These are some very think-y questions! Including a lot about beasts and monsters.
I want to clarify some things about my response to Sean. First, here are the three "roots" of critical hits in text. They're not intended to be in order, as I think they were simultaneous at this scale of history:
This was at a small convention some years ago (between 3 and 6, I would say), in the middle of nowhere, Finland. The game master and the other players were all strangers to me. There was maybe three or four players. I went in to fill the table, anyways, as I did with Savage worlds in the same con, too.
It’s been a while, but the new Discord functions are serving my needs to renew Monday Labs! To review the concept, these are discussion topics which patrons (any level) can participate in.
Zac has not retreated from his call that IIEE (intent, initiation, execution, effect) is the "beating heart of the activity," and Manu - the very soul who prompted this discussion at the Forge fifteen years ago - is still on task. Armed with these stalwarts, we embark upon another Monday Lab to investigate best practices.
Zac began it with this message:
Sometimes people email me with questions. Since I don't know them, and don't know the (sometimes) complicated process that led to them deciding to ask, I have to ask dense-seeming questions back in order to know what they're talking about before I can answer anything, or know if I can answer at all.
I cannot as yet summarize or eulogize or otherwise "state" my response to Greg's death. It wasn't that much of a surprise, yet was as hard as they all have been. He was a grandmaster of this activity we do, and he was my friend.
This five-video discussion is more of a celebration of encountering his work, with a little bit of reminiscence occasionally. I don't have much to add except for these:
Here’s one of the two workshops I presented at Lucca. It was prompted by two short videos I posted here in the past few months: The role of the roll and Emergent plot techniques, which have led me to a generally larger argument.
Usually I wait a week to post Monday Labs, partly to get enough time to edit properly, partly to keep at least something on a regular cycle at the site. But this time I couldn't help myself, it's been only two days and here you go.
Apologies for the buzzword ...
The idea here was to examine our respective region when we encountered role-playing, and to think about how role-playing got there, and in what form. It's only four people, representing two slightly different parts of Califoria divided as well by about six years (mid-70s vs. early 80s), the Netherlands at about the same time, and Argentina during the 1990s.
The comparison has been around for a long time; I first encountered it in an early edition of RuneQuest. It may even have entered that status of "everyone knows that," but I haven't run into much reflection on its content.