I went to Gen Con in 2003. It was okay. I drank a lot, hung out with some cool people and took care of some business with White Wolf. Good times, but do I care about Gen Con in general?…
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I went to Gen Con in 2003. It was okay. I drank a lot, hung out with some cool people and took care of some business with White Wolf. Good times, but do I care about Gen Con in general?…
(Adapted from my post at ENWorld)
The main Nice Things post inspired threads, anger and a blog carnival about growing the hobby — and more threads and posts and such.
There’s a certain routine you need to sigh through in these discussions. Before…
Yes, last in the series, from here to here and now, next steps. Oh, there’s still plenty of room for negativity, but I think anybody who’s going to get it has taken time to look at themselves and their communities.…
So! Lots of people read and responded to Why You Can’t Have Nice Things. That means it deserves a follow up, but I can’t address individuals, so I’ll try to sort everything in to broad response categories.
We’re just resisting…
A couple of years ago I had this client — great guy, worked with him a few times. He’s a former tabletop RPG player and was really interested in bringing some of the ideas he loved from that into a…
Drama? Russell Bailey got offended; Eddy Webb backed away slowly. Or something. It all started with some horrified reactions to my positions in an extended (and in my opinion, productive) talk with Jim Henley about the decline of friendship and its effects on RPGs.
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The Purefold presentations constantly refer to a social media power law — one that resembles (and might just be) the Power Law of Participation described here. The law (really a simplification of complex trends) says that in any community:
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Over at Jim Henley’s Livejournal I made an offhand comment that many games under the “indie” banner are designed to be played by people who meet at conventions, primarily know each other online or have similar remote, vaguely suspicious relationships.…
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…
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:
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