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Virtual Table Tops for RPGs, in which the author explores the various remote gameplay options available out on the interwebs; which is something I've been noodling at for awhile now. Far be it from me not to make use of someone else's hard work.
Build an army of reanimated corpses to destroy your foes in this puzzle-action hybrid.
The mutant child of a Bejeweled, Edward Gorey, and (at least in my head) the Shab al-Hiri Roach.
I got stomped in a pvp match, then went back to single player to learn how to lose more slowly. Incredibly addictive and weirdly fun. I actually found myself murmuring "thank god the sun came up."
Okay, not a patch, but people make the DnD = MMORPG comparison so much, I figured one more tired joke wouldn't hurt.
Actually, it's errata and updates for all three books, enough that I hope they correct this stuff in a second printing of the 4.0 rules.
They has completely overhauled the skill challenge system in the DMG errata. All skill challenges now end with 3 failures regardless of complexity, so Complexity 5 challenges are going to be very difficult. However, they also dropped the difficulty of all skill checks by 5 (which is something I was already doing, based on the number crunching geniuses at Story-Games... you know, they don't right many crunchy games, but those guys grok dice probabilities.
Anyway: all Easy skill checks are now difficulty 5 instead of 10. Moderate skill checks are now DC 10 instead of 15, and Hard checks are now DC 15 instead of 20. This still scales up with level.
Go here, type in your name, and watch it morph into a weapon.
The premise: A GM is starting up a new game, and wants to have a world with no spiders.
Result: people make suggestions. My personal favorite is the one where Lolth the Demon Queen of Spiders has been killed, and her death took all her little eight-legged minions out with her.
The results, it appears, might be pretty catastrophic.
Spiders: We'd Probably All Be Dead Without Them
Why? Because spiders are the dominant terrestrial predators on the planet.
Why? Because there are so many of them. (An acre of English meadow in late summer has been estimated to contain more than 2 million spiders, and it's safe to assume that wetlands and undisturbed forest contain significantly more.)
Why else? They eat a lot. So what? Because they structure insect communities wherever they occur, spiders play a vital role in the terrestrial food chain. Without all those hungry, carnivorous spiders, insect populations would explode, food crops would be decimated, ecological balances would be ravaged, and humans would probably starve within a matter of months."
http://nsdl.org/resource/2200/20061002152749782T
* Spiders are the largest entirely carnivorous order of animals.
* Assuming an average consumption of 0.1 gram of prey per spider per day, the spiders in one hectare of forest would consume 47,500 kilograms of prey per year--which is equal to 47.5 metric tons of insects!
Their sheer number make spiders vital in maintaining the balance of nature. Because they structure insect communities wherever they occur, spiders play a vital role in the terrestrial food chain. Without all those hungry spiders, insect populations would explode, food crops would be decimated, and ecological balances ravaged. Humans would probably starve within a matter of months--if they hadn't already succumbed to various insect-borne diseases. No spider, incidentally, has been found to transmit disease."
http://www.amnh.org/sciencebulletins/biobulletin/biobulletin/story1073.html
The spider is really man's best friend. Imagine a world over-run with flies. Life would be intolerable! Without our friend the spider eating other insects like the fly, many serious pests would rise in number and present humankind with an incredible problem - one which would seriously affect our chances of survival. Even the good old household spider, like the little one I have here, does his part. Imagine how much it would cost to develop tiny little robots to roam over your house and clean up the maggots, eggs, flies, larva and other living things hidden away in every crack and cranny throughout your home. The spider does it all for you, and all for nothing. Most times he even has the sense to stay out of the way when you are around. So if you want to keep the real pests down, tolerate the spider a bit more in your home. If you really cannot bear to have one in the room with you, go and fetch a glass, pop it over the spider before he runs for it, and slip a postcard or stiff bit of paper under the glass to temporarily seal it in. You can then turn the glass upright and with the card or paper still held on top, take it out into the garden and let it go. One deft flick of the glass low to the ground should do it."
http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/indexmag.html?http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/articles/nitemr3.html
Ecological impact of spider predation: a critical assessment of Bristowe’s and Turnbull’s estimates.
In any case, a fun little mind-game.
