So I was running a supers game. It was okay, but not great. I didn’t like it. I loved worldbuilding with my friends, talking about alt history and fiddling with systems, but I didn’t feel like actually running the…
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So I was running a supers game. It was okay, but not great. I didn’t like it. I loved worldbuilding with my friends, talking about alt history and fiddling with systems, but I didn’t feel like actually running the…
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.…
One of the interesting things about tabletop roleplaying is the ability to set up tensions between the game’s concepts and practical play considerations. Many tabletop gamers have a Manichean streak where something has to either cleave to the Big Idea…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…