What is this table-top role-playing thing? How does it work, what does it do, what kind of designs do which things? I've got some ideas, and so do you. This is where we talk about it - like this!
Some of my posts here present a concept, game title, or a historical hobby event for discussion in the comments, so join in with a will. You'll also find interviews and conversations.
I'm also recording what I guess I call "labs," which are organized and prepared at the Patreon. I run them on Mondays using Discord, and anyone pledging there can participate when they feel like it.
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:
Fabien Hildwein is one of the enthusiastic participants in the francophone sector of role-playing discourse and design. The thread back to me is probably Christoph Boeckle, who dropped a lot of time and buckets of posts at the Forge, and at some point along the way prompted a similar site (SilentDrift) and scene among French speakers.
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.
Megan Bennett-Burks and I toss some topics back and forth mainly because we both grapple with them. You'll probably recognize my beefs with crowdfunding, or rather, how it happened to turn out in practice, despite my support for the basic idea; also, my ongoing effort to distinguish between text as teaching vs. reference vs. user manual.
Ok, here are some more characters I built. Some are built for fun, others built for actual play. Building interpretations of characters is a bit of "lonely fun" sometimes and a mental exercise on how "I would build them".
If more people shared their interpretations we could get a Plato's Cave Allegory of RPG builds going. I would love to see these characters expressed in different systems and with a different focus.
Here is my build of Leonardo of TMNT fame
Below is this week’s build. If anyone out there has their own character builds, I would love to see them.
Below is this week’s build.
Below is this week’s build. If anyone out there has their own character builds, I would love to see them.
Below is this week’s build. If anyone out there has their own character builds, I would love to see them.
A character build can speak volumes about what a game is attempting to do.