Tag Archives: gaming

Right now, Masks. Probably two different games, ultimately, given I'll be running it for the kids as well as the online game. (It's getting easier and easier to pull this off as they get a bit older.) I'm sure a touch of No Thank You, Evil, maybe with Kaylee running the game. I'll be playing […]

Mash-ups don't get me very far these days. See, I play with my kids a lot, and they don't know the baseline genres well enough to appreciate mash-ups of those genres. Which is to say, they just don't get the joke, yet. At the risk of repeating myself, I'm going to dive into this a […]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say Aliens, but… I mean, it could be a hundred different shows. This was, however, more true back when I was playing face to face. These days, a lot of the 'quote banter' that used to suffuse our table talk has been replaced with posting relevant […]

Flippant answers aside for once. Attention. Respect. Engagement. And a small group people with whom you could easily see sharing a 3 to 4 hour car trip, enjoyably. Everything else is a bonus. —– Now if I was going to go back to the original question and talk about essential TOOLS, I'd talk about Roll20 […]

Players creating stuff or in similar ways demonstrating their interest and enthusiasm for the game. I love that stuff. It just makes my day. Also feedback, good or bad. But in either case, just engaging above and beyond "shows up on time every week," you know? I've been blessed by this level of engagement both […]

Switched up the question a bit, so I could answer "Probably PBTA stuff. Probably." For me it's a VERY GOOD mix of the kind of game approach that favors the GMing style I developed primarily with Amber DRPG, but built on a system and mechanics that regularly inject unexpected elements into the game, which was […]

Dungeons and Dragons, easily. I've been flailing at it since I was ten. Full-steam ahead all through high school. Several games in college, though it was rarely the 'main' game. A four and half year game that bridged 3rd edition into 3.5, plus a pile of Living Campaign play at that same time, all of […]

I don't really like adapting games much. I'm not a system designer by either preference or practice – I like running and playing, and I really enjoy when the rules as written just… work. There's a joy in that. I have, in the past, done a success-counting hack of Risus that I liked, an Approach-less […]

Haven, the Free City by Gamelords, Ltd. It was an urban setting for a DnD clone where everyone basically played different flavors of thieves. Since you were thieves, the game focused on personal interactions, intrigue, and political and social plotting in a way that was decades ahead of its time. Tragically, the team behind Gamelords […]

I'd say most PBTA games (and in a lot of cases most games that share that design-space in the industry). You need more than a couple sessions to really get them going, but characters tend to resolve arcs after about ten sessions and lapse into a bit of thumb twiddling after that until they get […]

That may not be useful to a lot of other people as a recommendation, but No Thank You, Evil! and Hero Kids are both designed with shorter scenarios and challenges in mind, due to their target audience. I don't think I've ever run NTYE! for more than an hour at a time. Outside specific games, […]

Who needs therapy if you've got "impactful" RPGs, right? Impactful is such a weird word. I've had lots of memorable sessions. Impactful seems like "something that changed you outside the game" and I'm not convinced that's why I play RPGs, so… Man, I dunno. Okay, here's one, maybe. Dogs in the Vineyard. Our second serious […]

* Monday: Pirate 101 with Sean and Kaylee. (Alternately, family game of Masks.)* Tuesday: Normal Tuesday Roll20 group, playing whatever we're currently playing.* Wednesday: Overwatch with Kate and Kaylee. (Alternately, family game of Masks.)* Thursday: Dungeon Crawl Classics, GMed by Tim.* Friday: Playing DnD 5e Adventurer's League, via Roll20/Discord.* Saturday: Luxurious full-length afternoon of DnD […]

This one's a bit easy for me: Tales from the Loop. It's entirely possible this answer is chicken-egg cheating, since Tales from the Loop started life as an art book before it was an RPG, but regardless, the cover's a perfect match for what the game's about. As an added bonus, it's a solid game […]

One of the nice things about recording all our online game sessions is it makes it pretty easy to simply look this kind of thing up. (I knew the answer, though I was curious about the specific numbers.) The 'winner' in this case is a apocalypse engine hack I built for our Star Wars game […]