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NewbieDM Minicast Ep. 8 is available.

May 27, 2010 by newbiedm

In this episode of the minicast I am joined by G. Dustin Snyder, Community Advocate for Organized Play at the Wizard’s of the Coast Community. He is going to walk us through the process of signing up for the D&D DM’s Rewards, which gives DMs free gifts for just signing up and running sanctioned games. […]

A simple tool for online gaming

May 12, 2010 by newbiedm

I found this neat website for those of you (like me) who may be interested in throwing down some old school D&D online gaming one day. It’s an online shareable whiteboard for use by up to 6 people. Perfect for a D&D party and a DM. The website is called Scriblink, and it works really […]

Analog Initiative Tracker for Heroic Tier

April 18, 2010 by newbiedm

If you are a newbie DM, and are having problems tracking and getting the hang of initiative management, this may be of some help. I created this “calendar” type initiative tracker to work with tokens, where you would just place a token representing characters and monsters in their appropriate squares, based on their roll. You […]

Reader Voicemail: Presenting Your Adventure

April 14, 2010 by newbiedm

I thought this voicemail would be better answered as a post, rather than on the minicast. So here goes… How a DM prepares or presents adventures is something that I am sure varies from table to table. In my particular case, and how I mentioned in our new “Dungeon Master Guys” podcast, I constantly seek […]

“The 36 Dramatic Situations” by Georges Polti

April 8, 2010 by newbiedm

“The 36 Dramatic Situations” is a 19th century book by french author Georges Polti. By analyzing Greek texts and contemporary French writings, Polti attempted to categorize every dramatic situation that might occur in a story. This list of 36 situations remains, until today, very popular among writers and storytellers. Here now are the situations: 1. […]

NewbieDM Review: Martial Flavor

March 31, 2010 by newbiedm

This review is a long time coming, and for that I apologize to Hannah Lipsky, of Chaotic Shiny Productions. She had sent me her work, Martial Flavor, for review some time ago and I put it in the proverbial backburner and it sat there longer than intended. Again, my apologies. So, with that out of […]

D&D Encounters Twitter Effects

March 25, 2010 by newbiedm

D&D Encounters is an organized play thing Wizards is doing on Wednesday nights at game stores around the country. On Twitter, they post certain effects that DM’s can grab and use at their table during the session. While I am not playing in D&D Encounters, I thought it would be kind of neat to collect […]

Ways You Can Help Your Players

March 22, 2010 by newbiedm

Chris Heard, of the wonderful, actual play Icosahedrophilia podcast, and I were talking via twitter the other day on ways a DM can help his players, and he suggested somebody should write a blog post about it. So I did. Sometimes there are things your players may forget to do that you can remind them […]

On podcasting…

March 3, 2010 by newbiedm

I have two podcast related things to share with readers of Newbiedm.com today. One is that Phil the Chatty DM, Dave Chalker from Critical Hits, and I are launching a DM related podcast. The podcast will be called “The Dungeon Master Guys” and will focus on DM issues only, which means you won’t get the […]

New DM’s: Have fun reskinning and playing with keywords

February 26, 2010 by newbiedm

One aspect of D&D 4th Ed. that I like a lot is its simplicity in letting you make the game as customized as you want, both rules wise and story/role-playing wise. The other day on twitter I went as far as calling it “possibly the most abstract D&D yet”, and some people didn’t really […]