RPG Culture | Mobunited.com

RPGs and Art That Challenges

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 [...]

Fudging, Fiat and the Regulation of Desire

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 [...]

You Can’t Do That in RPGs: a History

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 [...]

You Can’t Always Get What You Want (Rules-Wise)

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 [...]

All Talk, No Rock, No Friends

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 [...]

Phantasm: My Local RPG Con

Phantasm is my local convention. It’s a great get together: a small convention in one room, focused on roleplaying games. There are other games there, but RPGs, rather than being the sideshow, are the main dish. I’m not a big fan of game conventions, but I’ve warmed up to them mostly because I get to [...]

The Old School, Smiting It Hip and Thigh

I have mixed feelings about the Old School.
I’m talking about the movement to return to earlier versions of D&D. I’ve long been interested in older versions of games, particularly elements that fall by the wayside as design trends change. I’m also skeptical of the notion that games get objectively “better.” When OSRIC came out I [...]

GM As God, Part One: Three Ways to Use Your Omniscience

So, here’s part one of the GM as God series. This article is pragmatic and tip-filled. I’m going to jump around between straightforward business and the Art, though.
Let’s get started.
Though the forceful GM looms large in the imagination like a petulant god, the truth is that many GMs don’t use force wisely. GMs have access [...]

Archives

Posts by Category

Recent Updates

Malcolm Sheppard on Twitter