I talked earlier this week about the twin lures of “It has to be you, and it has to be now” as the key to getting players going on your plotlines. All in all, my GMs have been pretty good at this, though there have been a few times that something went sideways and the [...]
Categories: Impractical Applications |
Tags: impractical applications, motivation | 
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All of the conflicts I’ve seen work have made two major points to the players/characters: It has to be you, and it has to be now.
It has to be you. This is probably the most important of the two, playing as it does to the egos of the players—and to the verisimilitude of the overall [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, GM Advice, Motivation, Plot, Technique |
Tags: conflict, GM Advice, motivation, plot, roleplaying | 3 Comments »
This week wasn’t particularly good for applicability (I mean, come on. A writing exercise on a scary forest, a riff on reading getting in my way—rather not expand on that more than I have to—and a review of a game I played a grand total of once long enough ago that I’m not entirely sure [...]
Categories: Impractical Applications |
Tags: impractical applications, motivation | 2 Comments »
Keeping going in a game can be difficult sometimes—if the players are driving me crazy, the style isn’t anything I’ve done before, the… you get the idea. It’s easy to be frustrated nowadays. Writing, sadly enough, is likewise: if anything, a game is likelier to keep my attention, or at least my participation, because the [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, Motivation, Tactics, Technique |
Tags: motivation, questions, roleplaying, writing | 1 Comment »
My biggest problem with this month’s Camp NaNo attempt at major progress in my story, as with the first time I tried to NaNo Almagest, was underpreparedness. There were a few characters in my head, but not enough; can one truly do a good heavy court intrigue with only four, and most of them on [...]
Categories: For Writers, Learning from NaNo, Motivation, Technique, The Real World |
Tags: Camp NaNo, motivation, NaNoWriMo, writing | 1 Comment »
It begins the way these stories always begin: Shinali talks me into signing up for (a variant on) NaNoWriMo, and chaos ensues. This time, though, is different. It isn’t the official month—it’s June, and we’re doing the “Camp” version instead. This time I’m leaving the Generic Villain behind and taking a stab at Almagest again, [...]
Categories: For Writers, Learning from NaNo, Motivation, Technique, The Real World |
Tags: Camp NaNo, motivation, NaNoWriMo, writing | 3 Comments »
It might have been played up just a bit too much in order to provide motivation. Or maybe it’s to justify the fact that everybody with a name, a backstory and/or an even remotely solid set of stats seems to want to get their hands on it. Whatever the reason, it’s clear that the item [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Motivation, Tactics, Technique |
Tags: artifacts of anticlimax, motivation, roleplaying, writing | 2 Comments »
I first ran into the idea of the Hedgehog Concept in a book on businesses and how they succeed—but hey, what am I if not prone to interdisciplinary approaches? According to Jim Collins, the idea of the Hedgehog Concept is inspired by the idea that the fox has many tricks, but the hedgehog can always [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, Motivation, Technique |
Tags: hedgehog concept, meta, motivation, roleplaying, writing | No Comments »
“What kind of graduate program,” I ask, glaring at the computer screen, “doesn’t even make you write an essay?”
I’m still in the throes of grad school application, comparing the one I’ve been stalling on my app to with the one I’ve probably just been accepted in. Sure, the former is cheaper, but something’s been bugging [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, GM Advice |
Tags: GM tips, motivation, roleplaying, subtle hints | 1 Comment »
Two days ago, for the first time this month, I fell behind on National Novel-Writing Month.
It’s not that I wasn’t expecting to at some point. I went in fully aware that I was operating against pretty titanic odds by my standards, that what I was trying to do was considerably more complicated than either of [...]
Categories: For Writers, Learning from NaNo, The Real World |
Tags: block, freewriting, motivation, NaNoWriMo, Round 2, standards, writing | 1 Comment »