300. And no, not muscled men with hard abs.

And here’s my 300th post on NewbieDM.com. Whew, what a ride.  I recently said all the sappy things you say in times like this, when the blog turned 2, so I’ll tone it down here.  What I’d rather do is give a top 10 list of my favorite posts out of the 299 that qualify. 🙂

If you are a new DM in particular, this may be of some use for you.

1.  The token tutorial. This is probably the article that put the blog out there and exposed it to a larger audience than just the RPG Bloggers Network was giving me at the time.

2.  The “scale your maps up and print them” tutorial. It was just a natural follow up to the tokens that had to be done.

3.   Advice for new DM’s only. At the time it was some stuff I had learned about DM’ing, and wanted to share it with other new Dm’s out there.  It still holds up.

4.  Battlemap Tutorial by Jonathan Roberts.  One of my favorite tutorials on the site, by a great artist and all-around good guy.  He’s a working cartographer who had no reason to do this, but he did, and I’m grateful for that.

5.  Reskinning advice.  Really shows new DM’s just how easy it is to bend the game to your particular needs.  I’m quite proud of the way I turned a drow into a dinosaur, if I do say so myself.

6.  Making your own Dungeon Tiles. A great guest post by a reader of the blog.  It is what it is, making your own Dungeon Tiles.  A great article.

7.  Don’t make your PC’s ride the Newbie Railroad. Aaaall Aboooard!!  My thoughts on how new DM’s can think on their feet and avoid railroading their players.  This article is, for some reason, a big StumbleUpon traffic driver.

8.  The DM binder. A nice post on introducing new DM’s to the concept of a campaign “bible”.

9.  Adding a 3d element to Dungeon Tiles. I wrote this small article as I was experimenting with making Dungeon Tiles more versatile.  Maybe someone at Wizards was reading, and that led to their current 3d tiles stuff?  Nah. Not likely.

10.  3 Act Structure in your games. A more recent article, but one that I am really proud of, as I was able to combine my two favorite hobbies:  gaming and screenwriting.

I’m sure there are some I’m missing, but those are the ones that stand out the most in my mind.  I hope if you are new to the site you read those, and they help you out in some way.

I’ve never been the type of blogger that throws traffic numbers around, but today I’ll make an exception and throw out the top 10 articles or pages (per WordPress stats) and their views:

1. Counter, Tokens or Pogs Tutorial – 14,392

2.  Newbie Railroad – 12,831

3.  Printing maps to scale – 9441

4.  Masterplan:  Software for the 4th Ed. DM – 8365

5.  “Downloads” page – 7226

6.   Battlemap guest tutorial – 7146

7.  Battlemap guest tutorial part 2 – 7146

8. Making Dungeon Tiles guest tutorial – 6502

9. “Tutorials” page – 6061

10. Improved Initiative D&D Combat Manager – 4274

And lastly, I wanted to take the time to talk a bit about rpgKids, the rpg for little ones I recently self published. That game’s success would not have been possible without a bit of help from the fact that I had a blog to highlight it with, and the readers to download it and apparently enjoy it.  So a big thanks go out to you readers that played it when it first came out as a free download last year, and a huge thanks to those of you that have bought the new version.  I hope it is enjoyable to you and your kids.

So that’s the 300th post.  Thanks for reading and hope to see you around for the next 300!

Damn.  That’s a lofty goal.