogue. You wrote a short backstory, gave them a weird voice or a quirk, maybe made a joke about their name. And then somehow, after a few sessions… they stuck. They lived. They became more than numbers and gear. And you realize: you kind of love this character. It’s happened to me more than once. I’ve made so many characters over the years that I’ve lost count — some were hilarious disasters, some never got off the ground, and some felt like pure magic. Like a halfling assassin who was cheerful, bubbly, and incredibly deadly. That contrast — evil and happy-go-lucky — just worked. I didn’t know if she’d last long, but I always felt that sooner or later, her luck would run out. It was like her destiny was to end badly. And yet she kept going. The more I played, the more I wanted to see what she’d do next. She was originally crea...

  There’s this Star Trek: The Next Generation episode called The Inner Light . Even if you’re not a Trekkie, hear me out. Captain Picard gets zapped by a mysterious space probe (as one does), passes out for a few minutes, and wakes up living someone else’s life on a peaceful planet. New name, new wife, new everything. He spends decades there—grows old, learns to play the flute, raises a family. And then, poof. Back to the Enterprise. The planet’s gone. The people are gone. The whole thing was a memory implant—this extinct civilization’s way of being remembered. But here’s the thing: it changed him. That episode came to mind the other day, and I couldn’t stop thinking—maybe we’re all having little Inner Light moments when we play TTRPGs. The Lives We Roll Into I’ve played a lot of characters. Some were dumb. Some were funny. Some were powerful. Some were disasters. And a few… a few left a mark. No, they’re not “real.” I get that. They don’t go to work or eat cereal. But th...