This post originally appeared on DyingEarth.com between 2004 and 2007. A column on roleplaying by Robin D. Laws I’m still not sure where I come down on the whole laptop at the gaming table issue. Maybe my mind would be definitively made up if I were to see a GM make brilliant use of one. […]
Author Archives: Noah Lloyd
This post originally appeared on DyingEarth.com between 2004 and 2007. A column on roleplaying by Robin D. Laws If you really want to understand the culture we live in, read a few introductory books on marketing. I can already hear some of you screaming in desperate agony at this suggestion. And believe me, I feel […]
This post originally appeared on DyingEarth.com between 2004 and 2007. A column on roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Whenever I serve as a guest at a gaming convention, I make it a policy to ask the seminar organizer to set up a panel on Game Mastering Troubleshooting. On a minute by minute basis, I’ve learned […]
This post originally appeared on DyingEarth.com between 2004 and 2007. A column on roleplaying by Robin D. Laws One of the big differences between roleplaying sessions and the adventure stories from which they derive their inspiration is found in the degree of interaction between hero and villain before their conflict devolves into violence. In a […]
This post originally appeared on DyingEarth.com between 2004 and 2007. A column on roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Almost all popular RPGs are adventure games – escapist, wish-fulfilling power fantasies. We play heroes evincing varying degrees of ass-kickitude, overcoming villains and other obstacles, saving the day and otherwise demonstrating their reverberant mastery. The fantasy genre […]
This post originally appeared on DyingEarth.com between 2004 and 2007. A column on roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Those of you familiar with the Dying Earth roleplaying game know its Persuade/Rebuff mechanic. To emulate the twists, turns and connivances of Jack Vance’s sublime source material, the game treats persuasion attempts as having the same structure […]
This post originally appeared on DyingEarth.com between 2004 and 2007. A column on roleplaying by Robin D. Laws One of the powerful abilities of a roleplaying rules-set is to provide compromise without negotiation. The normal process of conversational give-and-take through which people normally resolve issues of mutual preference or gratification is inherently distorting. Let’s say […]
This post originally appeared on DyingEarth.com between 2004 and 2007. A column on roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Those of us make stuff up for a living face a wide variety of possible ways to make ourselves crazy. One of the fastest and most direct routes to self-induced insanity is to obsess over the ultimate […]
This post originally appeared on DyingEarth.com between 2004 and 2007. A column on roleplaying by Robin D. Laws A few columns back, I mentioned the iron rule of theatrical improv: never negate. The idea is this: when you’re working together to create a scene on the fly, you have to accept, and build on, any […]
The following article originally appeared in an earlier iteration of See Page XX in April 2008. by Julia Ellingboe [Editor] Julia Ellingboe is the author of Steal Away Jordan, an RPG about slavery in the United States. “Steal Away Jordan is about playing heroes” has become my mantra of late. I declare it to illustrate that Steal […]