Here's a good chance to see some or a lot of what I don't know.
Topics include some Sorcerer mechanics, academia, early TSR games, a notable slightly-later TSR game, a whole branch of RPG publishing in a single company, and a real conceptual conundrum.
The discussion from the Patreon is attached, so take a look if you'd like. The dialogue with John turned into a screen conversation, so if that turns out to be publicly shareable, I'll include it here later.
All of the questions this time featured "wheels inside wheels" leading to some thoughtwork. I don't know if I managed to convey every point successfully, but I'm sure you'll let me know.
So, more about fabulous people-beasts-entities in texts, then a lot about why and why not to rotate GMing, then much crazytalk about dice mechanics and games' themes and settings, and finally an absolute discourse on the dungeon crawl game to rule them all.
So I GMed my first game session of Tunnels and Trolls today (5th edition). I found it very interesting, it was fun, but a number of rules questions came up. Anyway, here’s what happened.
For a while now, I've joined in a Tunnels and Trolls game run by Jon Hastings, mostly with members of his longstanding friend group. One of them, George, wanted to have a conversation with Jon about how to follow up on what interested him in his RPG experiences. I nosily asked if they would be willing to have me join in and record it, and they said "sure".
Olen pelannut Puhvelilinna-sooloseikkailua Tunnels & trolls -pelin seitsemännellä laitoksella (30. vuosipäivän laitos, joskus muinoin hankittu). Seikkailu vaatii vähän soveltamista ja sen tasapaino lienee erikoinen tämän laitokset kanssa, mutta ei se mitään. Nyt on aika iso osa linnasta kartoitettu, vaikkakaan ei kaikkea. Otin tämän samalla sääntöjen oppimisen hengessä.
This conversation runs parallel to the recent post-play conversation among the participants of my Lamentations of the Flame Princess game. Jon wanted to discuss similar things in terms of his own decisions about titles to play, so we took some time for that.
Solo or solitaire play appeared very early in RPG history, and yet I often considered it marginal or beta play. I certainly saw it that way until about 2010, especially the second round of Ronnies and the contest/event 01/01/11 organized by Em and Eppy. By then, I’d wholly revised my similar thinking about twosie play, so was more open-minded about solo play and was even working on Cathedral at that point.
Justin Nichol and I continue our discussion, or training, regarding game design. This session (in 5 videos) delves into the way we talk / the way we roll. The topic shifts quite logically from whether & when describing things colorfully works, to gaudy and painful consequences of moment-by-moment decision-making.
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.
I've mentioned the "Escape from Queztec'l" solo adventure from my High Fantasy corebook a couple of times in recent videos, which prompted me to bust out some dice and play it. I was a player in a game about thirty years ago, but haven't tried this feature until now. I'm especially interested in it as a teaching device, for which the text is pretty explicit.