Tuesday, August 28, 2012

No "No And," No "No But," Just "No?"

Roleplaying games are a deeper subject than many want to contemplate. They don't want anything to get in the way of their play, even if it's a cogent analysis of the game they're playing. I refer to this as the "I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!" school of Anti-Intellectualism.

And this is why you don't hear more about what should rightfully be the greatest, most bitterly contested philosophical disagreement in the realm: "Who controls the story?"

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Build Your Own Campaign: Avoiding the Setting Smorgasbord

If you think creating your own campaign world from scratch is too much of a hassle, consider the alternative.

Saturday, August 11, 2012

Cheat

When running a game, the GM's aim should not be fair play, but fun play. The GM and players both need to keep this in mind.

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Building Your Own: These Things Gotta Start Somewhere

As the title says, nothing starts from nothing. If there's a big problem, it was set in motion by a smaller problem, and that started from a single event. Walk it back and determine what that event was, and you've got a good start writing your next adventure.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

The Elephant, The Foreign Object, and a Long Cup of Coffee

You remember that old joke, "How do you hide an elephant in a jelly bean jar? Paint its toenails."

For purposes of this writing, anyway, that joke makes a lot more sense than you might suspect.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

A Picture of Trouble

Recently, there's been a lot of noise about Kodak's threatened Chapter 11 bankruptcy. An article on The Conversation (linked from Slashdot) posits that this is not about any one device (cough*iPhone*cough) eating Kodak's lunch, but about Kodak grossly misreading the ways in which photography has moved from an archival to a social activity.

Meanwhile, I'm starting to hear noises about a 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and hell yeah I'm going exactly where you think I'm going to.

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Tone Design

Wherein I connect running RPGs with playing the guitar.

No, seriously.

Stop laughing, you insensitive bastards!