In May, I got to go to WisCon again. (Recovering took a while, thus not getting around to posting last month.) There was a lot of great gaming programming, including some very fun and mind-expanding conversations. One thing that kept … Continue reading
Tag Archives: theory
Imagine that someone wrote a travel guide to the US with the power to shape reality. Whatever the authors write is the way reality is, forever and ever. Imagine that that travel guide was only 50 pages long. The authors … Continue reading
Why does Traveller’s Imperium have a Scout Service? This is a question that has bothered me for a long time. The Imperium, in its most common iteration, is more than a thousand years old. There isn’t a star system that … Continue reading
There’s this persistent notion that goes around that games that play faster are better. Games that require a long time commitment, the argument seems to go, are wastes of time. If you spend more than a few moments on things … Continue reading
Another passing thought, inspired by conversation elsenet: When players tend to turn every offhandedly-mentioned NPC into the most important thing, pretty often it’s not because they like latching onto insignificant details and running off to do random things. Instead, it’s … Continue reading
Another observation brought on by gaming with my ongoing Blade & Crown group: It can be quite fun to have players choose the combination of characteristic and skill with which they’re doing a given skill roll. B&C is meant to … Continue reading
Cyberpunk 2020 introduced me to the concept of the medical campaign, where the PCs are medics. They probably all share an ambulance, and go around saving people from disease and injury and whatnot. For some reason, this always struck me … Continue reading
How to actually form games, schedule them, publicize them, registered for them, and (when necessary) cancel or communicate further about them is a huge problem for a gaming con — probably the single biggest one. When do games run? One … 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
Joss Whedon has had a lot of influence on geeky storytelling, I think. Not just with his particular cleverness with dialogue, or in his original (though in their own way trope-laden) characterizations. The way I’m thinking of is in how … Continue reading