Observations of the Fox

Among game designers there was a debate for many years about whether a game system mattered. This was pushed at The Forge, with essays such as " System Does Matter " by Ron Edwards. ...but to show that the debate has been going on for years, here's a random assortment of links to articles and posts over the years that have addressed the idea. " Why System Matters " " Game Structures Addendum - System Matters " " System Doesn't Matter* " " RPG History - What events/games led to 'System Matters' needing to be 'rediscovered'? " " Does System Matter? " " Why the Rules you use matter " " System Matters 24 years later " All of them are interesting reads and watches... (and yes, I know that two of the forum posts linked refer to the same video, but the varied discussions are interesting) The thing about most of these discussions is that they refer to the written words on the pages of a game

Everything in this series so far has consisted of things I've learned by running games, things I've learned by participating in games run by other people, or things I've learned from hearing about games that friends have been involved in. If you only ever play in series of games run by one person, using one system, and the same group of players. All the tensions on the narrative are going to be similar no matter how many sessions you play. If you judge all roleplaying by that set of narrow experiences, it's a bit like judging all  TV shows even thought the only thing you've ever watched is the 90s sit-com Friends. If you say that it's rubbish, or you say that you've become bored of all TV because you've become bored of the one TV show you know, you may not realise that there's a lot more potential that you haven't explored yet....and you can even make your own. To further the analogy, if the only TV show you've watched is Friends, then the on

Facebook post used by permission (written by Jeah-François Vincent) So many of the points I've addressed in this sequence of blog posts are present in the Facebook post...in a bad way. Let's go through a few of them, one by one... The group plays one game. We've already established the three way tension that plays a part on most game sessions. Different games pull on the narrative flow in different ways, and at different ties during the course of play. This can mean that the same group, with the same narrator, can have a very different play experience during a session if they play with one game system compared to another. Honestly, this isn't a totally bad thing, it's just a predictable thing... if you go for too long with the one game system then you end up in a bit of a creative rut, but it also allows everyone a bit more control over the flow of play because they know how and when the game will try to exert an impact. The horror that some players express when reg

Quite a few of my students have found this blog, and they've been asking me to write about key members of the various groups I've been running. They've also been trying to work out who is who among the  various nom-de-plumes already included in various articles. That's been kind of nice, and it basically leads into a lot of the things that I've been discussing.  I've always thought that one of the aims when running a good game, is creating an event that people want to come back to. Anything that might help that situation is potentially a good thing. If I can get people talking about the game between sessions, this is a good thing (as long as the game doesn't become detrimental to other parts of their life... and I've seen that happen in the past, briefly mentioning "Mephisto" from the distant past at the end of part 7 ) . If I can get players more immersed in the events of the story while the game is happening, that's a good thing. If I'

I remember back when I started going to conventions in the early to mid 90s, where I met a range of people who'd actually been running games for 15 years. I had read about long-term campaigns in RPG magazines, but generally thought they were urban legends until I met some of the people who had actually taken part in a few of them.  As far as I'm aware, a bunch of those folks are still running the same campaign worlds. The characters have certainly been and gone, I've heard that many of the first generation of players have literally died of old age, and the original narrators have passed on the mantle to new ones. Many of these games even shifted through game systems, from early D&D to Advanced D&D, then 2nd edition, sometimes even swapping to completely different game systems as the needs of the narrative shifted, perhaps moving to Pendragon, Ars Magica, or Rolemaster. These were the kinds of epic campaigns that I always wanted to be invited into, or wanted to run.

For a lot of folks, there seems to be an assumption that a tabletop RPG only occurs during the course of play when the official session is running. I touch on this when I discuss the ideas of setting up a liminal space for the session, and when I mention that "bleed" can be a dangerous thing. But bleed exists and always will exist, and it can be used to advantage. I'm still a fan of the idea that there needs to be a separation between the fantastic world of the session, and the real world beyond. However, there is always the opportunity to make the real world a little more magical by spreading the game to it.  I began seeing this idea back in the mid 1990s. I was a part of a few communities of live-action gamers, and the internet was nothing like it is today. These various groups typically held games monthly, the first Saturday of the month might be one game group, the second might be a different game... but having thirty or more players trying to cram in a complete story