I am not at PAX, nor am I at PAX dev. This kind of sucks. I mean, it sucks a little bit less than not being at Gencon because it’s at least _possible_ for me to go the Gencon without punching a huge hole in my life, but all the same? Sucks. In fairness, much […]
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What Else Compels are Good For
One of the curious issues I have with Aspects these days is that I almost never compel them. Not because I don’t bring their negative implications into play, but because my players are sufficiently enthusiastic about playing up the negative side themselves that I don’t even need to bother. It’s a good problem to have. […]
A Noun is a Person Place or Thing
I love the Discworld novels. They’re fantastic, and I enjoy the heck out of them, but like many fans I am partial to a particular subset of them. In my case, I’m a huge fan of the City Watch books. Nothing else comes close (except perhaps the Moist von Lipwig stuff, which I’m willing to […]
4 on 1
I had the unexpected pleasure of playing in a first edition AD&D game this past weekend. It was a long-standing game that my brother in law participates in, and they had an opening. This was pretty much the classic AD&D game in just about every way imaginable. They’d looked at other editions, played a little […]
Zooming In On Neverwinter
There is a writing technique that is commonly used when writing about a physical thing. The author starts from a very high level view, sketching a brief picture of the broader context, then steadily zooms in on the scene until focus is at the level of whatever’s being written about. Lots of novels start out […]
Jumping Turtles
I’ve been playing Bastion lately, and enjoying it very much. It’s a very pretty Xbox game with some reasonably fun gameplay and fantastic music and visuals, but what’s been keeping me hooked is the story it’s telling. Some of this is from interesting gimmicks, like a narrator who is very responsive to events in play, […]
Your Better Instincts
I admit that I’m usually all about taking advantage of your instincts to hose your players to make things more fun for them, but I want to take a second to turn that around. See, while I’ve gotten better, one of my real weaknesses as a GM is a tendency to be too nice. If […]
Stuffing the Underpants
Great comments on yesterday’s post, at least some of which speak to the subject of today’s post – what to do once you’ve got your underpants gnome plan in place. It’s all well and good for me to say “Come up with a plan, then fill in the gaps that present themselves” but it might […]
Underpants Adventures
Very interesting post about what went wrong with the Star Wars prequels that’s worth a read for writers and GMs. It boils down to a pretty simple point – if you start with a simple plot, it allows for the characters and story to grow more complex in the telling, but if you start with […]
The Grand Unified Theory of Maneuvers
This may have been covered already in some prior posts on the site, but I’ve found myself typing something like it in an email again, so I thought I’d put this out there in a post of its own: That’s the “secret” of assessment, declaration, and maneuvering, in fact — they’re all the same action, […]