A popular mechanic which crops up in a lot of excellent games is Conditions. A Condition is a problem that’s affecting your character, like “broken leg”, “on fire” or “suspected traitor”. The idea is that the GM will hit you with trouble when your Condition would be relevant, or penalise you when it would get […]
Category: Tips
How I run investigation games (part 2: in-session)
Last time I wrote about how I prep investigation games. I’ll talk a bit more about that here, but I also want to move on to talk about what I do during sessions. My aim in running an investigative game is twofold: Make the players feel smart Make the investigation challenging Those two aims seem […]
Breaking down hard moves
Apocalypse World introduced the concept of Hard Moves, i.e. the individual interventions the GM makes in response to players’ actions and rolls. Subsequent PBTA games have tended to distinguish between “hard” and “soft” moves. But they vary wildly in how much time they put into explaining the distinction. Here I’m going to talk about the […]
How I run investigation games (part 1: prep)
A really juicy mystery, with the cool feeling of piecing together clues and coming to the correct conclusion, is one of my favourite things in roleplaying. It’s also something that I feel isn’t well delivered by existing RPG systems. Here I’m going to talk about my approach to building a mystery and enabling real investigation. […]
Is it ok to fudge rolls?
I was bodding about on Twitter recently and I came across this: Three opinions I always get yelled at about on the internet: 1. D&D is not perfect.2. The GM rolling dice and ignoring the results is a violation of the social contract of RPGs3. Marginalized people deserve to see themselves represented in games. Every […]
Lovecraftesque – a kickstarter retrospective (part 4)
This is part 4 in a multi-part series looking back on our RPG kickstarter, what went well, what we’d change, and so on. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here. This time, we’re talking about the quality of the product and the post-kickstarter phase. Delivery phase – quality Quality-wise, I couldn’t be […]
How to be a great RPG player
I’d like to talk a bit about how players can contribute to making a roleplaying game as much fun as possible for everyone. The headline is: Don’t expect your GM to make all the effort, or to make the game fun for you. Roleplaying isn’t like going to a movie – your contributions are as […]
Lovecraftesque – a kickstarter retrospective (part 3)
This is part 3 in a multi-part series looking back on our RPG kickstarter, what went well, what we’d change, and so on. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Part 4 is here. This time, we’re talking about how we delivered the product, particularly how we managed the delivery timetable and our costs. Delivery phase […]
Lovecraftesque – a kickstarter retrospective (pt 2)
This is part 2 in a multi-part series looking back on our RPG kickstarter, what went well, what we’d change, and so on. Part 1 is here. Part 3 is here. Part 4 is here. This time, we’re talking about how we worked to support diversity and inclusion, and tackle Lovecraft’s bigotry; and how we […]
Lovecraftesque – a kickstarter retrospective
Just over 2 years ago, we launched the Lovecraftesque kickstarter. If you didn’t follow it at the time, it was a success – we raised £15000, over triple our funding goal. As we’re slowly moving towards a position where we might kickstart some more games[*], it seems timely to talk a bit about what went […]