ACTUAL PLAY
This is where we do what we do! We talk about playing table-top role-playing games. This is not a play-at or streaming site - it's for discussion of what you're already doing.
You can discuss decades of play or thirty seconds of play, or anything in between. Any table-top role-playing game is welcome: old, new, in print, out of print, published by you, published by whoever. You could have played it at any time, from back in the early 1970s to a second before you hit "post."
From there, I trust you to work out how you want to talk about your games. If you'd like, check out my best-practices manual for suggestions, but it's really flexible.
If you already do a podcast or other actual-play series, live or not, please consider yourself invited to discuss it here by embedding a link as a topic.
For games in design, i.e., playtesting - yes, go right ahead, that's welcome too. For consulting sessions with me, which is different, see the Consulting page.
I'm currently designing Champions Now, for Hero Games, in active alpha playtest. The dedicated page for that is here.
Up against the Good Guys! Weak Force, Ankylo, the Anomalator, and Scratch, as I named them from Zircher’s illustration.
The game continues to be cursed by the interface. Please watch rather than listen, if you can, because I put in tons of visual material to help the understanding and the discussion.
When I was a 10 year old child, I tried to gamemaster a few Toon games with my classmates during recess, but I could never get it to work. Barring that, the following is an account of my first time roleplaying, and certainly the first time that I participated as a player.
Here's a techniques discussion of the Sorcerer character diagrams, which is a spiky topic in the case of this game. I didn't realize the physical separation among us would be this significant, and I'm worried enough to reflect here. First, a detailed look at how the damn things work:
It's the adolescence. Creepy rural fantasy aside, which is working well too, playing the characters as mid-teens is working wonders.
Briefly, Cults of Terror is a not merely a landmark in role-playing history, it's a giant. Coupled with the rules it was written to support, RuneQuest 1980, and the supplement that immediately preceded it, Cults of Prax, it established a new-and-different bar for play which defined "I play RuneQuest" into almost its own sector and subculture to the present day.
Just some Sorcerer actual play, right? But pay attention to how a story came to be without a story in place. I'd like you to identify any rules of the game that interest you, regarding how they did or didn't play into what happened.
This game is pure gut-punch Sorcerer, but there's a little history underlying it.
I've given this some thought. I've played it, both badly and well. I've read a bunch. I've talked to its developers and knowledgeable business people. I've built a couple setups for play.
I can only describe the cultural discourse about it as mass hysteria. Almost no one seems to have played the game I'm looking at.
My recent games of Cold Soldier - with Zac, Santiago, Ángel, and Moreno - make a powerful comparison.
Moreno and I have been meaning to do this for a long time, and finally got around to it: Cold Soldier, knives out.