Search results

100% honestly: Yes

In some games shared GMing doesn't involve any kind of system mastery, and just has specific tasks usually left up to the GM that are passed off to one or more players. In Band of Blades, you're playing the part of an entire regiment of soldiers retreating from a lost battle. At the...

[EDITS IN PURPLE TO BETTER EXPLAIN SOME BITS] [Damn @Ovinomancer I really like this look] Torchbearer is my game at hand. The GM describes the room and how everything is just a confusing menagerie of dolls and toys marching around and making noise. The player describes their character...

Is there a reason why there have to be two axes instead of just reverting to different aspects of Order and Chaos? It worked for Chinese culture and Michael Moorcock.

You need to pick a place for where you want your goal post to be.

Order and Destruction could be something along the lines of urban decay whereas Chaos and Creation could be untamed wilderness. That might make you want to shift the life/death axis to civilization/war which would then contain life/death.

I had assumed that would be the format for my current hexcrawler, but it hasn't happened yet. In Band of Blades, it's kinda baked into the system.

I just don't understand how you can look at a branching narrative like that, where there aren't set sign posts, no pre scripted scenes, there's no narrative structure that players have to follow to have the correct storyline unfurl before them, and insist that it's an A must go to B must go to C...

In looking for a different Alexandrian post, I found this: Don’t Prep Plots

It's been a while since I did a mystery game, and I don't remember where I stole all the bits and pieces of my personal philosophy. I know that some of them came from Gumshoe, but I stole the bulk of them from Jason Alexander. 1. Always have at LEAST 3 clues that lead to any new piece of...

Think of a game set up more like a Plinko board instead of a sliding board. Yes, in retrospect, you can say easily point out what the string of events were and see what steps logically lead from one to the other. But looking at it from the other end when you're starting out, especially when so...

Wow. I had played the original for a bit back in the mid 90s and really enjoyed it. Definitely too many cooks on that one. [EDIT] This brings to mind a lot of smaller games that I've played over the years where either the people who I met who were running said games or the fan made material...

Just trying to wrap my head around which pieces of information on a character sheet aren't metagame. So far I've got name, description, backstory, and treasure. Is there anything I'm missing?

This really makes me appreciate games like Blades in the Dark, and Torchbearer all the more. In Blades, character histories are built as you play the game, with flashbacks explaining how, as an example, the guy guarding the door to the private club you want to get into just happens to be a...

It fell apart when we hit the summer break, but in the early 90s I had been in a campaign that was essentially Quantum Leap, but instead of jumping through time when we solved a problem, we'd jump into another game system. The GM would make new character sheets for us and deal them out randomly...

It depends on the game and the premise. I personally am all for the players and GM starting off on the same foot, either with the GM building a world around the group's story, or the group building their story off the GM's world. There are some systems where that's more important to me, and...

In college, just after 3rd Ed came out, one of my friends played their first cleric, walked up to some random human enemy, exclaimed "I turn undead!", and held his character sheet out triumphantly to show everyone the awesome special ability he had that we had all obviously missed. He was in...

In my son's first D&D game, after his Link clone finished beating up the Ganondorf clone, I asked him if there was anything his character wanted to say to the bad guy. He got all quiet and withdrawn and mumbled under his breath "I'm sorry for fighting with you." and then offered to shake the...

When I was in college, I had two experiences that really opened my eyes a bit D&D wise that I then insisted on dragging the people I gamed with, out to do at least once or twice a year. The first was paintball. Specifically the experience of setting up and having to walk into ambushes. This...

Filmmaker - At least conceptually I describe things as shots and cuts and reveals and dwell on the dimensionality of a location. Outside of my head I try to translate things out of that language. Up until the pandemic, overall production value was always a point of pride in my games. Sound...