Mythender! Playtest!

By On June 21, 2012 · Leave a Comment

So, short update: I just ran a small playtest of Ryan Macklin’s Mythender with Quinn Murphy of Thoughtcrime Games. If you’ve got 2 hours 20 minutes to watch other people play a game, it’s up over here.

The game’s great. Check it out!

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Why don’t we just play Primetime Adventures?

By On June 11, 2012 · Leave a Comment

So, I think Primetime Adventures is a great game. So great a game, that we might well ask why we don’t just use it for everything. Well, because of reasons.

Let me unpack that a bit. Some time ago, I was promulgating the notion that most of what makes a successful instance of RPG play is shared genre-expectations among the people at the table. I still think that this is true.

Primetime Adventures is a game with some powerful mechanisms for getting everyone at the table to share those genre-expectations. It’s a one-two punch: first the pitch, where everyone at the table gets in the same general area of idea-space, and then fanmail, which works[1] as a feedback mechanism to let players tell each other “yes, more of that, please!”

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  1. When it works. It can and does fail. [↩]
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Vulnerability and Trust in RPGs

By On June 4, 2012 · 2 Comments

When we came up with the Circumstances system in Becoming Heroes, I’d thought we’d hit upon a really awesome mechanic that allows for fantastic moments of awesome. And I still do. But that observation has been tempered in a number of ways in the last year, and it deserves reconsideration.

Let me fill in some blank areas. I’m male, I’m white, I’m reasonably well educated, I have a good job. I am, sort of, the canonical example of privilege. I may have mentioned elsewhere that it occupies a lot of my mind. I bring this up because during last year’s Gen Con, and recently via Twitter, I have seen people in positions of less privilege identify loss of character authority as a sore spot.

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