In Flash, hosted here, and thus accessible anywhere. Because I am a nerd with a few minutes free time.
Waiting in my Inbox, early this morning...
Not quite the 60% discount is was on preorder, but the box set of all three core books is still 40+% less than the sticker price, and approximately half what the three books would cost, purchased separately (sorry, FLGS).
You haven't been keeping up with the exploits of D and his dad Tony? Why on earth not? Go here. Read.
Turns out two of the kid's characters can speak draconic, and they've been fighting kobolds, so the kid is making Dad translate what they're saying all the time.
At this point in the fight it was very much all over but for the agonized draconic shouting. But that, interestingly, is when things got really funny and weird.
"GGLgLGGGLGG! SSSSSSSssss ss ss ..."
"What's that mean?"
"We are done for, my brother! Let us die with honor!", I say. After all ... they're toast. Everyone knows it.
Quoth D: "Do you surrender?"
>Blink, blink<
"Uhhhh ... SSS?"
"What's that mean?"
"Uhhhh ... yes?"
So now he's got two prisoners, and I'm all like "What the heck is he going to do with prisoners? Is there going to be horrific torture involved? Is he going to wring information out of them, then slaughter them? Kids can be dark ... "
Quoth D: "Are you good now?"
>Blink, blink<
"Uh ... I don't think we're really ... uh ... good or evil. We're just sorta ... us."
"Oh. Well I've decided you're going to be good."
"But that ... that doesn't actually make us good."
"It will. I believe in you."
Wow. His major adventure-genre influences have been Fantastic Four, Naruto and Avatar ... but I didn't realize he'd actually been listening.
So he took them back to Winterhaven. He said "You're going to live here now, and you're going to be good." He spent all afternoon talking to extremely mistrustful villagers, convincing them to give these two guys a chance.
In the interest of having chances to, y'know, fight (which D definitely agrees is a lot of fun) we established that he'd gotten lucky and captured the only two non-evil kobolds in the whole tribe, and that the rest of them were terribly evil right down to the core and needed to be killed with extreme death.
D listened to that and said "Yeah, because otherwise we'd have to rescue everybody, and I don't have enough legos for that."
Can't. Stop. Grinning.
Okay, so here's what happened.
Tycho and Gabriel from Penny Arcade, plus Scott Kurtz from PvP, got together with one of the R&D guys from Wizards of the Coast, who runs a DnD game for them.
They recorded the whole thing. Plus, Gabe and Scott drew some scenes from the adventure.
So what the teeming public gets out of it: the whole adventure has been recorded as eight podcasts, plus funny comics.
But that's not all!
See, Tycho plays d20 all the time. Scott hasn't played in years, but did at one time. Gabe has never played DnD or any other tabletop RPG at all.
And the GM is really good and takes his time explaining everything, so you find out about the game's system in a way that's really natural -- the guy is REALLY good explaining the game.
And you have players who are just kind of excellent to listen to.
The first session is here.
The second session is here.
You have to create a login to the Wizard's web site to see the stuff and download the podcasts. If you have the least little interest in the game, at all, this is how I would suggest you learn about the game, before even looking at the rules, or buying them.
I have to admit, I've been looking over the rules for the levels 21 to 30, the "Epic" ranges, and thinking that those rules represent exactly the direction our long-time DnD game went... an ogre warrior gathering an army to become a battle master... or a cleric on the way to demigod-hood, for example (she gave birth her deity's son, after all)... it's a shame these weren't the rules we were using back then. We would have had somewhere to go.
Dungeons and Dragons, 4th Edition.
I'm sorry, I'm just hearing too much good stuff about it. The indie roleplaying community is going gah-gah over it. "If old-school basic Dungeons and Dragons were rewritten by Days of Wonder, after they'd played Spirit of the Century for six months."
It's meant to be a high magic game... crazy high magic like rivers of flowing earth and villages of dragonblood humanoids. Dunno if I love that, but ...
Eh. I dunno. I mention it mostly because of the great reactions from people whose opinions and gaming tendencies I frequently agree with, and from this actual-play write up, in which the gamer's seven year old son plays through the first DnD 4th edition module, simultaneously running five characters, keeps all the rules straight (even for Attacks of Opportunity), and outmaneuvers his dad.
