We had our fourth Quail Valley Campaign session last night and although it will be a bit before the campaign log gets posted, I did want to share something that really struck me after the session. It wasn’t anything new as many, many others have discussed this issue in the past. It was just something that really struck me in the difference between how this session went and how the prior sessions had gone…all of the players trusted–implicitly–the GM and this made all of the difference.

Read the rest of this entry

Johnn Four over at Roleplaying Tips has a discussion about what it means to roleplay a character. He has a distinction between acting and representation as roleplaying.
Read the rest of this entry

I admit that I use a lot of published adventures in my campaigns partly because I’m lazy, partly because some of them are pretty good but mostly because my brain is wired that way. I have a strong tendency to see how things can (even if they shouldn’t) fit together. I often use bits and pieces of different published adventures and tie them into a campaign to further an ongoing story or to introduce a potential new direction. One of the major problems of doing this, however, is that most published adventures rely upon plot devices rather than plot opportunities to advance the story and plot.
Read the rest of this entry

As part of character creation for a FRG campaign, I asked one of the players some clarifying questions about his character’s background because I had story ideas starting in my head and didn’t want to go off in a direction he hadn’t intended. His response was interesting, “Do what you do and I will react accordingly,” and it really struck me as being both blatantly obvious and surprising elusive. What it really says is, “Act and I’ll react,” which seems to me to be exactly what it means to play in a roleplaying game, especially one that is story oriented. It is, in fact, the key to an emergent story and got me thinking of how to discuss this idea. With apologies to Newton and my tongue firmly planted in my cheek, here are da Head Rat’s Three Laws of Emergent Story Motion.
Read the rest of this entry

Well that certainly is a pretentious title, eh? I don’t really mean for it to be pretentious and, in fact, I’m not all that interested in defining role-playing games. What I’m going to do is take the standard definition (aka Wikipedia’s) and highlight its various components and stress the elements that I prefer in a game.

Read the rest of this entry