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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 [...]

GM as God 4 . . . ish: More on the Land of Miracles

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 [...]

GM as God Part 3: Shatner on the Mount

Oh boy.
This one was inspired by a Youtube video. It’s extremely silly and incredibly nerdy, and I may not be able to communicate my message because of it, but what the hell: at least it’ll be good for a laugh.
I want you to watch a video where William Shatner talks about Star Trek V.

Are you [...]

GM as God, Part 2.5: Bang!

My last post in the GM as God series was a little too abstract so I want to elaborate a little by talking about an example of it succeeding in one of my own games. So:
Bang!
I said this one word in 2002 to depict a critical event in one of my Mage: The Ascension sessions [...]

GM as God, Part Two: Information and Revelations

One of the most difficult tasks for any GM is to fully integrate the players’ character portrayals with the world. This can be a deeply hidden problem because groups tend to get right to how everyone gets along instead of exploring root issues. It might generate animosity. We might end up talking about “dysfunctional relationships” [...]

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 [...]

GM as God, Part Zero: Introduction

It’s easy to hate the GM. It’s a cheap and easy way to look clever – has been for the history of the hobby. One of the first things any would-be game design revolutionary does is alter or eliminate the job. These are shallow, reflexive reactions, but they’re also understandable. A really bad GM breaks [...]

Back!

Many things have happened. For a while I experimented with just posting gaming stuff to my livejournal instead to save time, but I got email asking where newer updates were. So here we are — and I’ll be answering an email this time.
“Dicework” (who apologizes for his/her English — it’s a second language for him/her), [...]

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