I confess: the battlefield rules sound really fun.
I'm not sure who this mad, mad genius is, but I can't argue with the results. Boing Boing linked to his (?) steampunk Justice League (and they are yummy -- I *adore* Hawkgirl), but take a look at the Star Wars and Venture Brothers figures as well.
Holy crap. Holy CRAP.
Okay, the animation isn't great, but the voices are pretty good. Why am I so excited?
Here's the story with Dragonlance. Basically, a group of DnD players back in the days of ADnD, working at TSR, ran a campaign. The two authors who were writing the books basically statted out the characters from their story and everyone divvied them up. A huge amount of stuff that happened in that game made it into the story, but as importantly, the idea of the story superseding the basic DnD practices of "kill it and take their stuff" infused the campaign.
It didn't hurt that the books are actually pretty good.
When the books were released, TSR also released a series of campaign modules designed to let anyone play those characters through, essentially, the story of the books, with some extra stuff that you only see alluded to in the books. It was something like 14 modules, I think -- an epic, epic kind of story. Huge.
But more importantly, a lot of the players in my group (this was back in high school) read the books and were really jazzed about the characters and the story. They saw what the characters were doing, they saw what happened to them, and what kind of choices they made -- more realistic, less 'loot it!' And that informed their play.
In short, that was the first game I ran where people weren't so much playing a group, tabletop version of Gauntlet, and started roleplaying.
The story was a horrible, horrible railroad from one end to the other, I'm sure -- no way it could be otherwise, really, when you're trying to follow the basic storyline of a book -- but it was a golden, special time in my memory, and I preordered the movie this morning.
The Zombie Fluxx card games combines a great love and a great hate of mine.
Love: Zombies. Man, I likes me some zombies.
Hate: Fluxx. I'm goal oriented enough that the constantly shifting 'win' requirements in Fluxx actually give me a headache (and remind me of a few too many bad I.T. projects).
I'm torn. I want to order a deck, but it might only be so I can set it on fire.
From one of the game's author's a great tweak to the phases in SotC character generation to move away from a time-oriented series of phases and instead use a more organic series of questions to find answers for:
* Who are you?
* Who are you connected to?
* What's your big issue?
* What kind of situations do you see yourself being involved in?
it's very very good.
Don't get me wrong -- I love the phases of character creation in the standard Spirit of the Century rules, and I've used them both in a standard game and an Amber game with good success, but the phases themselves are pretty closely tied to the post-Great War setting. This tweak allows you to 'fit' character generation into virtually any setting with no problems at all -- it has all the Aspecty-goodness of SotC with some great flavor added from things like Primetime Adventures "issues" and even the old-school Amber questionnaires. Good stuff.
Don't believe me? Peruse the Jonathan Coulton - Listening Suggestions.
I'm going to buy, like... everything on his site. So much fun.
DM of the Rings XIV:Boring Distractions
D&D is a sort of simulation. A simulation of living in a fantasy world where the creator of the universe is frequently disorganized, highly distractable, and alarmingly vague on the rules of the universe he’s trying to run.
*embarrassed*
Theory From the Closet: Interview with Fred Hicks
This is a really good, fairly long interview. Clyde does some really great interviews, and I enjoyed this one immensely. I'm also not done with it yet because it is, as I said, long, but it really offers some great insight into the design philosophy behind SotC.
"Story Game" (400 page, hard-bound, beautiful, hard-crunch, sci-fi blaster, smacking) Burning Empires won Origins' RPG of the year award, beating out Exalted, 2nd Edition and the new RuneQuest.
There is a vanishingly small difference between a mainstream RPGs and indie productions in terms of print quality (since most use Indie Press, Lulu, or another POD), and has been evident in the last couple years, no difference at all in quality of design.
Via ***Dave, Unique, Unusual, and invented names of 2007 & 2008 may make you laugh out loud at nine out of every ten (the tenth being semi-reasonable), but if nothing else they give you a pile of NPC names. (Which you still won't remember, AND can't spell!)
Story Games for Everybody - I'm not enjoying running Primetime Adventures.
I've run PtA a couple of times and played it a couple of times. Whenever I've played it, I've had a ball. Whenever I've run it, I've had very mixed results, but I've never actually enjoyed it.
