James D'Amato

Just a super useful, incredibly accessible, and also deeply informative all at the same time. D'Amato manages to draw together all these different parts of storytelling theory, improvisational theory, and practical solutions to figure out both how you want to play, how you can better your play with others, and how you can turn your tabletop roleplaying into the kind of narrative play that makes popular shows like The Adventure Zone (and D'Amato's own show, One Shot) so compelling.

Really show more strongly encourage folks looking to get more out of their roleplaying, or even just explore other possibilities for telling stories at the table, to check this book out! show less

Just a really fun book that can be useful for both your RPG characters and also just like writing exercises to better know and flesh out characters! D'Amato does an amazing job of asking these really, really insightful questions that strike at the heart of knowing more, and strikes the perfect balance of serious and also silly. Probably my favorite exercises in the book include building a familiar/mount/apprentice, where you are forced through the exercise mechanics to build a balanced (and show more therefore more likely to be fleshed out) character for yours to interact with. Some of the charts I found a little confusing, but otherwise I think this is a really handy book for any writer or roleplayer to keep around! show less

This is a decent guide for new game masters that emphasizes the shared storytelling aspect of tabletop role-playing games, namely that the players and the game master are telling the story together and that even though the GM is doing most of the worldbuilding and session prep, they are not just there in service of the players (and they’re not there to play against the other players); they have their own wants and needs, and the game should be fun for everyone. I’ve watched a lot of show more YouTube videos about D&D, as well as several actual plays, so a lot of the advice in here wasn’t really new to me, but it was useful to have in one place. I also liked the inclusion of some GM tools for helping player characters develop backstories and become more involved in roleplaying, and helping GMs devise plot beats (which feels like the hardest part of the campaign running for me). I’m looking forward to someday trying out this advice to run at least a one-shot! show less

Possibly an overly generous 4 stars, but I enjoyed the variety of prompts available, the fact that you can take or leave whatever prompts you wish, and the fact that there is a section of prompts to be used for high-level characters. It's easy to devise prompts for characters of lower levels, but it's also fun to flesh out details for characters you've lived with for a long time. At least I imagine it would be. I haven't even played a campaign yet!