Just in time to ring in the new location, RPG Blog Carnival for April 2010 is right here on the Exchange of Realities!
Into every game, a few NPCs tend to fall. And then a few more. And then a few more….. but in every game, there are always some that, for whatever reason, are titanic [...]
Categories: Characterization, For Roleplayers |
Tags: Characterization, For Roleplayers, NPCs, RPG Blog Carnival | 
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For those who value it, loyalty can be one of the strongest motivations out there. It creates people who will go out of the way for a friend, rewrite reality for the sake of their organization, refuse to change sides even under insurmountable proof that their people are wrong. It’s powerful, it’s admirable (granted, more [...]
Categories: Characterization, Characters in the world, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Technique |
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As I noted yesterday while explaining why I moved websites, one of the things I’m working on is a worldbuilding project of my own, for a novel I will eventually be writing. This story itself began in a number of places, that slowly brought themselves together: with a chance encounter on an airplane, with a [...]
Categories: Birth of a world |
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You know you have too many characters when you can do this, with a specific subset of the game’s population, and most of the characters listed have at least one alternative.
A Loose Threads Heavenly Alphabet
A for Altair, a good place to begin;
B is for Brychan—did you recall him?
C for Calandra, you heard what she said;
D [...]
Categories: Characterization, For Roleplayers, For Writers, stories |
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Welcome to the new home of the Exchange of Realities.
I’d been considering this move for a while; those of you who followed things other than my blog probably know why. My old site was nice, particularly in the beginning when community was still the priority of most of the major Names on that network, and [...]
Categories: Uncategorized |
4 Comments »
In my experience, players of RPGs demand time-skips a lot. It’s hardly surprising. We only have so much time allotted for session, people want to squeeze every drop of enjoyment out of it, and the last thing anyone wants to do is take valuable time on things that not everyone is enjoying. And those time-skips [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, GM Advice |
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A while back, I wrote about how we could increase our ability levels to compensate for the inevitable heroic power levels. But while staying constant with them is Dramatically Interesting and thus sanctioned by the Laws of Dramatics, there’s no rule saying we can’t try to counter their typical ways of gaining power. Fortunately, most [...]
Categories: Generic Villain |
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One of the most interesting applications of the Awesome vs. Better Than You continuum for me has been the complicated slide back and forth across the scale I found myself playing with with my charming manipulator Jalil. The man just can’t hold still when it comes to the Awesome/Better Than You continuum; I’ve seen him [...]
Categories: Impractical Applications |
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Yesterday’s article talked about ways that different versions of the same sort of interaction could mark a character as leaning farther towards Awesome or Better Than You. But it’s not just interaction, it’s also action; what sorts of actions, either behavior or plot-event, tilt a character in a different direction?
An Awesome character tries. This doesn’t [...]
Categories: Character image, Characterization, Characters in the world, Concepts, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, Technique |
Tags: original posts | No Comments »
Yesterday, I talked about a character continuum between Awesome and Better Than You characters, and its uses in helping guide the target audience’s response to any given character. One thing I find really interesting about the continuum is that it’s a razor’s edge; there are many behaviors that characters across the continuum might use, and [...]
Categories: Character image, Characterization, Characters in the world, Concepts, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, Technique |
Tags: original posts | 1 Comment »