The Character Arc advancement system, one of the more notably post-trad mechanisms of this Invisible Sun game I’m running at home, has me thinking about flags. That is, the stuff the players share with the table explicitly as “yes, this, I want more of this thing.” It’s a fundamentally authorial tool. Anyway, our current game’s… Continue reading Raise a Flag
It was my 50th birthday last week, so here are 50 lessons I’ve learned about roleplaying. Some of them might be short lessons! If one of these jumps out as interesting, let me know and I’ll write a longer piece about it. You can’t fix real-world problems between players in your make-believe space.Enthusiasm will paper… Continue reading 50 Lessons About Roleplaying
My buddy Jay and I were speculating (well, dishing, complaining, bemoaning) on the Slack today about what it is that leads a player to be a lone wolf at the table. I'm not even sure this is an "indie" or storygame topic so much as a fact of life at many tables. Without even a… Continue reading A very short post about lone wolves
The greatest gaming lab ever created is the Las Vegas casino industry. That lab's most significant finding is that humans crave two things in games: pattern completion and intermittent rewards. I've been thinking lately about how my favorite games leverage both of those monkey-level impulses. In particular, I've been thinking about how the very best… Continue reading Pattern Completion and Intermittent Rewards
Last Tuesday we played our fourth session of Forbidden Lands. My heart was -- is -- so heavy. But on we played. Last week I decided to go all-in on FL's procedural generation and ditch everything attached to the Raven's Purge campaign. It eliminates my prep time and lets me discover the world alongside the players. That real-time discovery… Continue reading Fiddling While Rome Burns or Drawing the Magic Circle Anew (probably both: Forbidden Lands session 4)
