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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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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Today I have a special treat for our Readers. The first session podcast from the More Than Dice crew. This Pathfinder campaign, entitled Return of the Black Prince contains two new players, four women and one Josh. It takes place in a steam-punk world of my own design called Vion. The first session was a little shaky [...]
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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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Posted in Character interaction, Characters, Conflict, D&D 4th, Dungeon Mastering, Dungeons and dragons, Inter-player conflict, Roleplay, Uncategorized, backstories on May 3rd, 2011
An intrepid group of adventurers sets out to make their name in the world. With mighty swings, bawdy songs and esoteric spells they rid the kingdom of evil and earn their place among the legendary heroes. Along the way the heroes will fight many villains, striking down each with righteous fervor and without much hesitation. [...]
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