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 […]
Rob Donoghue
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 […]
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 […]
The Meek Shall Inherit The Tabletop
One of the most important lessons I learned from MUSHing (for the unfamiliar, think of it as LARPing online) is the power of weakness. People play games looking for chances to be awesome, but in a game where you’re interacting with other players, that creates few opportunities, because everyone else would like to be awesome […]
Keeping 4e’s Skin
First, here’s an important qualifier. I like 4e a lot. I think the combat is a ton of fun, and it’s full of good ideas, so please do not take what is about to follow as a broad criticism of 4e. It’s not. It’s a solution to a problem I wrestle with at my own […]
Leveling Up To 1
There was a great discussion on twitter yesterday about what might go into a hypothetical RPG for new players based on changing 4e or Pathfinder. Lots of good ideas, but it also reminded me of another idea that I’ve been sitting on for a while, one that puts 4e through a lens of Harry Potter […]
The Gamer’s Choice
I’m on my second playthrough of Dragon Age 2, and I’m trying to make it end differently than it did my first time, because while I “won” the game, I was unhappy with many of the events surrounding the endgame, and I have a very strong sense that at least some of it is a […]
Pulling Teeth
More on lateral connections is coming, but I got sidetracked by a thought this weekend. Someone on twitter was talking about bringing “Roleplay” oriented mechanics, like Aspects, into 4e, but was worried that getting his players to RP would be like pulling teeth. I sympathize with this a great deal, so I just wanted to […]
What Not to Write
Thinking about other characters and how they can drive play lead me back to a thought that lives in the same orbit as the thinking in my Getting Villainy Done post. The hang up I’ve been running into is this: games are full of things that are _interesting_, but just because something is interesting as […]