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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As a player, one of my favorite parts about gaming is finding creative and unexpected solutions to thwart villains and move the party forward to new adventures. Sometimes these creative and unexpected solutions are a little sketchy. One of my favorite examples from the Star Wars game I am in is when we were trying [...]
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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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Posted in RPG, Roleplay on Jul 11th, 2011
The myriad forms of role-playing are more popular and accepted than ever. It seems like everywhere you go you can find someone who plays some type of role-play game, whether it be tabletop, online, or a LARP. What I am noticing as gaming gains momentum in popular culture is that certain stereotypes are becoming prominent. Now, many stereotypes dealing [...]
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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 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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Literature is full of tropes, symbols and devices that create intricate settings for encounters between colorful casts of characters as they adventure through the plot of a story. The art of planning a campaign that is interested in storyline and contains a strong, character-driven plot may require the DM to participate in a certain degree [...]
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Posted in Characters, RPG, Roleplay on Jun 17th, 2011
One of my great passions is the theatre and I love seeing how theatre and gaming interact in really exciting ways. This is the first in a series of posts I plan on writing about those interactions and how to use theatre tricks to improve your gaming. When I am directing a show, I usually [...]
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This post is part of a series. Please click here for part one, here for part two and here for part three of this adventure arc. Welcome back intrepid heroes! Today is the final installment of The Return of the Black Prince. The final combat encounter as well as the storyline resolution are included below. Also, today’s post [...]
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