50 Games in 50 Weeks: Houses of the Blooded
I’m building an “RPG Tour,” a set of RPGs that, if played, will give one a broad appreciation for different approaches to tabletop gaming. The list includes Dread, Fiasco, Old School Hack, and Dungeon World. I ran my second session of Houses of the Blooded last night, and I’m adding it to the list. Houses is a game of high court intrigue. The players are all powerful nobles struggling to get their way in a complex society. In many ways, it’s […]
How to Run an Online RPG Convention
Indie+, an online RPG convention on Google+, finished today. I was one of the four sponsors who co-ordinated and ran the whole thing: 21 games and 7 panels scheduled for all hours of the week, including integration with YouTube, Google+, and a wiki. A few weeks ago, we put out a call for potential hosts, asking them to add potential games or panels to our wiki. Once the new Event functionality appeared on Google+, we switched […]
Quick Promotion
I’m helping to run an online game convention, Indie+. It’s a con run as a set of independently-run games and panels, all organized centrally and run as Google+ Hangouts. It’s running this week. I volunteered to shepherd the gaming side of things. There are quite a few moving parts, including several different schedules to sync. I figured it’d be no big deal, as we were running this for the first time, so I wouldn’t have […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: The Play’s The Thing
If you can imagine a Shakespearean role-playing game that’s riotously fun even for those not steeped in Shakespeare, you’d be imagining The Play’s The Thing. The players take on the roles of small-time Shakespearean actors in a play that changes underneath their feet. That, indeed, is the fun: not only can the director interrupt and tell you to do the rest of the scene in Japanese accents, but all the other players can bid to have […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Marvel Heroic Roleplaying
Marvel Heroic Roleplaying is a new tabletop role-playing game that’s garnered a lot of interest lately, partly due to its impressive roster of designers and developers: Cam Banks (Smallville and Leverage RPGs), Rob Donoghue (Spirit of the Century, Dresden Files RPG), Matt Forbeck (Lord of the Rings RPG, Deadlands RPG), Will Hindmarch, and Philippe-Antoine Menard (The Chatty DM). MHR takes an interesting mechanical approach: to perform an action, build a set of dice (a “dice pool”) from elements […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Paranoia
RPG players are conditioned to view PC conflict as an absolute bad. So how can I describe the fun of an RPG that assumes players will attempt to kill each other at every session? Paranoia is set in a 1980’s dystopia where Friend Computer directs humanity with a scented iron fist. It’s 1984 crossed with Discworld. The player-characters are all troubleshooters (“tasked to find trouble and shoot it”), given a job […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Fudged Mouse Guard
My game group played Fudged Mouse Guard a few weeks ago. It takes the excellent Mouse Guard RPG–a game of intelligent mice with medieval-level technology–and converts the system to Fudge (every stat is a score from -4 to +4, and you roll dice that modify your score up or down for a final result, which is compared to a target difficulty). The original Mouse Guard system is a simplified and heavily modified version of the odd Burning Wheel system. The conversion to Fudge […]