Treasure Tables

Via Twenty-Sided I ran across this blog which is pretty-much devoted to helping GM's improve their skillz. This is pretty close to being my favorite (maybe only) topic of conversation with my non-Objectivist friends, and just from skimming the front page of the blog I found several tips that I will be considering further. Can you say gold mine?

Running a role-playing game is like any other complex social activity (running a small business, starting a club) that involves a small group of people with a single goal. It requires a lot of organization, applied philosophy and psychology, and VERY good problem-solving skills. A lot of games crash and burn when the GM fails in one of these or a myriad of other areas. A friend of mine sometimes asks why people keep gaming if most games are a disaster. He supposes that people practice selective-forgetting so that they don't feel they've wasted the time on doing something that wasn't actually fun.

I think it's the opposite: that a good game, properly done, is so much fun that you're willing to put up with all the other crap in order to experience it. It's kind of like sports: to an outsider it looks like the players spend a lot of time doing the same old not-very-interesting things over and over. But the moments of pure awesome drama make up for it.