Great thread of advice for a long-time traditional-RPG GM who wants to love running PTA as much as he enjoys playing it.
I've talked (a lot) in the past about running games that are essentially built on nothing but Bangs (or as SotC would have it, decision points). In (very) brief, this is a mode of GMing in which (most commonly) you come up with dilemmas that the character has to deal with, somehow. That's actually simplifying it: Bangs are about creating a situation in which the reaction says something interesting about the character.The elements of this situation (and this is important) have no 'right' choice in mind.
In game, play progresses up to this situation, then the situation is presented, then the player(s) look at their options (probably inventing new options as well), and make a decision. We all (even the player) learn a little something new about that character in a backhand way, and play continues in the direction their choice and actions dictate. *
I haven't always explained the technique very well, despite using it pretty much exclusively for a number of years. Thankfully, someone else stepped in to talk about it.
Mike Holmes is one of the best GMs I've had the pleasure of playing it, and he is something of an expert in this style of play. During a recent discussion of 'what a Bang is,' someone asked Mike to start up a new thread in which he breaks down all the different kinds of Bangs you can bring into your game.
He took up the gauntlet here: Story Games for Everybody - Bang Types. Good stuff, presenting even more variations on the theme that I plan to shamelessly rip off, because there's a BUNCH I hadn't really considered.
Continue reading "Bang bang bang" »
So, I was at the Forge forum, and reading down the forum thread: [Forge Midwest]Interview with Ron Edwards, and promised myself to listen to it, cuz I met both the participants for the first time at the con, and that was really cool, and apparently the interview is good also.
Then, down toward the end, there's this:
We all wonder, ‘why are you [story-game proponents] so pissed at systems like White Wolf? They inspire rich story in their setting and flavor text, and the rules are simple enough to get out of our way and let us tell our story.” And it becomes a badge of honor to say, “there are lots of times we don’t even ever roll dice, all night long!”
Hey, I’ve been that guy and part of me still is. But the thing is, what I think The Forge and Ron and so many others who’ve been growing the story games movement over the past seven years, what they’re saying is, “If you have to get your system out of the way in order to go into story mode, then you need a new system that actually can be used IN story mode.”
And I look at the last couple posts I've made and yeah... that's at least part of what I'm saying.
John Harper (author of Agon) is playing in a Spirit of the Century game and hacking in some things that I really find useful and interesting. over at The Mighty Atom: SotC Hack is a post about tweaking the Stress/Consequences bars to make Consequences happen more and generally speed up combats a bit. It's a direct yoink from the upcoming Dresden Files rules.
Actually, he's got quite a few insightful SotC tweaks discussed over there (and Fred Hicks is conferring with him in the comments), so it's worth checking the whole thing out: The Mighty Atom.
Television Without Pity (not really) presents a recap of the first half of the two hour series premiere of Ill Met by Gaslight.
Nineteen bloody pages. I'm knackered.
Spirit of the Century is a great game for high-adventure pulp hero gaming. It's not so appropriate for Chandleresque pulp-noir games. Fly From Evil, however, is going to be six kinds of awesome for that kind of game, and I intend to own it, oh yes.
Just as soon as it's out.
[Breaking the Ice] - You proved me wrong!
When I initially heard about Breaking the Ice however-long-ago that was, my immediate gut reaction was "Oh, come ON! That won't be fun!" I don't know what it was about the game (or rather, the idea of the game) that rubbed me the wrong way. But there it is: me, monstrously predisposed to hating Breaking the Ice.
The flip side of have strong gut reactions to lots of things is that you eventually learn that your gut isn't always right. So, when I had the opportunity to try the game out, I did.
It was really, really fun.
Someday, I hope to get a chance to play that game. Until then, I'll just carry it around and reread it. :)
The boys of the Durham Three go super-old school with a game of Twilight 2000 and discuss what about the game is definitive old-school and what makes that awesome.
Quote of the podcast: "I just don't have a problem beating up feral children... in a game. You put a feral child in front of me in a game, I'm not going to feel bad about blowing him up with his own grenade."
I was going to do two posts this morning; one about this, and one about someone using Spirit of the Century to run a Classic Traveler game, which is cool.
