My nerdcation to Washington DC last month opened my eyes to a lot of things. These included crab chips and secret ginger candies that stop motion sickness. Mostly, it was the exposure to open-form roleplaying games that has been taking up most of my free processor cycles. Despite being the guy in our group that would cheerfully handwave every combat in favor of having an all-roleplay session, I find myself flummoxed when faced with the infinite possibilities of a game like Fiasco. I have a lot of fun when it works, and nobody has fun when it doesn’t.
D&D Zombie Apocalypse, Part 1: Genesis
In which Chatty tells the story of a great 100% made up on the spot D&D 4e game he ran for new players at the New York ComicCon. Be careful, it contains zombies and wolves.
The Architect DM: On Character Creation
If someone asked me for a single bit of advice to improve their roleplaying games, whether as a DM or a player, I would tell them to spend as much time as they can reading the great fantasy and sci-fi books that are out there. For the first several years that I was playing RPGs I was not an avid reader and had not even heard of many of the classics, including ones that everyone should have heard of like The Lord of the Rings. At the time I thought many of my friends were insanely creative or stricken by some miraculous form of otherworldly inspiration, but as I’ve read more and more of the books out there I began to realize that most good ideas in our RPGs have been inspired by or even directly ripped from other sources. For example, in one of the first D&D games that I ever DM’d a player showed up with a character named “Muadib” and I remember thinking that it was a very unique and interesting sounding name. A year or two later I started reading Dune and groaned when I realized he’d simply lifted the name straight out of that book.
Improv Pushups: The Movie
Early Monday morning, I bid farewell to one Dave Chalker (who I had been staying with for the week, and who had risen with me to get me to the airport before the coming of the dread Day Star).I came all the way to the East coast for one specific purpose: to game my face off. More specifically, DC Gameday was this weekend, and I wanted to game my face off as close to Congress as I possibly could. Somebody’s got to show those guys how to play nice together, right?
I Was a Manchild at Geek Girl Con
The inaugural Geek Girl Con ran last weekend in downtown Seattle, and I was there to check it out. The con focused on female geeks of all stripes. There were panels about gaming, comics, movies, TV, feminism, and gamer culture.
Roleplaying Resurrection
In Fiasco, there’s not really dice rolling, except for the start and middle bits, and trust me, those don’t count. It’s all decisions, decisions and storytelling, decisions and storytelling and improvisational roleplaying. Uh oh, there’s that word. Roleplaying. I’m going to have to sit at a table with other people and write a story out loud in the voice of a character that I just met, all while those other people are staring at me and judging me and hating me. This kind of thrown-in-the-deep-end roleplaying is a little daunting. No, wait, that’s not the right term. It’s gonad-shrinkingly terrifying.
The Architect DM: Dungeon Interconnectivity
Yesterday I started playing the new game Dark Souls on the PS3 and the level designs in the game are very inspiring when it comes to planning out dungeons. One of the coolest things Dark Souls, and in fact many video games, does with its levels is interconnecting different areas in creative and unexpected ways. This is also an element that I see very rarely in tabletop RPG dungeon design, and that’s a disparity that I’d like to see changed.
Review: “Dark Delve”
I was checking my email yesterday when I saw a request to review an Xbox indie game called Dark Delve by a fellow named Mark Harvey. He even sent me a code to download it for free! Given our corporate policy to give great reviews to anybody who gives us free stuff, I hope that my immortal soul was worth the $1 cost of the game.
The One-Page Character Sheet
So here is a game that I really do enjoy, and yet, there is this scar on my beloved which prevents me from embracing it completely: the character sheets are 8000 pages long.
The Architect DM: Winter is Coming
Recently I’ve been reading the Song of Ice and Fire books and really enjoying them, starting with A Game of Thrones and now I’ve just finished the second book A Clash of Kings. One of the major concepts of the series is that summers and winters can last for years at a time, and the books start during a long period of summer and focus on the Stark family whose motto is the very foreboding words, “winter is coming.” Though there are different seasons, the northern portion of the series’ fantasy world is always in a wintery climate and the narrative of the books returns to this area every now and then as a subtle reminder that winter is in definitely coming.
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