Posted by Ravyn on June 15, 2013
(Procedural note: I am out of state for my younger sister’s college graduation. As this involves a great deal of tiring travel time, from tomorrow’s post to next Saturday’s Imprac all posts this coming week will be reruns. New posts will resume next Sunday night.)
I talked this week about the dos and don’ts of conversations [...]
Categories: Impractical Applications |
Tags: conversations between NPCs, impractical applications | 
1 Comment »
Posted by Ravyn on June 8, 2013
…man, that title is a cliché. It’ll do, though. It was a longish session tonight, and I’m tired.
I haven’t run game for a while. Part of this was a conscious decision, requesting that one of my players run a hiatus game so I could get my brain back. It went on a bit longer than [...]
Categories: Impractical Applications |
Tags: impractical applications | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on June 1, 2013
Honestly, this week was not written to go well with an Imprac… so I’m going to try something a little different. I reviewed Better Angels this week, but I felt that it might be a bit easier to contextualize the review by looking at what we actually did and how we ran into the conclusions [...]
Categories: Impractical Applications |
Tags: Better Angels, game stories, impractical applications | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on May 25, 2013
I talked this week about ways of handling the party disliking your slated-to-be-important NPC, both to do and to avoid. I’ve been lucky; most of my NPCs have only gotten that reaction when they were meant to. But as a player I’ve seen them go well, and I’ve seen them go poorly. There are two [...]
Categories: Impractical Applications |
Tags: bad first impressions, impractical applications | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on May 18, 2013
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 | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ravyn on May 11, 2013
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 »
Posted by Ravyn on May 4, 2013
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 »
Posted by Ravyn on April 27, 2013
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 »
Posted by Ravyn on April 20, 2013
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 [...]
Categories: Impractical Applications |
Tags: impractical applications, losing gracefully | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on April 13, 2013
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 »