However, this is an important link, and I don't want to distract from it.
Vincent's Roleplaying Theory, Hardcore
This single page of posts, written by that Dogs in the Vineyard guy over the course of months, comprises the most lucid, easy to read, approachable discussion of 'indie' rpg theory you'll ever find, period. Everyone who's ever even kind of sorta looked sideways at all those Forge neologisms or dealt with one of those hippie games I play should read it. Everyone should read it.
More importantly, everyone SHOULD read it. Read, especially, "A Small Thing About Suspense" and "A Small Thing About Death" (I'm looking at you, Tombstone RPG!)
But read it all. It's all good.
Remi, from the Durham Three podcast, posts some actual-play on Primetime Adventures, played at Camp Nerdly (which ran the same weekend I was all warm and sunny in Florida, so I don't really feel bad for missing it.) [Camp Nerdly - PTA] Sexitricity.
Why am I linking it? Because in one part of the thread, Remi breaks down how he handles the Session Pitch -- he said earlier that he disallows any negative input at that point in the game, and someone asks for more info, and he brings it:
First I ask everyone for something that's gotten them jazzed in the last week or two. An idea, a TV show, a piece of music, whatever. I make it clear that the show is going to be a synthesis of what everyone's excited about, and that I'll be the one doing most of the formal synthesizing. I go around the table in whatever order people want to go. For this session Duty, The Bene Gesserritt, Babarella, and the Preacher comic book series were all mentioned.
Joshua mentioned the Bene Gesserritt and someone immediately picked up and said "Oh! We could be, like, the companions in Firefly!" and someone else said, "The companions were kind of cool, but the lame thing about them was . . ." and I stopped it cold, insisting the person only talk about what they liked about the companions, not disliked. The pitch session could have degenerated right there into people sniping one another's ideas, which when you're gathering material is death. The player immediately turned around and said what he'd like to see out of a companion-style idea, and we built from there.
This is something I wish I'd read before the "Tarot Game" Mortal Coil session. As that did not happen, I'll have to settle for enforcing that guideline unswervingly in future play, in any game, even in-game (especially with strong narrative-switching like PTA) -- a kind of "never say no to the scene" improve acting rule/technique.
GameCraft :: View topic - The Disruption Hourglass of Death (table rule, any game system)
Anyway, I do love our style of roleplaying, and it's just a big habit of mine to, even in the middle of a serious moment, to break it up with a bad pun, or a joke, or a double-entendre or something. Rick has recently been doing the same thing, and even more so. This hasn't disrupted things to the point of, "Shut up, you dick, you're breaking my concentration!" or anything like that. But we all agree, even the comment-giver, that:
* Levity is AWESOME, and welcome in certain amounts.
* However, busting caps right in the middle of a dramatic moment with a pun can really take the spotlight from them.
* And more often than not, since the mood has a 'crack' in it, it's very easy to follow it up with more jokes (Rick says something funny, Quintin follows up on it, I get in, and 5 minutes later we're like, "OK, what were we doing again?")
* Which leads to derailing the drama.
One crack every 5-10 minutes or so? Harmless.
However, we know ourselves better, and know that that first crack usually starts a chain reaction which derails the discsussion or roleplaying moment.
I'll simply point out that the group Andy describes in the post sounds a LOT like the local Denver group, where one joke inevitably leads to another; or where one quote from a movie inevitably leads to another quote (or, more inexplicable, the SAME one, repeated, as though to confirm we heard).
The Bringing Down the Pain "Group" rules from the Finnish version of TSOY, translated back into English. It's worth noting that the guy who translated the game is also a very good rules wonk and tweaked things here and there in the rules, so seeing his version of the rules are really interesting and often enlightening.
At any rate, it's not that his version of the Group BDtP rules are different than the English version, they're just looking at the whole situation, and explaining it, from an very different angle (134 degrees rotated horizontally, 32 degrees vertically :). It might be useful to get your head around it.
Before I head off to Chicago, a quick link to a post that starts out asking [TSoY] Refresh: with who?, and in the replies turns into a great dissection of what Refreshment scenes are FOR -- what they accomplish in the story, and why they really aren't about conflicts...
except when they are. Good story-stuff, all around.
