After recent events, my thoughts have understandably turned towards the philosophical side of our hobby. Particularly, why we have rules in RPGs and what do they do? Reductio Ad Absurdum Imagine an RPG without any rules. Can you? Does the concept make sense? Even the most basic idea of role-playing,
Last Thursday night, I saw a 50+ year old man behave in such a juvenile way, I was forced to call him on it. Apparently this makes me a sanctimonious arsehole. My regular Thursday Night gaming group has been going with the same four players for over five years. We
This month’s rpg blog carnival is about ways to use weather in RPGs and what role it can play in the narrative. The intro post is here -> Mortaine’s Blog Weather As Plot The weather forms part of the reasoning behind the character’s quest. It features heavily in discussions about
Accessibility can mean many things. In the post by Accessible Games announcing this month’s RPG Blog Carnival theme, Jacob Wood encourages us to think about what accessibility is. In particular, he gives the prompt, “What does accessibility mean to me?” I can break my answer into two themes – layout
Roleplaying is a group activity and only when every member of a group is firing on all cylinders will the game really fly. But how do you do it? How can you inspire tabletop gamers to put their heart & soul into an RPG? Here are five tips for inspiring
Or as we prefer to call it, the Game Leader. This isn’t us wanting to have a new name just to be different. Master is used for someone who has complete control over the game. In 6d6 that simply isn’t true, so we prefer the term leader. Your job is
I mentioned in a previous post (The Lonely Rogue) about once retiring a character on the grounds of redundancy. If you’ll forgive “the let me tell you about my character” post, I’ll go into a little bit more detail. The Star Wars D20 group in question was a reasonable size
You’ve got your concept and you know the role your character will be filling in the group. The story leader has explained the setting and has given you the standard 70 character points to spend. Here is my advice on how to spend them during character creation. Before you can
The Greek gods were cruel in their punishments. The princess Cassandra of Troy was on the receiving end of one of the worst. After she spurned the sexual advances of Apollo, he granted her the gift of prophecy but cursed her so that her warnings would not be believed. Her
Unless the players characters exist in a vacuum, their actions are going to have effects on their surroundings beyond a trail of dead goblins. Every action they take will eventually be noticed by someone and a reputation will build around the characters. How quickly that reputation will build depends on
