First, I should state that I believe that RPGs reach their greatest potential in a social setting…
Reviews
Review: Fractured Kingdom RPG
Part cyberpunk, part post-apocalyptic, part something else, Fractured Kingdom combines the best parts of several genres into an interesting new take on futuristic role-playing…
Steal this Background
3-D Man (Delroy Garrett) – Marvel Datafile
The Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Game may have been cancelled but there are lots of books still out there […]
Editorial
Choice in Games: Does It Require Nonlinearity?
Choice. It’s something that nobody really considers to be a “bad” thing in gaming. However, it is also something that is fundamentally misunderstood by a lot of people in gaming…
Better Gameplay?
Getting Women To The Table
One of the things I’ve often been asked as a somewhat experienced GM who’s run games with lots of players is “How do I get girls interested in my games?” It’s an interesting question, and one that can be really quite painful…
Editorial
The History of Star Wars RPGs Part 2: Star Wars d20
This is the second in a three part series on the history of Star Wars tabletop RPGs. In each post, I’ll be exploring each of the major Star Wars RPGs and discuss how they worked and how they affected both the roleplaying game industry and the Star Wars universe…
Editorial
Why “Bad” Games Are So Successful, And Why It Doesn’t Matter
One thing that a lot of people who describe themselves as “hardcore” gamers lament is how the highest profile games always are the ones that are the least like what they want to see in the market. For instance, every Call of Duty release cycle, there will be a fairly large crowd posting vitriolic comments stating hat “Call of Duty is the cancer in gaming” or “not the same game again”. And every few years or so, the concept that this will come to some sort of apocalyptic climax for gaming comes up. It’s entirely false, however, for a number of reasons…
Editorial
One Campaign, Many Systems: An Experiment (Part VIII) – The Big Wrapup
So, here’s the obligatory wrapup post. How did it go versus my expectations, what did I learn, yadda yadda. But first, here’s a list of the RPGs we played over the summer, including my thoughts on the whole endeavor…
Editorial
D&D Encounters – A Coordinator’s Review
My husband and I are coordinators for D&D Encounters. We schedule, organize, and supply the program, while our local favorite gaming store supplies the space. As we approach the final weeks of the current season of Encounters, I decided to reflect on the changes to the Encounters program and how these changes have affected the program…
Better Gameplay?
How Playing Skyrim Can Make Your Assassins Scarier
Let’s talk about assassins. Not the idealistic ones in white (popularized by the shiny ongoing series Assassin’s Creed), lest we get into a conversation about what they were thinking when they decided to make the game about pirates. Nooooooo, the fun kind…