Sean Hillman and I discuss some confusing things about situations in play, specifically, what does preparation have to do with them. Seems easy, right? You prep it, then the group plays it - hey, the real (digital, video) games do it all the time, so we should just do that, right?
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Seminar
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.
Posted by: Ron Edwards
27 Mar 2020
15 comments
As part of my recent swim-about in the internets of Glorantha and its associated games, my friend Nick Brooke and I had the chance to mix it up a little! It's regarding the long-standing interpretations of human ethnicities in Glorantha, including those which made it into published form
Posted by: Ron Edwards
22 Mar 2020
3 comments
Andy Goodman's Expedition to the Grizzly Peaks podcast is a worthy artifact - essentially, this guy missed all the ins & outs of the role-playing scene for about twenty years, mid-80s to mid-00s, and now he's looking at today's scene in mingled love, curiosity, and understandable bemusement.
Posted by: Ron Edwards
17 Mar 2020
0 comments
I've finally realized how regularly people ask me to explain RuneQuest, HeroQuest, the Chaosium, and Glorantha, specifically because they've bounced hard off the apparently extensive setting and apprently impenetrably insider-oriented fanbase. It's usually private, and they often present the question as if it's their last fatigued try at finding out what "there" is there.
Posted by: Ron Edwards
17 Feb 2020
Games: RuneQuest, HeroQuest, 13th Age: Glorantha, Mythras
20 comments
During one of my consulting sessions, I told Ron one of my major design concerns regarding my current project is the concept of interdependence: it's a game about a group of people fighting things that should be well beyond the possibilities of the common human being. How do they do this? I want one of the answers to be "together".
Posted by: LorenzoC
07 Jan 2020
Games: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition, Dungeon & Dragons 4th edition, Band of Blades, Circle of Hands, Blades in the Dark, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying
19 comments
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:
Posted by: Ron Edwards
13 Dec 2019
Games: Dungeons and Dragons Holmes 1977, Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition, Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition, Street Fighter, 7th Sea, Call of Cthulhu, Gloomhaven, Star Wars, Sun and Storm, Apocalypse World, Warhammer, Sorcerer, The Clay That Woke, The Riddle of Steel
22 comments
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.
Posted by: Ron Edwards
20 Nov 2019
Games: S/Lay w/Me, Murphy's World, Amber, Prosopopee, Le Petits Chose, Freemarket
0 comments
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.
Posted by: Ron Edwards
23 Oct 2019
8 comments
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.
Posted by: Ron Edwards
21 Oct 2019
0 comments
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
Posted by: Jerry D. Grayson
05 Sep 2019
Games: Mythic D6
2 comments