Essays, actual play, theory talk, and general navel-gazing about story-focused roleplaying, aka “indie” games. And trindie. And OSR. If you’re small and scrappy, I want to talk about what you’re doing! If you’re fighting to grow, I want to talk about what you’re doing! Basically if it’s roleplaying (tabletop, freeform, larp, whatevs) and it’s not the monolith of D&D, it’s in my wheelhouse.
Last week I talked about how I’ve finally jumped into the deep end of the online roleplaying pool. The game we’re playing is Adrian Thoen’s Impulse Drive, a Powered by the Apocalypse game in the spacefaring scumbag genre. It’s the first of many games I’ve played that has really captured the kinetic romp I want… Continue reading Deep Dive: Impulse Drive
Prior to the stay-at-home orders of the past couple months, I had never played a tabletop RPG online. I blame a combination of fear and snobbery: I already hated seeing myself on screen and hearing myself on podcast recordings, and I didn’t want to have to adapt my beautiful and perfect skillset (ha). It always… Continue reading It’s Only Kinky the First Time
Last week I was struck by a deep exhaustion when I realized literally every discussion topic about roleplaying I've read in the past six months has come from the same short list for at least 20 years, and probably longer than that. Thirty? I started chatting about ttrpgs on Usenet in the early ‘90s and… Continue reading What’s It All For?
If there’s one moment in play in any tabletop game that I dread, it’s the moment a player asks “What do I know about…?” Doesn’t really matter what the topic is: ugh! I was reminded how much this sets my hackles off after a brief flirtation with The Nightmares Underneath recently. No surprise, given that… Continue reading Whadday Know?
Do you hate prepping your RPGs? I do. Well…I thought I did. Because I have many decades of play in me, I considered prep a necessary evil. Prep is necessary so you don’t have to improvise at the table. Prep as a preventive measure. It was so deeply embedded, so baked into the activity, that… Continue reading Prep 2.0
