Diary of a Failed Game Designer

 There is a thing I do in my RPG campaigns. I give players arcs.  Sure, I also try to give each character a bit of spotlight each game. I like to keep everyone involved and occupied. I think I manage it game to game with varying degrees of success. But that's not exactly what I'm talking about. I like to try and give each character something going on in the larger world that either directly touches them or which they will want to be involved in. Further I will often pursue one player's arc from quite a while. If player interest drifts, I'll switch focus but generally I'll ride an arc until it concludes. Much of this is unspoken. It just kind of happens.  It helps I have a small, long time player group. If was running at a local brick and mortar shop with 8 people who changed all the time, I would have a hard time maintaining arcs that are specific to each character. The last set of adventures were very clearly the "Master's arc."  He was a druid, reest...

This my dear reader is a good thing. I'ts 2020. There is a new generation of RPG players out there and they  have the buying power in the RPG industy.  Ones that have absolutely no connection to the  war gaming history of the hobby.  Players who really only want to see their  tiefling sorcerer steal a kiss from the barbarian the evening before setting off to face the big bad.  Players who don't want a scribe, a mapper, or a caller. Players who want to watch RPG's on youube and Twitch, the way we used to watch Conan and Krull. ones who want to hear how the  light plays off the gems on the gypsie's hem.  Players who don't mind if the game they’re watching is not a group of friends creating an emergent story. Rather a group of actors brought together via casting call, and running through a GM's vision of the game. Players who don't particularity care "Miniatures move and fight using a ratio of either 1:20 (one miniature representin...

I took a year ( 11 months ) off from blogging. Anything I posted in 2018 were just unfinished articles I found floating around on my hard drive. Great. I think I needed the break. I was getting pretty disillusioned with the whole online R.P.G. scene. Google had, and has changed their algorithms so that even the more successful blogs were having some trouble drawing traffic like they had in the past. My actual human viewer count went from small to nonexistent overnight. Which was a bit of a gut punch. Secondly our live gaming group just had a straight up busy year, so there was less gaming going on at the table. I'm one of those people who is far more creative when I can share or use what I'm working on. Otherwise I loose interest. So, How do I find my self typing on the old blog? Google announced that they are finally killing G+. Apparently by August 2019 the service will be, as they say"sunseted." Sunseted being a made up nice way of saying "slowly killed."...

I had a few days off last week and I spent a good amount that time writing. I started working on an idea I had concerning the genre of 1970's Kung-Fu movies. These films are dear to my heart because I grew up watching them every Saturday on local broadcast television. Some people have Star wars nostalgia, I have have godzilla, Kung-fu theater, and WCCW wrestling out of texas. So I  came up with a setting brief. I thought about what I wanted the game to achieve. What I wanted the dice to do, the kinds of decisions I wanted the mechanics to support. I started typing. Ten thousand three hundred thirty six words later I realized I forgot to think about one thing. How will I play this game? I play mostly online via roll 20 these days. Roll 20 to me is the unfortunate artifact of being an adult  with  responsibilities beyond the gaming table. Our group as it is can't get together once a month, or even once a quarter during 2017. We can however usually get a weekday evening wher...

W arning, this post doesn't contain any usable gaming content. For that I'm sorry. Not sorry enough to stop typing, but just sorry enough to realize someone might  be looking for usable content, why waste their time. Honestly though, no one is going to read this, so who fuckign cares anyway. This  will stray a bit far afield,...Fair warning. There is a mountain of GM /DM ing advice on the internet. Some of the advice is practical. Things like "Here is how I used index cards to organize my notes", or "here is the shorthand I used to  write monster descriptions for quick reference." These are useful things that can help a new Gm. I'm all for that. There are people who have been playing for a very long time they're bound to have picked up a few tricks that make running games smoother. I'm all for that. Some internet DMing advice is personal opinion cloaked as useful tips. Even all that opinion can still be useful. Insightful opinions about how to ru...

Mixed bag post today: Part 1: AAIE is being run at Gen Con 😁 .. Not by me ..by Neal Tanner who is a Gen Con veteran and the  most adamant proponent of AAIE on the face of planet earth ... (more adamant even than  your's truly.) There were 5 seats at the table and they all sold!  Neal will have a full group of  what could be the most discriminating gamers, at the  granddaddy of all conferences. I hope he kills all of their characters in the most brutal and random ways possible. It's cool, knowing that one of my humble games will be  played at Gencon. I appreciate the effort Neal went through to make that happen. I have an odd relationship with Cons. I used to  joke with a friend back in school that someday we would make it to Gen-Con, I mean it's not that far honestly a couple hours by plane, we could do it. Now that I'm older and Gen-Con is so, so much bigger. I don't think I could do it anymore. I t has effectively been taken off my bucket list and r...

Monkey Business By Jens Durke. Disclosure: This can't be a review because I'm too close to the project. Not only did I chat with Jens often during his time working on the project. I also contributed some art. Rather than a review the following text should be considered info piece.   The writer behind the " Disoriented Range r (DR)" blog has put out a module called Monkey Business . It is currently available via Drive through RPG, I believe he plans on a POD version later on, though I can't directly speak to that. Anyone who has followed the DR blog in any capacity  will know that Jens does not take a shallow stab at anything. He specializes in deep dives. It doesn't matter if he's figuring out a method to roll up Hierarchies for NPC's or Preparing to Run an adventure  he always pulls from diverse schools of thought to put his ideas together. I can say without fear of insulting Jens that he "connects the dots" in interesting ways and designs ...

