By Brent on 10 May 2011
I’m tired of objectivity. Don’t get me wrong: I believe in objective reality. I’m tired of people speaking and acting in objective terms. “That was terrible.” “That was a really good movie.” “This is a complete and epic fail.” Every word is subjective. And no, I’m not asking people to preface every sentence with “I think.” I’m saying that those phrasings are lazy. “I loved that movie.” “I hated […]
Posted in Miscellaneous |
By Brent on 25 April 2011
Been listening to Merlyn Bragg’s audiobook The Adventures of English, which traces the history of the English language starting from its earliest days in England. Which sparked some ideas about languages in role-playing games. D&D-style worlds usually have half a dozen languages: a Common or Basic tongue that’s known by 99% of civilized people, a few species-specific languages, and maybe a few religious or otherwise esoteric languages (equivalent to Latin and Ancient Greek in our […]
Posted in Role-playing |
By Brent on 30 March 2011
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 […]
Posted in Technology |
By Brent on 14 March 2011
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 This is an outdated paradigm, though a lot of games default to it.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 […]
Posted in Role-playing |
By Brent on 11 March 2011
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 […]
Posted in Role-playing |
By Brent on 9 March 2011
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. […]
Posted in Role-playing |