Travis Miller's Blog About Sword & Sorcery Fiction and Classic Fantasy Adventure Gaming
Mike Mearls, the chief architect of the Fifth Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, has recently spoken to some podcasters and YouTubers about the current state of 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons and the tabletop role-playing game business. This conversation with Ben of Questing Beast was very revealing. In it, Mike talks about how 5E came …
Continue reading Five Lessons About the TTRPG Business From Mike Mearls
The people who believe they deserve "support" from "the community" purely on the basis of being part of "the community" irritate me.
A phrase commonly used in conversations about role-playing games is "genre emulation." One might say that Call of Cthulu emulates Lovecraftian cosmic horror or Feng Shui emulates Hong Kong martial arts action films. Role-playing games do not emulate a genre. Role-playing games are one of many mediums that makes up a genre. A RPG is …
My number one priority as a game master is to create a gaming experience that produces strong bonds of fellowship in the game group. This essay is about how I tap into a variety of emotions in an effort to build deeper relationships between the players.
I hypothesize that one of the reasons the "collaborative storytelling" claim persists is that both RPGs and stories produce powerful emotions. Stories and games can feel the same or at least very similar. This makes them seem like the same thing but they have a crucial difference.
“People don’t want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole in the wall.” Theodore Levitt XP is far less of an incentive than many game masters and designers think it is. Experience points are a proxy for what players want not the thing that players actually want. The myth of Experience Points as primary …
Continue reading Experience Points are a Proxy for What Players Want
In this essay, I'm going to clear up why good rulings are not arbitrary and offer you some suggestions about how to make a good ruling.
Grumpy Wizard 
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