Game Mastery

Last time I talked about my system, I looked at some of the challenges in writing up a list of skills.  By the time I got to the skills, I was out of steam and it was just a list.  I’d like to go back to some of those skills now and talk about some of the things I’m doing with them that I think are interesting.  This is mostly a look at some of the special cases I’ve come up with rather than an exhaustive list of all the skills.

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Originally this was a StackExchange answer presenting the classification I use when inviting players to my games. But it’s a work in progress so it didn’t really fit there.

Most schemes I’ve seen classify players by what they get out of playing – the buttkicker wants to fight, the method actor wants to pretend, the optimizer wants to crunch numbers, etc. They all address the things you need to put into your games. What I’d like to classify instead is what the addition of a player will bring to your table.

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Hi blog.  Long time no see.  Sorry about that.  It’s not you, it’s me.

Okay, here’s the deal.  I haven’t gamed since my son was born.  He’s almost two.  The posts you’ve seen in the last two years have been based on ideas or experiences that I had before then, but I’ve mostly run out of those.  I have a todo list of ideas and a few half finished posts that could use some finishing touches.  But as much as I want to keep writing here, without regular gaming I don’t have material to write about.

So, let’s shift what I’m writing about.

First off, please ask me questions.  I participate in a few RPG forums, but I usually hold back there.  Nobody likes reading a wall of text, so I usually post replies in paragraph form.  But if you ask me something here, I’ll try to answer it in full.

Secondly, even though I haven’t been gaming I have been homebrewing.  I figure that if I can’t get my fix with a gaming group, the next best thing is to write a system.  I have plenty of ideas for that.  Now, I don’t want to turn this into the blog about my game system.  But I also don’t want to turn it into another blog that never gets posts.  Given a choice between the two, I’d rather write posts about my system.  So that’s what you’re gonna get.

This was the first campaign where I’ve fully embraced a campaign setting.  Before this I usually bit off a section of a campaign setting and ignored the rest.  We’d stick to a city or town and have an adventure there, but ignore the rest of the world.  It makes the game seem small and severely limits the scope of what you can do, which is why I preferred it for my 8-10 session long adventures.

I should add the caveat that when I say ‘campaign setting’ I mean something explicitly written as a campaign setting.  The game before this was set in George R.R. Martin’s Westeros.  I spent a lot of time rereading the books and finding resources for world info.  Going into this game, I expected my experience with Westeros to be similar to using FR as a setting.

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You may have noticed that I’m a big fan of backstory. I think it adds to the game and makes the GM’s life easier. What I’ve never quite figured out is how to properly reward backstory, until now.

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Google Wave has potential to be an awesome platform for online roleplaying.  You heard it here first.

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Whee, new blog.  See the “about” section in the right hand menu.  Hopefully I’ll figure out how to make posts into pages and vice versa soon.