Over in my last post on metaplot I talked about the good and bad in metaplots, how they compare to other game/IP development methods and proposed some ways they could be improved. This time around I want to develop a model for how to build a metaplot so that it supports a loyal community, a [...]
Metaplot sucks, except when it’s totally awesome. Nobody likes it and they miss it when it’s gone. It’s a pain in the ass godsend for game developers and an alienating useful tool for groups.
What What?
These reactions are nigh-incoherent yet feel genuine, mirroring the good and bad in metaplots. The bad things about metaplots — that [...]
Art isn’t always for challenging the audience, but a creative community needs that if it’s going to thrive. RPGs aren’t doing that. By “challenges,” I don’t mean Maybe old D&D rules kicked ass! or I bet we can do this without a GM! because these things don’t have wider social relevance. This also applies to [...]
Participant fudging and fiat are excellent techniques for all RPGs (and other games, but they’re really great in RPGs). People say a lot of silly things about it for three reasons:
Peer pressure.
An unacknowledged desire to dominate others through the game’s text.
A misunderstanding of how it works (which is often contrived due to the influence of [...]
The history of RPGs is the history of things you can’t do, and various strategies to veil, deny or accommodate that fact.
Players like to think they can go anywhere and do anything with their characters unless there’s a mechanism in place to solidly prevent them (and make them like it) or trick them (also, to make them [...]
To follow up on the Next Gen RPGs post I’d like to toss up a sample interface:
This is probably a Flash application. You can resize, minimize or dismiss each pane in the interface above. The book screen is actually the second screen you’d get after opening up the game, after going to your library from [...]
Today’s been an interesting one for White Wolf, CCP’s tabletop imprint. At ICC it announced that it was “freeing” (and dismantling much of) the Camarilla, developing new community and game management tools, and kinda sorta maybe not printing game books as we know them any more. Ryan Dancey was quite a bit firmer in a [...]
I recently put my homebrew SF game on hold to get back to our previous Star Wars Saga campaign. Now I like Saga in a lot of respects, but all in all I think it has too many rules, requires too many “build” style decisions and limits my ability to improvise while drawing from the [...]
I think the RPG scene is plagued with two tendencies that feed from each other, blocking gamers’ ability to get regular games off the ground, but these disguise a bigger social problem.
Gamers describe games in terms of problems, not opportunities. After all, there’s more to talk about when something bugs you. This isn’t the issue [...]
As I said in the last part of this leg of GM as God, settings are bullshit. There are no vampires and elves. Even in grounded settings, real human beings are interested in a whole bunch of ordinary things I doubt you have any interest in playing.
I don’t just mean the love and friendship themes [...]