We started playing Nathan Paoletta’s Imp of the Perverse last week. It’s a funky, specific horror game that evokes Edgar Allan Poe vibes in 1830s-1850s Jacksonian America. Playing the first session reminded me about how hard I find conflict resolution games. Imp of the Perverse is squarely in that camp of design. Conflict resolution is… Continue reading Conflict Resolution is Indie Gaming on Hard Mode
One thing this pandemic year is teaching me is the pleasure and necessity of longer-term play. Because the quality of roleplaying has, in my experience, been diminished – playing via video is both lo-fi and exhausting – I try to make up for it with quantity. We’re several months into an Impulse Drive campaign with… Continue reading In It For the Long Haul
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
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
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
