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The Bastard Out of Boston and the End of the World

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 or the Big Idea has to utterly suborn itself to practical issues. To my way [...]

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 [...]

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 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), [...]

Vampire/Mage Game Postmortem

My Vampire/Mage game is done for this phase, giving me a chance to look back and think about what went right, what went wrong and how to improve play in the future.
One of the problems with the game was that I didn’t do enough prep for many sessions. I winged it too much. That leads [...]

Access to Interior Play

There was a question about this a while back.
This means that your character’s hidden motives, thoughts and feelings, as well as your plans for and feelings about the character must never *ever* be hidden from me. I demand total access to any information about your character and your play that I require with no [...]

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