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
What happens when you get Burning Wheel's chocolate in PbtA's peanut butter.
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
For posterity's sake: This is the week the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic. I'm torn between feeling like roleplaying is frivolous nonsense, and wanting normalcy as my country realizes this is the real deal. But! I have lots of readers who also crave normalcy, and online play is a great way to while away the… Continue reading A Decade of Indie Roleplaying: 2015
Movie critic Roger Ebert once famously said, “It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it.” The same thing applies to games. It’s why systems, among other things, matter. I got my copy of Bite Marks this week. It’s a Powered by the Apocalypse style game about belonging to a pack… Continue reading Inside You There Are Six Wolves
