A few weeks ago I blogged about strengthening trust between players in role-playing games, " Trust & Promises in Role-Playing Games". It was inspired by a blog I'd seen on Gnome Stew on the same topic. Well, the Gnomes wrote a sequel to their blog, "Earning Their Trust: The Rules" and it has inspired me to write on the topic again ( Read more... )

One of the blogs I read about Role-Playing Games (RPGs) such as Dungeons & Dragons is Gnome Stew. Recently the authors there posted an article that got me thinking, "Earning Their Trust: Keeping Your Promises". The article discusses different types of promises made by the GM in setting up a game, including those which are typically made "Out loud" ( Read more... )

A few weeks ago I read an article about some of the wisdom of Charlie Munger. Munger, who died last year at age 99, was famously the vice-chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, the corporate conglomerate controlled by the legendary Warren Buffett. In an article on Moneywise, ‘Who in the hell needs a Rolex watch?’: Why Charlie Munger warned Americans ( Read more... )

We played session 7 of my D&D game The City of the Dead on Friday night. It was delayed from a week earlier when one player had a bad work schedule and I was still marginal from a long-running cold. And even this Friday, things went slowly. The group moved slowly and didn't manage to get back to the actual City of the Dead ( Read more... )

A while ago I started asking the rhetorical question, "What's this game about?" in roleplaying games. Except it's not just a rhetorical question. It's a real question... and a very pertinent one.

What's this game about? The question came to me as a prompt for RPGs when I started fixing a problem with game focus in my own games a few years ago. My ( Read more... )

A few weeks ago I read a good blog in the roleplaying games blog Gnome Stew, entitled Entertainment is Key (Nov. 2023). It's about how roleplayers have different motivations to play and how a good game master (GM) strives to understand their goals to craft a playing experience that's entertaining for everyone. It got me thinking about the successes ( Read more... )

Hosting a dinner party is tough nowadays. I don't just mean the effort of shopping for food, cleaning the house, preparing food, and cleaning up afterwards. Even just planning the menu is getting difficult. So many people have food allergies nowadays that if you get 2-3 people with different no-can-do lists it's hard to assembly a reasonable sized ( Read more... )

A problem that's existed in roleplaying games nearly as long as there have been roleplaying games is firewalling player knowledge from character knowledge. Part of the fun challenge in playing the characters is dealing with the unknown and the surprises it deals. But what if the players already know all the answers, either from having encountered ( Read more... )

Woohoo, I'm playing D&D again! Last night we managed to kick off our short term game. It was the first time in, like, 8 weeks nobody was sick or stuck axle-deep in mud. And we mapped out five Fridays in the next two months we can play!

Last night was only a session zero so no dice rolling. We players got aligned on the story, the setting, a group ( Read more... )

I said several days ago I wasn't going to write a lot of blogs about Band of Brothers. "Maybe two," I thought to myself. That contrasts with the Chernobyl miniseries, about which I've written sixteen blogs- plus possibly one more to come! I'm glad I didn't say "Maybe two" out loud or commit it to writing because now that I've started writing about ( Read more... )