Posts Tagged by roleplaying
| April 23, 2009 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
Playing roleplaying games (often called “gaming”) is a lifelong hobby for me. I started gaming when I was 10, and am still gaming regularly more than 20 years later. Without exaggeration, I can say that many of the best aspects of my life can be traced back to gaming. (If you’d like some background on me, check out my personal website.) This article is about the positive ways that gaming has impacted my life. It’s intended to serve as an introduction for parents, significant others,…
| April 20, 2009 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
When you get right down to it, what is an RPG? It’s an engine for making interesting decisions. When your players are playing in your campaign, at the most basic level they’re doing one of two things: making decisions, or having stuff happen to their characters. Stuff happening to their characters is by far the less interesting of the two — it’s the decision-making that really matters. Game Mechanics and Decision-Making The game rules — the mechanics — are there to facilitate decision-making (and to…
| October 3, 2008 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
This is the fourth and final article in this series — the home stretch. My definition of “roleplaying-intensive” is in Part 1, along with tips 1-3; tips 4-6 are in Part 2 and tips 7-9 are in Part 3.) 10. Driftable Mechanics (This topic was suggested by Gnome Stew reader Irda Ranger — excellent suggestion, IR.) “Drift” just means taking an element — usually a mechanic — from one RPG and using it in another RPG. Sometimes that involves conversion from one system to the…
| June 19, 2008 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
(The first three steps, and my definition of “roleplaying-intensive,” are in Part 1; tips 4-6 are in Part 2.) 7. Make Good on Your Promises By this point, you’ve made two promises to your players, one explicit and one implicit: Here’s the kind of game I’m going to run. This is the explicit promise you made in in step three, when you pitched a roleplaying-intensive campaign to your players. The follow-through here is simple: Run that kind of game. Don’t suddenly change your mind and…
| May 27, 2008 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
When I started up my current Mage: The Awakening chronicle, I made a conscious decision to not use battle maps. When combat or exploration comes up, I doodle sloppy maps on the huge white board in our game room, and adjust them on the fly. Signposts Could I have used battle maps instead? Sure — but I wanted to put up a signpost for my players that says, “This aspect of the game is less important than the others.” I wanted all of us to…
