I posted the 2014 edition of my ongoing “Best of the Twenty-Teens” series recently. In it, I called 2014 “The Year of the Trindie,” which got me thinking about what trindie even means. There’s quite a lot in that space as I conceive it: conventional (“trad”) power and resolution arrangements paired with unconventional (“indie” aka… Continue reading A Few of My Favorite (Trindie) Things
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
We wrapped up our tenth and final session of Band of Blades this week, bringing our campaign to a close. The Legion arrived at Skydagger Keep for their final showdown with the endless hordes of the Cinder King. We were, perhaps, more excited for the campaign to be over than we were to see how… Continue reading Band of Blades: A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
While it’s true that virtually every RPG you’ll ever play will require rulings or some other human judgement, there are a few games out there that require improvised game design as part of the play experience. Or at least make it fun as hell. As I’ve written before, we’re in the midst of the Band… Continue reading Improvised Game Design
This morning I was chatting with a friend about how I actively dislike the thing in fantasy RPGs where a magic-using character’s player wants to learn a spell (in reference to this week’s post about Invisible Sun), and it lands in the GM’s lap to make that happen. It’s a really weird tic in my… Continue reading The Misery of Precedent
