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Here's Ron Edwards's answer, in the last minute or so of this video: The enjoyment of the medium for the properties that it offers, that no other medium I know does. It really is a valuable human thing to do. Intimacy. Enjoyment. Creativity. Unpredictability. Varying levels of success as you...

I recently watched the Return of the King film with my family, and the (second-last) ending, where the "last ship" sails from the Grey Havens, prompted the thought that has led to this post. JRRT is probably the most famous conceiver of a fantasy setting, and that setting - Middle Earth - is...

I often read posts asserting that Marvel Heroic RP (ie the Cortex+-based supers game) doesn't allow for PC creation. To me this seems just wrong. I mean, the rulebook has a section on creating characters. And I've personally created plenty of characters for the game, both superhero PCs, and...

A recurring thing I see said is that, in Apocalypse World, players can't declare actions that are not covered by a move. This is just silly. The rules are clear: if a player's declared action for their PC is a move, then the rules of the move are invoked ("If you do it, you do it"). Otherwise...

My friend and I continued our two GM, two player Burning Wheel today. I wrote up our second session here, and we played another session between that one and today's. That session ended rather surprisingly: Alicia and Aedhros escaped the guards, but Alicia then returned to fight them so that...

A lot of games invite players to imagine things while playing them. But not all. Chess doesn't. Nor does bridge. The card game Crew, which is a cooperative variant on bridge, has flavour text that bridge lacks. But the invitation to players to imagine things is pretty tenuous: the card play...

Vincent Baker posted this blog nearly 14 years ago, but I don't think I've seen much discussion of it on ENworld: anyway: Things on Character Sheets (2) The core ideas are this: *A character sheet will set out different aspects of a character - position (who am I? who am I related to? what is...

All the ongoing discussion of the Deck of Many Things prompted me to revisit the Dice of Chaos (from Rolemaster's Creatures and Treasures book) and write them up for Torchbearer 2e: I'm not sure I actually want to use these, of course - like all these sorts of items they are a little bit...

Another recent thread raised the issue of what the GM contributes to the game. This prompted me to think about some of the themes and associated tropes I've consistently drawn on in my FRPGing, especially as a GM. In this OP I'll set out two. The relationship of mortals to cosmic/divine law My...

Various threads - eg the "why rules?" thread, and the agency threads - have prompted some conversations with RPGing friends. At least from my perspective, a recurring theme or element in discussion has been a contrast, between: *Play where the players establish dramatic needs for their PCs...

Around the same time as this session, I ran a brief session of Traveller for my other daughter. This weekend (so after a gap of almost 3 years), we played a little bit more of it. From three years ago, I had three bits of paper. One was a PC sheet: Bob Airrunner B29497, a 30-year old, 3 term...

A conversation with a couple of friends about "tips for new GMs" blogs/Q+As led to someone suggesting a thread along these lines. So here it is. At the heart of "story now" RPGing is the players bring the protagonism. The players decide what it is that their PCs care about, what their...

In the LotR (The Two Towers, Book 3), Aragorn, Gimil and Legolas meet Eomer and his Riders of Rohan. The encounter begins as a hostile one, but after Aragorn announces himself ("Elendil!") the tone of the encounter changes, and Eomer agrees to let the three companions continue on their hunt for...

One of my kids likes to play imagination games - she and her friends all pretend to be other people (often superheroes) and do exciting and interesting things. These clearly have a lot in common with RPGing. But they don't have rules - disagreements about what happens next are just resolved by...

This post is prompted by listening to one song - Black Wings, on Tom Waits's Bone Machine - and being reminded of another - the Disillusionist, on The Church's Priest=Aura. Although the protagonist of each song is a bit different, there are similarities - a sinister but charismatic persona...

I've been thinking about posting this thread for a while. I've been prompted to do so by @The-Magic-Sword's interesting thread about neo-trad RPGing: Thinking About the Purpose of Mechanics from a Neo-Trad Perspective Back in 1981, Lewis Pulsipher gave the following advice about designing...

This thread is a sequel to these two: Approaches to prep in RPGing - GMs, players, and what play is about and Space and time in RPG setting and situation. The example scenario is one I was remembering a couple of days ago, although it was one that I actually GMed around 30 years ago. The system...

This thread is a sequel/complement to this one: Approaches to prep in RPGing - GMs, players, and what play is *about* In that thread, I observed that: A lot of discussion of RPGing - especially when framed through ideas like "the dungeon" or "the adventure" - makes some assumptions about this...

RPGing needs "stuff" - fiction. The things we are all imagining together when we play. Some of this stuff is characters. Some of it is setting - where the characters are, the history of that place, etc. Some of it is situation - ie what is happening right here and now that will prompt the...

Family obligations and sickness kept some members of our group away, and so two of us played Burning Wheel. We returned to this game, with each of us playing a PC and sharing GMing responsibilities depending on whose character is at the centre of the action. Our last session ended with Alicia...