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 …
Category: musings
Prince of Denmark
"Prince of Denmark" That's all Shakespeare provides to the reader of Hamlet before you dig into the play. It's fascinating to me that one of the greatest storytellers in the English language gives very little context to one if the most famous characters in the history of drama. All we are told is that Hamlet …
Games That Don’t Have Rules For Everything You Can Do
Games have rules. They set the boundaries of what can and can not be done. In games like chess, Magic the Gathering and Ticket to Ride; if it isn't in the rules, you can't do it. Dave Arneson and the group of players in the Twin Cities discovered a type of game where you can …
Continue reading Games That Don’t Have Rules For Everything You Can Do
Guidance Not Guidelines
“People don't have ideas. Ideas have people.” Carl Jung Because of this post, I came across this post. And it put me in the frame of mind to think about Rob Kunst's book about the genius of Dave Arneson. Combining that with Secrets of Blackmoor; I think I have a complete thought coming along any moment …
Not Every Session Will Be Good
And that's OK. If you want to be good at anything, you have to suck at it first. This include game mastering. The unfortunate situation with game mastering is that you have to suck in front of your friends and they have sacrificed some part of their precious time to experience the suck. Therefore, there …
“Options”
Do you want fewer options? An interesting side effect of mechanically defined character actions, such as feats, is that players will often focus on those defined actions to the exclusion of all other possibilities. A player will look at their list of mechanisms on their sheet and pick one of them. This is especially true …
And This Is Why We Can’t Have Awful Things
I find it interesting how reluctant RPG companies and designers are to go into the depths of how human beings can be horrible to one another. There are a few like Lamentations of The Flame Princess that go there. A couple of past games have gone down the road, a bit. Earthdawn had some gnarly monsters …
Grumpy Wizard 
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