Questing's Readings - 6/9/09

It's September and more than third of a quarter of the year has gone by. Now it's a good time to start looking back at your achievements and mistakes for this year and planning for next year's resolutions.

Speaking of looking back, this month's RPG Blog Carnival is being hosted by Johnn Four in his Campaign Mastery blog where he asks bloggers to think back about GMing mistakes that they have done and reflect upon it.

If you missed any of last month's blog post while you were away at GenCon, the roundup for last month's conventional carnival is also up at Chogwiz's Old Guy RPG Blog.

In the meantime, these are some of the readings that I've enjoyed this past week for the start of September. We have a couple of great interviews coming out of GenCon, a guide to an online gaming program and a look at monster maths in 4E

A Butterfly Dreaming
Character Development: Flashbacks
A repost on flashbacks and how to run a flashback session for your characters.

Dungeon's Master
Keith Baker Answers 13 Questions
An interview with Keith Baker on his thoughts about Eberron and some of the changes made in 4E (particularly about dragonmarks). There's a couple of juicy inside information about his upcoming novels and who Keith thought was the most worthy candidate to be sitting on the throne of Galifar.

Mike's Mind
Digital Dungeon Master: RP Tools Part 1
Digital Dungeon Master: RP Tools Part 2

A simple guide to installing MapTools, an online gametable. With instructions on how to host a game and creating tokens for combat.

Robertson Games
Differences & Direction in Dungeons and Dragons
A list of spectrums and how each edition of D&D stands between them. It's an interesting list to consider and it can be used to judge other game systems. Other DMs have already used it to judge their own personal preferences (RPG Blog II and Spirits of Eden)

RoleplayingPro
The DM's Call: Consequences
A good article that shows why everything the PCs do should have a consequence. Whether causing negative impacts to them or presenting opportunities for the DM.

Stupid Ranger
Interview: Bill Slavisek and Andy Collins from Wizards of the Coast
The Stupid Ranger crew asking them about their gaming history and career, dispensing some campaign advice and what are their favorite classes and villains. It's a little long and builds quiet a text block. I think it could have been better if they split it into 3 parts.

The Spirits of Eden
Wyatt Does Attack Math (This Can't End Well)
Wyatt Does Defense Math (Oh Lawd)
Despite his bile-filled speech about some 4E products, he does love 4E. Loves it so much that he is willing to do the math to study Monster defenses and attacks on an average PC.

Some interesting findings to be had for sure and maybe these will be addressed in future 4E products?

UncleBear
What is a Campaign?
Uncle Bear giving some definitions of what a campaign is. I really like mine to be the second one but it works out more like the third.

This could be useful in planning future campaigns to give it some structure.