The second playtest had six players, which really changes the dynamic of the game.

( There are more dead people than there are French people... )

Over on Story Games, there's a thread about writing RPGs in 5 minutes. This is one of the games I wrote for that.

Wide StanceThis is a game for four players*. You will collectively tell the story of a prominent conservative politician, who is also a closeted homosexual ( Read more... )

Someone online asked for some detail on how QR codes were used in Amber's birthday larp. I thought that I might record that information here as well. So this is a description and evaluation of how we used some two-dimensional barcodes and a free smartphone app to simulate unusual senses and Doctor Who's sonic screwdriver ( Read more... )

First move advantage is a well-known phenomenon in boardgaming circles. In some games, acting first gives you an advantage which can range from very small to quite substantial. In chess, White goes first and in tournament play White wins about 52-55% of the time. On the smaller end, there is a statistically tiny advantage to going second out of ( Read more... )

This last Saturday we had a playtest of Department Nine, my 2007 Game Chef game. I've playtested the original rules a few times in a form only slightly modified from the Game Chef version. They always worked, but the game never seemed to be firing on all cylinders. So this playtest had substantial revisions to the setup phase, core conflict and ( Read more... )

While going over how my Origins went (just fine, now that you ask), Matthew asked me for my thoughts on a specific matter: how to write a good larp character.

( Long thoughts about larpwriting )

Gamers are weird about their dice. We all have seen this, right? Folks who insist that their dice hate them. The guy who won't let other people touch their dice, or only uses specific dice for specific purposes. Some folks even claim that a roleplaying game without dice isn't a roleplaying game at all ( Read more... )

While at GaspCon, I did actually succeed in running one of my three games. (As they say on Discworld, "One out of three ain't bad," right?). I wasn't terribly surprised to see that it was Bloody Forks of the Ohio.

( Full retelling )

This weekend I played five different roleplaying games. The settings of these were:

-Pittsburgh 1,000 years into its mythical past
-Pittsburgh, 250 years ago
-Pittsburgh, 400 years after the apocalypse
-A national forest just outside Pittsburgh, as seen from a mouse's perspective
-the Pittsburgh you only see in nightmares.

Notice a theme there?

I'm currently writing a roleplaying game for Nathan Paoletta's Two Games One Name RPG Design challenge. The idea of the challenge is that each participant is assigned a title for a game, that they have to design. But another participant was assigned the same title, and has to design a different game entirely. A set of optional binary ( Read more... )