This is one of those odd posts about my personal experiences and views on RPG's. If that's not what your into cool.  Skip this post and comeback for the next one I'll probably have some random charts or something. I thought the internet was going to fix this. Apparently I underestimated my own propensity to act like a hermit. I have a very small player base. A few good friends with whom I have been playing for years and in some cases decades. I love those guys, and appreciate them putting up with my creative impulses. As is the normal way of life however  we have gotten older, life has become busier. We rarely get to play games at the table. We have started to lean more and more heavily on virtual table tops like Roll 20 and I-table-top  to get our gaming fix. That leads me to my point: If I am doing 90% of my gaming on line anyway why am I not actively seeking new players to join in? WHy am I not using the  net, to  cast a larger net? I heard a podcaster the ot...

My D&D 5th ed campaign has lost it's steam for the moment. The holidays brought with them a gaming drought which stole any momentum or desire I had where running my game is concerned. It happens every year. We will get back to it, we always do. * I  have proposed that we try something I have actually never done. A full on dungeon crawl. My games have traditionally been about  characters traipsing around the land, dealing with things they find and moving on. Rarely have they gone below ground. As I have gotten older I have started obsessing a bit over odd details... Why is the  mega dungeon there? How was it built? where did all the dirt go? Who paid for this huge public works project. How do those orcs get food? Air? Gravity, hows that work? and so on. Without question if I have a big ass multi-level magical dungeon in the middle of my game world I want it to have some logic behind it. with that in mind, the whole mega dungeon concept doesn't fit very well into my own...

" S omewhere under a lost and lonely hill of grim and foreboding aspect lies a labyrinthine crypt. It is filled with terrible traps and not a few strange and ferocious monsters to slay the unwary." -E.G.Gygax * This post is completely unrelated to a few other posts on the  subject lately. If you wish to take a deep dive on the subject of preparing an adventure, check out The Disoriented Ranger's series. I have come to a conclusion that has probably been  incredibly obvious to everyone else for quite some time. There are two basic styles people like  in their prepackaged adventures. Neither style is lesser, both styles are valid, but they are distinctly different. Furthermore, I understand there are modules and adventures that cover the range between Styles A and Style B mentioned below. Style A: One type of gamer wants pre-packaged adventures as interpretive as possible. Areas can be loosely defined, descriptive fluff text is nice if interesting but not necessary. Thes...

Well here we are 2017. A constant in RPG blogging that has always amazed is the longevity of other blogs. This blog had a down year post wise.. My 2017 post count was in the 40's Down from in the 70's the year before.. Which for the record was down from over 100 the  year before that.. On the  plus side I  broke 100000 page views (As of this writing sitting at 100,158.) A big  thank you  to all of the humans who has actually viewed the blog. Which is a debatable thing considering 12k of the views are from the web crawler linked to the Russian equivalent of Google. The post with the most views from 2016 was " Packing it all away " Which was about how what we play in our formative years can shape what we are comfortable with well beyond that. I was surprised it received as many views as it did. I think my favorite post of 2016 was " Adventures in the Canopy " A system neutral post about  the myriad of ways characters can die in a jungle. It was may favorite b...

Back when I was in Jr high school I wrote a "RPG" about pro wrestling, which I creatively titled "The wrestling game." I don't remember exactly when. I know it was before High school, before being able to drive, and all the distractions that come from that sort of thing. We would get together at one of our homes and play D&D, Car wars, Star fleet battles, or whatever was on deck. Since we were relying on rides from others, we would never all arrived at the same time. So I wrote the wrestling game to fill those minutes before the group had fully convened. We played it a few times. I think we enjoyed it. I guess that's when I got the game design bug. I realized I could makes something my friends and I could share and enjoy. Since then I have always held a soft spot for pro wrestling games. Not that there have been a ton of them, but there have been a few. Here's a quick list of some of the Wrestling games I've read through in the years since I wrot...

Here's the  kickstarter page, for record. if you are into games (and you must be if you landed in this tiny blog backwater) or if you are into what can be done in the world of  game publishing at its upper limits, check out this kickstarter. "1,846 backers  pledged  $664,274  to help bring this project to life." I wrote thsi a few weeks ago and let it sit in my drafts folder. I waited to post this until the kickstarter campaign was over. Not that this wee little blog in the  corner of the  internet would be able to slow that supporter train down. Regardless I didn't want to confuse anyone into thinking that I was trying to slow that train down. Now my disclaimer: I like Monte Cook Games and their products very much. I feel they are an upstanding group  running an outstanding company. The quality of their products, and the obvious time and attention they give each project has been impressive. I own the Numenera book. It ranks among my top gamebooks...

This post was inspired by  two  sources.  Primarily my friend Neal putting my brain to work about a game I wrote which he has played with  other people that I will likely never meet. So naturally he asks a lot of good interesting and useful questions about the game. Secondly This Post  from the Pits Perilous blog served to further my thinking. I'm going to write a bit about  character death and just some of my thoughts on the subject. I will directly relate some of those thoughts back to a game I wrote. Other points will be more general. I'm afraid this  post will likely be a meandering mess, please forgive me. I have a game, It's called Amazing Adventures and Incredible Exploits. Check out the labels on this post to read more about it. The facts are the game started as a joke among the people I game with and myself, and it has grown a bit like an unpredictable weed. The  premise being  that for every successful character in D&D,  Sw...