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 […]
Blog
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, […]
Consequences as Positive Currency
The idea that Fate’s consequences are a kind of currency isn’t new. Many of you are already familiar with the -2/-4/-6 consequences approach we use and recommend, as seen in the Dresden Files RPG and other places. Along with the stress track, they add a tiny resource-management aspect to Fate, and they tie into the […]
Rating the Unratable
I think I’ve mentioned before that if you haven’t read it, Atul Gawande’s Better is a great book about how things can get systematically improved. It focuses on medicine, but it’s one of those all-purpose insightful books. Anyway, one section that really stuck with me was the Apgar score (article version here, for the curious) […]
Streamlining Snags
4e classes are interesting because, by and large, they’re pretty distinctive. There comes a point in play when you know they’re working. The Barbarian rounds a corner and becomes a damage output machine. The Warden stands his ground against an impossible foe. The Warlock kills a lot of people, really horribly. It’s the point where […]