Something that occurred to me just this year: having an encyclopedic knowledge of RPGs hasn’t actually made me happier. In fact it’s probably made me less happy participating in my hobby, because I don’t share the same assumptions as the players with whom I spend most of my time. It’s given me all the tools… Continue reading The Usual Suspects
Part 4 of ? in the Cultivating a Storytelling Mindset series My home group has been playing UFO Press' Shattered City the past several months. It’s a setting-intensive game where the collaborative world-building is a major selling point of the exercise. It’s not exactly in the same vein as Microscope or The Quiet Year: everyone… Continue reading Worldbuilding and Built Worlds
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
Howdy everyone! How's your isolation going? Today was the first day of having my daughter home, figuring out some homeschooling/unschooling strategies for the upcoming weeks. We're taking a break, so let's talk about 2016 in indie RPGs. This was the first year I couldn't track everything coming out. Kickstarter became the primary funding/marketing venue for… Continue reading A Decade of Indie Roleplaying: 2016
My current Godbound game has gotten me thinking about games that have taken measures to ensure they’re fun to facilitate. I mean…running games is its own reward, of course. I could speculate as to why: my frustrated creative impulses as a failed novelist are high on my own list, as is the pleasure of hosting… Continue reading Certain Values of Fun
