We just played through Leverage and it has me thinking a lot about a lot of different pieces. On balance, we had a ton of fun with it, even with only a passing familiarity with the rules. I’m sure our second play through will be smoother. As a license-based game, the system captures the feel […]
People come and go. Sometimes, someone who starts with the best of intentions can’t make it past the first session of an ongoing game due to any of the various slings and arrows of life. Sometimes, a friend is in from out of town for the weekend, and you want them to join. Some games […]
Back to grinding the “mechanics are important” axe! I want to talk about a concept that comes from sociology—marked traits—and how it applies to role-playing games. Certain RPGs hold a privileged status when compared to smaller production games. D&D, and to some extent the World of Darkness, are two such games. These systems are considered […]
Here’s an idea that I’ve been hashing out with my friends Alex and Amir, neither of whom have enough internet presence to link to, sadly. Looking at games like Mouse Guard and Dread, we started thinking about limited resources, particularly resources-for-action, and refresh mechanics. Let me unpack that a bit. Both games very nicely constrain […]
This week, Rob Donoghue has been posting a compare-and-contrast about video games and tabletop games. On Tuesday, he said something that’s been brewing in my head for a bit. The key point from that post, for my purposes, is that video games are very tolerant of failure—there’s almost no cost for failing, just the time […]
Recently we circulated among ourselves a very well-written article by Robert Schwalb about the frustration surrounding skill systems, particularly in D&D. I recommend the article, but want to talk about an idea that’s slightly tangental—target fixation. Target fixation is the concept of becoming so focused on something that one excludes everything else, to the detriment […]
A heroine scans the horizon, searching for the army that is pursuing her and her friends. Failing her Spot check, she does not see them in the darkness of night. A hero attempts to convince a king of his party’s noble goals, but botches his Etiquette roll. While battling a nefarious deathknight, a whole group of adventurers […]
When a character dies, it can be a real buzzkill in a lot of games. Some games make this not so—in Fiasco, you can continue to exert influence over the story, in the name of a dead character, just as easily as a live one. In Dogs in the Vineyard, you don’t die unless you’ve […]
So boundaries, even the hard ones, are necessarily all over any gamespace. This is certainly true for our game, In a Dragon-Guarded Land. For example, we make a big deal in the book about how Traits (the defining bits of your character) are facts. No one can take the fictional boundaries they represent away from your character. If your character is Silent As The Air, then they are. The important fact about that kind of boundary is how it’s less like a ceiling and more like a buttress—it defines and supports the players even while it gives their influence definite shape. This is exactly the kind of boundary that you want—a kind of horizontal boundary rather than a vertical one. One that clearly defines the fiction and informs character and player choices, but in a way that those very characters or players can later grab a hold of and use.
The wonderful Joshua A.C. Newman recently tweeted this: In my Human Contact backer’s survey, the players who said they played D&D said, “D&D, of course”. All three of 248. This raises an interesting point. All three of us here at Transneptune began gaming with D&D. A lot of what we do exists in reaction to […]
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