It’s not unusual for RPG players to find themselves in situations where, if they’re being honest, the character they’ve established would make a choice that the player knows is a bad one. In these cases, a good role-player acts according to his character’s established background, goals, and personality even when it isn’t the most advantageous…
Sometimes, instead of a blog, you get a widget. This is one of those times. I made up a random generator script to generate one-shot (or if you’re really brave, campaign) ideas based on the tables in The Book of Dumb Tables 1 & 2. You can play with it on this ugly-ass page here….
I recently finished writing the section of M-Force that deals with conducting investigations. Since investigation scenes are common in all types of RPGs, I decided to share it here. Since the details are more about process than mechanics, it should be fairly easy to adapt this to other game systems if for some reason you…
I’ve mentioned numerous times that my usual method of planning for a game involves deciding what conflicts are going on in the world and then trying to figure out ways to get the characters involved in those conflicts. I haven’t really gone into the “get the players involved” part of the equation, so I’m going…
I rarely do very much planning for the games I run. One of the benefits of using a rules-light system is that it’s easy to make things up on the spot, so I don’t see the point of spending a lot of time drawing maps and looking up stat blocks that might or might not…
Sometime last year, I got involved in a reddit thread about women in gaming and ended up getting interviewed by Jamie from The Lonely d12. She posted the interview earlier this week, and I think I’m officially the first non-lady to be interviewed for their Ladies of Gaming series. Since I’m still easing back into…
I realize now that I didn’t mention this back in November, but the lack of new posts for the last month and change was intentional. Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, everyone’s busy, in a food coma, pissed off, depressed, or drunk–sometimes all of them at the same time–so I don’t want to write a blog…
A recent post on a gaming blog I follow mentioned an online tool called inklewriter, which basically lets you write your own Endless Quest books. The author had started using the site to make a tool to help new players make their D&D character and announced a contest where people make a gaming tool using the…
Role-playing is like Vegas: What happens at the game table should stay at the game table. That’s not because gaming stories are scandalous, it’s because it’s very rare for gaming stories to be the slightest bit interesting to anyone outside of the group of people who played the game. A lot of of them boil…
Last week, I posted an excerpt for the upcoming second edition of M-Force and mentioned that we’d been working on it for quite a while. We planned to release it much earlier this year, but it’s taken a lot longer to write than we expected. Some of the delays are the usual “real life getting…
