Hope you’ve had a lovely Christmas, and are all set for New Year’s Eve and a shiny new year in 2016! We’ve had a busy month, between our Pelgranista get-together at Dragonmeet in London, and soft launching our new look webstore, which is the first part of our website redesign. The new store design has […]
Search Results for: dramasystem
When I start a new series, I always intend to keep it separate from the last one. Certain factors inevitably continue from one game to the next. At the top of this list appear the habits of individual players in creating and portraying their characters. The way any two players tend to riff off one […]
See P. XX A column on roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Lovecraft specialized in tales of cosmic horror, in which the insignificance of mere personality pales when confronted with the utter indifference of a materialistic universe. His heroes go mad or are destroyed by monstrous stand-ins for a reality that takes no note of human […]
In my recent piece on the necessity of kicking out incorrigibly disruptive players, I briefly mentioned geek culture’s fear of ostracizing behavior. JS3’s comment on the post has me wanting to consider that in a little more depth. The idea that geeks don’t separate themselves from fellow members of the sub-culture due to their own […]
A column on roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Christmas may bring its game books snugly wrapped beneath the tree, and Easter the famous bunny who scatters Napoleonic miniatures around the house for delighted children to find. Still, the gamer-friendliest holiday of all has to be Halloween. After you finish bobbing for d20s at a spooky […]
The play advice in Hillfolk largely focuses on the GM as the source of external pressure that keeps the player characters at odds with one another, generating new and compelling drama. However, as a DramaSystem player, you may well enjoy the process of tightening the screws on, or delivering comeuppances to, other players’ characters. A […]
The entire Pelgrane team will be at GenCon Indianpolis until next week – please be patient with any support requests during this busy times. This is our biggest GenCon ever, featuring nine seminars, more than 100 events, new releases and the ENnie Awards! As usual we are sharing a booth (#609) with ProFantasy Software. You’ll […]
Robin Laws’ multi-award-winning Hillfolk is a great game in its own right, but its DramaSystem engine includes a toolkit for describing and dissecting characters that can be used in other games. One of these tools is the concept of dramatic poles. To quote Robin: “Driving any compelling dramatic character in any story form is an internal contradiction. The character […]
In DramaSystem players both work together as co-authors to build a story, yet also compete as characters in pursuit of their unmet emotional needs. By requiring you to call scenes featuring other characters who don’t necessarily want to give you what you seek, it bends you toward conflict. But if you’re used to a more […]
Just as DramaSystem characters are torn between two dramatic poles, we as roleplayers may find ourselves torn between two roles: character and co-author. Certain games and play styles encourage us to think only of what our PCs would do. Some players who prefer this approach take a semantic leap overboard and declare any game where […]