Archives by date

You are browsing the site archives by date.

The Infrastructure is Done

Just finished watching this thought-provoking video by Merlin Mann: His final point bears repeating: on the web, the infrastructure is pretty much done. Want to create a website? You can have a slick site in an afternoon. And that’s not just one page of black text on a white background; that includes SEO and permissions and embedded videos. Nor do you have to be a techie to do this. Google any question. The answers […]

Who Drives: GM or Players?

There are a lot of interesting theories out there about what a “story” means within a role-playing game. The simple view sees the GM as the controlling narrator, with the players reacting to the GM’s story. In this view, the players are fundamentally passive, struggling to overcome the GM’s challenges. The PCs are trying to survive or otherwise get past the current obstacle. This is an outdated paradigm, though a lot of games default to it. The other extreme […]

Published Adventure Philosophy

My previous blog post got me thinking: What is an adventure’s intended use? A lot of adventure writers (myself included) design adventures with a “commercial software” approach: the user will install the software and start using it immediately, probably without a manual, and it needs to work well up-front. It should guide the user in its use and require minimal fiddling to be useful. What if one were to take an “open […]

Why I Don’t Buy Adventures

There’s a great post over at RPG Musings about buying third-party products. I have a similar problem: I rarely buy third-party RPG products. In my experience, those products are too-specific slices of other peoples’ campaign worlds, which don’t fit into my own. I’ve only bought generic tools, like Gygax’s Book of Names, or completely self-contained adventures that don’t connect with my world, like a jungle temple adventure I bought. […]

I work for Amazon. The content on this site is my own and doesn’t necessarily represent Amazon’s position.