Hey, all, 
In just two days, I’ll be leaving for my annual* June retreat. This is my going away post and I’m brimming with anticipation, can you tell?
Because of the way the holidays landed this year, it’s gonna be an extended one. Holidays on a Tuesday and a Thursday in the same week. Only in Portugal! What a country… (oh, and just so you know, I’m saying this is a bad thing, even though I’m totally using it for my retreat!)
Hello, all,
Yesterday, I had another excellent session of Shadow of Yesterday. While the game is proving to be consistent uncompromising fun, lessons to be learned as regards the nature of role-playing itself are naturally becoming fewer and fewer as our grasp of the mechanics and the game mode increases.
Still, I learned a valuable lesson about coherence at the table, not only from the sessions themselves but also from pre- and post-play talk about what had happened in the previous session and what happened in this one.
Hello,
Well, this was a weird weekend for me, not only RP-wise, but in general.
We had an interesting session of Dogs in the Vineyard on Friday, but I don’t want to go too far into that before we actually get to finish the town. We also put together a new PTA season, but again, play has yet to begin, so nothing to advance on that front.
Also, back and forth and back and forth, I drove a grand total of 250km, on Saturday. Tiring, I tell you.
All this to say, I don’t have much to advance regarding interesting actual play, today. So, I thought I’d take this moment to point something out: Every once in a while, I try to engage someone in conversation and use terms from the Big Model, like GNS and stuff, and I get glazed look, or worse yet, a response along the lines of “we’re not interested in theory, we just want to have fun”.
The thing is, GNS and the Big Model isn’t really theory. All it is is language. It’s a dictionary, created so that different people can talk about their games and actually communicate with each other, instead of talking past each other with empty catch phrases like “this is role-play, not roll-play”.
But wait. If GNS isn’t theory, then what is?
Anyone want to see what actual theory looks like? Check out this thread. Then, tell me if you want to talk about theory or not.
Cheers,
J.
Hey, all,
The Shadow Of Yesterday continues to shine for us. After a rather bland start, an awesome third session and a rather bumpy fourth session, last week, we had one of the best RPG sessions I remember ever having in my role-playing career. Ever!
We stopped playing at about 2:00AM. We lingered about for a while, then Ana and I drove home, and because we live far from where we played and we’re responsible for distributing everyone, we didn’t get home till about 3:30.
At 7:30 AM, I still felt like the session had just ended, and I just could bring myself down enough to even think about falling asleep!
Hello, all,
This is the fourth and final post in my Mother May I series. To recap:
In this post, I finally want to talk about some rules sets and play techniques you might use if you wanted to get away from this sort of play. This post is mostly aimed at people who are in camp n. 3. In other words, if you’re a player and want to find out how to have more cretive input into the game, or if you’re a GM and want your players to have more creative input, this is for you.
Hey, all,
Content and Meaning (continued)
Before I start into other modes of play, I want to talk about two exceptions to what I wrote in my previous post. So, what follows is a description of two types of situations where all players have a chance to create content and meaning, regardless of the set of rules or techniques in use.
Both of these exceptions have their up side and their down side, and I’ll take a stab and describing those as well. If you feel that you can add to my accounts of the advantages and disadvantages of each, please don’t hesitate to add a comment.
Hey, all,
What’s In A Session
I was talking to a friend, the other day, trying to understand what it is that he likes in RPGs, and he described the following situation:
“We were all trying to figure out how it was that we were going to off this high-powered sorceress. Taking her on directly was way above our means, so we needed to come up with an alternative plan. I decided to bank on her being a regular biological being and we booby-trapped her bathroom and waited. It could have failed in so many ways. We might have been caught. She might not have needed bathrooms at all. (We didn’t know if she wasn’t an undead being.) Or she might have noticed the booby-traps. As it was, it worked and we blew her to kingdom come. As a further point of coolness, these NPCs some times leave a specific type of loot, which one of the players needed. We got to console the player as the GM described said loot mixed in with the debris, destroyed and worthless.”
I’m listening to him, and I’m thinking two things:
Hello,
Yeah, finally, I’ve wanted to try this one out ever since I met the rest of the crazy indie dudes in Lisbon. (Especially Ricardo, who buys indie games in bulk, I suspect…)
Hi,
If I had had a blog, back then, I’m pretty sure all this stuff would have been in here:
That’s it for now. There’s a bunch of definitional blog entries out there that I should have linked to, but since it’s not within my grasp to recall them all, well, hopefully, I’ll just remember to at least refer to them if and when I decide to talk about their respective issues.
Cheers,
J.