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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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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In many warrior based societies the duel is the standard way of resolving conflicts which cannot be smoothed over with diplomacy. If two nobles claim to tell the truth, if one deeply insults the other, or if a crime is committed the duel is used as judge, jury, and executioner. This is due to the [...]
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Today’s post is a follow up to For Your Own Protection in which I detailed the meta-human secret police force known unaffectionately as the Minutemen. They gained their name both because of its resonance with the American revolution and because the name implies that they can be anywhere in a matter of moments. The name [...]
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Government heroes like Captain America and Captain Atom have existed for decades and the military experiment backstory is common in superhero universes. The positives and negatives of these heroes has been explored by many major publishers and the idea of government only superheroes was the subject matter of Marvel Civil War. Personally I have always [...]
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Posted in Characters, Conflict, D&D 4th, Dungeon Mastering, Dungeons and dragons, Hero System, Houserules, Pathfinder, RPG, Roleplay, Skill checks, Star Wars, backstories, city building, storytelling, world building on Mar 10th, 2011
Time to get personal. I have several permanent injuries. I tore a groin muscle several years ago. I’ve had both ankles surgically reconstructed. I also have a bad back from being rear-ended 3 times in one year. Over the years, I have learned to compensate for these injuries. I still enjoy quite a few athletic [...]
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Posted in Characters, D&D 4th, Dungeon Mastering, Dungeons and dragons, Pathfinder, RPG, Roleplay, city building, storytelling, world building on Mar 3rd, 2011
I don’t know about the rest of you, but the cantina scene in the “Special Edition” of Star Wars always irritated me. Han shot Greedo under the table. Greedo never got to pull the trigger. That was how the scene was originally scripted and that’s how it happened as far as I’m concerned. When playing [...]
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Zombies are huge in popular culture these days. The genre of zombie movies has experienced a popular reemergence and the familiar brain eating bad guys appear more in video games, comic books, and table top RPGs than they ever have before. When planning a session for my Urban Arcana game I decided to use zombies [...]
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