One of the things I brushed on this week was a person being just that oblivious—and at least some of it possibly being my fault. I’m not sure how much of it is and how much of it isn’t. The phrase “It’s not fun anymore” came up, but wasn’t believed until one of our other [...]
Categories: Impractical Applications |
Tags: impractical applications, Saturday game | 
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Earlier this week, I talked about the problems with playing a powerful character when inexperienced. That post was almost entirely personal experience; due to my tendency to end up as the new player in groups that had been doing their respective games for a while, that sort of thing happened to me multiple times—twice I [...]
Categories: Impractical Applications |
Tags: impractical applications, learning, power levels | No Comments »
So… I have this Saturday game. That D&D one I rant about occasionally probably a little too often. I don’t even know why I started overthinking that one, since most of the fun I have in messing around with settings and with characters is when I’m in regular contact with the other players and the [...]
Categories: Impractical Applications |
Tags: impractical applications, overthinking, the Valkyries and stairs rant | No Comments »
Earlier this week, I did a thought exercise about weapon control in a fantasy world. The issue has somewhat come up in some of the games I’ve both run and played in—not in a codified sense most of the time, mind, but in the form of societal expectations, some of which were even comparatively enforceable. [...]
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Tags: impractical applications, weapon control | No Comments »
I freewrote this week about the idea of the story-oriented GM’s perceived responsibility being to lose gracefully, and the alternatives to character death that might in the short run render this responsibility somewhat less relevant. My groups have done this a lot, though for every time they’ve done it, I’ve seen two more occasions on [...]
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Tags: impractical applications, losing gracefully | No Comments »
With my group, running for smart PCs is the rule, not the exception; even the tanks tend to be pretty good at solving riddles and exploiting technicalities. So we learn a thing or two about how to handle each other, or we face each other’s snark.
I deal with it by doing layer-plots. If I can [...]
Categories: Impractical Applications |
Tags: impractical applications, smart PCs | 1 Comment »
There hasn’t been much to say about my gaming this week—not that there hasn’t been one, just that it hasn’t had anything particularly egregious, and the week’s post were more about writing anyway.
The one thing that’s been going on is a personal project. I’m on one of those writing kicks again, as you’ve probably figured [...]
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Tags: impractical applications, Innerworld | No Comments »
Earlier this week I riffed about RPGs and mind-controlling the PCs. Unlike many of my subjects, I’ve seen that both go wrong and go right, so it’s a lot easier to put a few “do”s in with all my “don’t”s and the occasional “never ever not even then”.
The one of these that set off Tuesday [...]
Categories: Impractical Applications |
Tags: impractical applications, mind control | 5 Comments »
I talked earlier this week about sympathetic antagonists, and their advantages and disadvantages. I’ve seen them go a lot of different ways—success, failure, combinations of the above, all depending on what I managed to do wrong, do right, or occasionally do a little too well.
I’ve written before about my last adventure with an antagonist without [...]
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Tags: impractical applications, loose threads, sympathetic antagonists | No Comments »
My group loves honest manipulators; it’s almost a given that in any game, one of us will be playing one.
The game in which I played Tuyet had somewhere between one and two. Tuyet herself was the uncertain fraction; on the one hand, she was a very good liar and had an inordinate fondness for secret [...]
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Tags: honest manipulators, impractical applications, manipulation | No Comments »