As a game master, you don't have to be a highly skilled story teller to get a good story out of your game.
Category: design theory
I Do Not Enjoy Opera
My wife likes opera and I have watched several live streams of the Metropolitan Opera with her. The Met has the best musicians, the best singers and the best production crew in the world of opera. My response? Meh. I appreciate the effort that goes into it and I appreciate the amazing skill that everyone …
Ludic Causality
Terry Pratchett, so far as I can tell, came up with the term "narrative causality." Narrative causality is when an event takes place in a story for the express purpose of driving the story in a particular direction. The hero doesn't have a lucky break because he's lucky. He has a lucky break because if …
What Is a Table Top Role Playing Game?
What is an RPG? I have said before, over and over...A game is not a story. Yet, RPG's feel like a story. If the experience of playing a game is not a story even though it feels like one (kind of) then what is it? Can't we just go with Potter Stewart's definition of obscenity, "I …
A Thought About How the Open System Developed
Many people who played with Dave Arneson said he had a lot of the "rules" for Blackmoor in his head. It wasn't written down. The lore of D&D's early creation was that Dave sent Gary eighteen pages of hand written notes which represented the "rules" of Dave's Blackmoor game. By today's standards, OD&D has a …
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What I Learned from Secrets of Blackmoor: Part II
In this post, I'm going to lay out some concepts I picked up, in part, from the documentary . These lessons align with an important observation made by Rob Kunst. That observation is this; Role playing games are a combination of open and closed systems. Role-playing games are games in which players can do things that …
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The Primary Reason I Use Dice
Cavegirl wrote a post about using dice which I agree with, mostly. Her thesis is, "Rolling dice is a tool for when it's hard for the GM to adjudicate the results." (emphasis hers) I can't agree that this is the only or perhaps even the primary use of dice in an RPG. As noted by Brendan …
