Posted in Adventures, Character interaction, Characters, Dungeons and dragons, Inter-player conflict, RPG, Roleplay, Tropes, Uncategorized, backstories, storytelling, world building on Sep 1st, 2011
In his last post, Gestalt wrote about creating characters with more traditionally medieval values in his fantasy games. Now in reality, if you are striving to recreate (for lack of a better term) the most historically accurate medieval fantasy game ever to exist, that’s going to be very difficult. Many of the pieces of literature [...]
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Posted in Adventures, Character interaction, Characters, D&D 4th, Dungeon Mastering, Dungeons and dragons, Pathfinder, Roleplay, storytelling, world building on Aug 29th, 2011
I am going to begin today’s blog post with an important caveat: this post is not intended to imply that any form of roleplay is wrong or that there is a right way to run games in a medieval setting. With that out of the way I can hopefully reduce the number of cave trolls [...]
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One of my favorite theatre personalities is Peter Brook (he directed a really influential production of Titus Andronicus that brought that play with all its gore and glory back into the theatre canon). In his book The Empty Space, he has a chapter called Deadly Theatre, a term which he uses to describe crappy theatre. [...]
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Star Wars is choc full o’ iconic villains, from Vader to Revan to the Hutts – the bad guys are larger than life and diabolical to the extreme. Part of the charm of the universe is the stark contrast between good and evil and the galactic level conflicts that are generated by a handful of [...]
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So last time I talked about how – for some of us – it can be easier to think of a character’s background in relatively recent terms, rather than going Freudian and beginning in childhood. Today I’ll be talking about how hopefully all of us can benefit from knowing how stories like these get told. [...]
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Hello friend, my name is Jack Connor. I was born in 1885 and I am immortal… Well, not exactly immortal. More like really hard to kill. I was the world’s greatest card shark, so good people used to say I was born with a deck of cards in my hand. Actually, I was the only [...]
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In my last post, I described my Urban Arcana character, Eolyn, who is essentially ineffective in combat. Today I’d like to expand on her a little more by talking about the value of choosing to play a character that has little prowess on the battlefield. There are certainly advantages and disadvantages to taking on this [...]
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I hate writing backstories. While I believe myself capable of playing a variety of different characters in different ways, it’s difficult for me to think of too many interesting things that could happen to a character before early adulthood. While my current group doesn’t mind, I’ve RPed with people who would demand pages of character backstory about [...]
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I was thinking about the last session of the Urban Arcana game in which I’m currently playing and it brought to mind something that I have kind of struggled with in my own gaming: making decisions (even in combat) based on what my character would do, not what my character should do. For example, earlier in [...]
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When a new player joins your gaming group it is often a cause for celebration. A breath of fresh air for both the party dynamic and the storytelling. I have noticed, however, that when inexperienced players join a gaming group that the other players and the DM sometimes interfere with their decision making process. In [...]
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