Funniest Machinima video I've seen in awhile, even if you've never seen WoW. Great spin on a classic Muppet bit.
Or rather, superscience: how to run Venture Brothers style adventures using InSpectres.
The Ballad of Black Mesa makes me want to go buy Half-life 2.
This weekend, Kate's in town and I wanted to have a social kind of gaming thing -- while both she and I game, we really haven't done much gaming together at all -- basically two games I've run had a few too many players and were both kind of chaotic (either as a result of the group size, or intentionally, or both).
So anyway, due to the super-creative nature of the player's we'd be doing this with, and the fact that the my regular group's history involves a fair amount of diceless stuff, I decided on running Mortal Coil, which I've been excited to run, and seeing what happened.
The problem: I haven't actually run MC before.
The solution: test run with two of my 'regular' players (Dave and Margie) to go through the whole 'pitch session', character creation, and a sample conflict to see where the hitches and questions arose.
The result: [AP] From the Casebook of Donne & Donne, Detectives -- lots of fun and, as you can see from my post to the Forge, lots of rules questions.
The whole thing DID prompt me to go back to the Mortal Coil section of RandomWiki though, and reread MortalCoil - Conflict Examples. These were all written by the game's author; I thought they were cool and useful before I'd run the game -- having now run it, I think they're damned near invaluable.
NearbyGamers -- a gamer locator, since FindPlay doesn't exactly... umm... work. Right now.
Minion Cards!
Minions, being the salt and bone of Spirit of the century, need heavy use and lots and lots of variation. For this I think Minion Cards are good help for hard-pressed Game Masters and the reason for this Thread.
I'm such a visual person. It's totally stuff like this that gets me revved up to run or play in a game. MAN this would be cool! I want to engage in wrestling and fisticuffs with Ape-man Scientists!
((With thanks to Andy Kitkowski for the post title.))
How... interesting.
Wizards of the Coast is offering a limited supply of advanced reading copies of:
Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress
A Girl’s Guide to the Dungeons & Dragons Game
By Shelly Mazzanoble
With tongue-in-cheek humor and plenty of self-mockery, Shelly Mazzanoble chronicles her unexpected descent into the world of Dungeons and Dragons. Shelly’s a girlie-girl through and through, but when a friend asks her to join his D&D game as an 134-year-old sorceress named Astrid Bellagio, she agrees, never expecting to actually like it. In spite of all the stereotypes—or maybe because of them—she actually finds herself getting game.
Part Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging, part D&D for Dummies, this book lays out how to create a character, make D&D-themed snacks (Magic Missile Meatballs, anyone?) and play the game, all the while taking a light-hearted look at the myths and realities of gamer stereotypes. For teen girls who love reading fantasy, for librarians running gaming clubs, or for those of you who want to figure out how to start one, here’s your stepping stone to a fun, rewarding, and totally geek-chic experience at the library, at school, or at home.
Coming September 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7869-4726-3
Nonfiction—YA to adult
Advance Ordering
Author Bio:
Shelly Mazzanoble believes her childhood was too functional to become a really good writer, so she has decided to go insane. She likes to think of herself as the Snow White of Seattle, living among loads of personified inanimate objects and imaginary friends, including her teddy bear Pooh and her condo, Betty. When not playing with and feeding her ghost dog tuna sandwiches from Subway, Shelly is busy fending off slander lawsuits from family and editing her collection of short stories about a girl who lives in Seattle with loads of imaginary friends and ghost dog. Shelly loves binge-eating, over-exercising and HGTV.
I'd almost buy the book on the bio alone.
Marvel's Civil War storyline (which directly addresses things like 9/11 and the Patriot Act) makes a pretty bold move. (Huge spoilers if you haven't been keeping up with the story, but plan to read it later.)
I found the article pretty interesting for a lot of reasons: it talks about the way a story for a supers character can develop, why certain things sort of *need* to happen, and it involves one of my personal favorite characters in comics (along with Wolverine and Spidey).
Related to that last post: steampunk magazine - putting the punk back into steampunk
Before the age of homogenization and micro-machinery, before the tyrannous efficiency of internal combustion and the domestication of electricity, lived beautiful, monstrous machines that lived and breathed and exploded unexpectedly at inconvenient moments. It was a time where art and craft were united, where unique wonders were invented and forgotten, and punks roamed the streets, living in squats and fighting against despotic governance through wit, will and wile.
