A really important element of an RPG session or group is the social contract: the rules, explicit or not, between the people in the room about how you’re going to play and how you’re going to treat each other. For … Continue reading
Tag Archives: social contract
Last month, I got the chance to game with what I still consider my weekly group. Most of the time, I’m approximately 12 time zones away from them while they’re gaming. This makes it very difficult to join in to … Continue reading
I’ve only played a few games that included dedicated social combat mechanics. And I’ve played even fewer that had social combat mechanics that actually seemed to work in play. Even when the mechanics made sense in themselves, the actual play … Continue reading
A lot of games, Blade & Crown included, have a specific statement that players should only roll for success on task attempts when there’s actually a chance of failure. If a halfway-competent sword-fighter is trying to hit a rock that’s … Continue reading
When Ryuutama was being Kickstarted and it was sold as “Miyazaki-style fantasy”, I was pretty much sold right away. Hayao Miyazaki is very possibly my favorite director; Laputa City in the Sky is one of my favorite movies; Valley of … Continue reading
I’ve been running this quite a bit at recent cons. It’s a lot of fun. We ended up with a world with some pretty weird physics: light moves in discrete packets, sound is faster than light, gravity is bouncy and … Continue reading
Following InSpectres, this was the second game I ran at CotN 2015. After last year’s game, I thought a longer, more in-depth palette would help clarify things somewhat, so I let the declarations go on until everyone was satisfied, not … Continue reading
So have I told you about my favorite Champions character? Well, third favorite actually, after The Human Cheese Grater and Bituminous Man, but he’s really my favorite in some ways because of the awesome time I, um, the time where … Continue reading
Spell effects in Blade & Crown are intentionally unquantified. As I’ve said before, I like to keep magic mysterious, powerful and rare, and I think keeping it unquantified helps preserve mystery. Once you know that a fireball will emit 0.015625m3 … Continue reading
The next, second, and last, panel I was on at Convergence 2014. The topic was pretty similar to last year’s “I’m Getting Too Old to Find Time to Game”, so we were a little worried about repeating territory already trod. … Continue reading