Even if we had to make it all up.
Also Steampunk Rayguns!
Have Games Will Travel: Focuses specifically on the responsibilities of players to engage in the game and shout out when they're not having fun. Long broadcast, but good stuff.
The Durham 3 talk about Secrets in Gaming -- very specifically, in the first couple minutes they talk about secrets in Shadow of Yesterday, which makes it REALLY relevant for the players in the Petrana game. To whit: if you have a 'big secret thing' that you're character's all about, and you don't tell anyone about it, there's no way to get awarded for it by the game system, which is how 'big things my character is all about' are measured.
Just in general, though, I think it's an excellent discussion of how to HAVE secrets as character, NOT have them as players, and still ENJOYING them in the game.
Generally, as a 'nothing up my sleeve' player/GM, I like this approach a lot, I support it -- I like having that kind of open discussion and open work on character Secrets -- we're using that level of openess in The Mountain Witch, to an extent, and I think it helps everyone socket into the game. Also, discusses GM-secrets and how to approach that.
It's just a good podcast. Recommended.
Playing, designing, and respecting other players with kick-butt characters, Using Questions to help your game, and Good Sentences
There's some good stuff in there, especially in the part about making a bad-ass character, giving other people in the group time to shine, and respecting the niches that other people 'have' in a game.
Beat This Caption (Stormtroopers edition)
"Luckily for these guys, being in their thirties and still living in their parent's basement gave them plenty of experience of holding their own poles."
Son of Kryos Podcast #27: Given everyone screen time (an ongoing concern of mine). Playing RPGs online, such as over IM, E-mail, and Forums (something I'm doing right now with Mountain Witch). Plus what to do when you pick up a game that you've not played in a long time (something that comes up alllllll the time). There's just not anything in there that isn't useful or relevant to me right now.
Have you never GM'd? Have you GM'd only a little? Have you just be kinda curious about GMing and, along those lines, GMing indie hippy games like Primetime Adventures or The Mountain Witch?
Are you a vet GM with lots of 'trad' experience, looking to spread the authority of the GM around a little bit, or just get a little more 'play' time?
Read this thread: Story Games for Everybody - Calling all Non-GM's -- it's a good poll of folks who don't usually GM who have tried out the reins with indie/hippy games of various kinds, what they've found they've liked and don't like. Good, good stuff.
My RPG flaws... people talking about their personal/gaming flaws in RPG-expressed terms. Funny, and very very recognizable.
Matt sez: We playtested Galactic again and it was awesome!
Holy cripes it sounds like he really got the game humming. It barely sounds like the same animal -- DEFINITELY sounds like he dropped the less-important cruft.
Story Games for Everybody - Bang!: A Roleplaying "Gateway" Game: Great discussion, full of observations I agree with. :)
Looking forward to some more Bang-play in the future, hopefully pulling in the Dodge City expansion (it's got Bibles!).
Gametable: shared whiteboard/mapping/tactical space, plus die-rolling. Perfect tool to run alongside Skype, when your players are geographically dispersed.
BibliOdyssey: Illustrations from old books.
That's all it is, and it is mighty.
No-prep, quick-start play using the 400+ pulp extravaganza, Spirit of the Century? Yes.
I envy Paul Tevis' upcoming gaming schedule. (Have Games, Will Travel #79)
How do you take an already great game and awesomeate it? Jungle Speed: Flower Power -- The game comes in a tin replica of a VW MiniBus and the totem is a plastic stool.
strange maps, a fun blog with a ton of interesting bits on it, complete with -- of course -- maps. Maps of the planet where most of the Flash Gordon action took place. Maps illustrating where the phrase "beyond the pale" comes from.
All in all, good stuff.
Before the dawn of Time, all the creatures of the world came together for a great competition. The benefit to the winners were many, the most obvious being the honor due the greatest of all creatures. In return, the mightest participants in the competition had to agree to protect the weakest for all eternity.
Cats win.
Humans come in dead last.
The result: Cat.
How do you take a lame 80's cartoon and make it incredibly awesome? Here's one way: |
