ars ludi

Remember Tomorrow by Gregor Hutton is a weird little game that you probably never heard of. It came out back in 2010, and it’s possible that it made less of an impact because on the surface it doesn’t look weird at all. You play a character with a goal, fighting bad guys to get what […]

In the past few years I’ve had a lot more regular weekly games than one-shots. Mostly games with no GM, so no one is writing a story for us to follow. We are all just playing in the moment and seeing what happens. I love it. Except for one thing, which I’m doing to myself. […]

We play these games together to be surprised and satisfied by ideas we wouldn’t have created on our own. How all our contributions combine is something no one of us can predict. For that to happen, we have to let go what we individually *expect* or *want* and just see what *does* happen. We had […]

Way back in college, when I was taking anthropology courses instead of focusing on my major, I learned the idea of “emic vs etic”. Anthropologists, being clever folks who have spent a lot of time studying cultures, recognized a distinction between terms and concepts that were part of the culture they were studying (emic), versus […]

Of course not every game of In This World has been magical, but when I hear about sessions that dragged, they often have one thing in common: Only two players. In a high creativity game, the difference between two and three players is bigger than it seems. When there’s only one other person in the […]

“I’m the god of fire. I have fire powers” “Fire powers? What are you, a superhero?” We’re in the middle of a game and you need to make up a god. Because you know, we’re gamers, we have to create whole worlds, gods, civilizations on the fly. What do you do? The number one approach […]

“Say yes” is a fundamental principle of just about every shared creative process. “Yes and”, “yes but” — either way, say yes. And it is absolutely good advice for role-playing games. Accept what other people contribute. Embrace what’s been said as established truth and build on it. Don’t contradict it. But there’s a big caveat […]

When I’m playing a role-playing game, I’m much more interested in hearing what someone’s character feels about a situation than what they do. If we understand the character’s feelings, even taking no action is informative. And if we don’t know their feelings, any action remains a mystery. Why did they do that? We don’t know. […]

Any role-playing game is a careful balance between agreement and disagreement. We need agreement because the game world only exists in our minds. If we can’t agree about what’s true, we’re going to contradict each other. If you think there are walls around the city and I don’t, our game will crash. Since agreement is […]

My first rule of role-playing games is to care more about the people at the table than the story. The players matter more than the fiction. The danger is getting caught up in the wonderful story and forgetting that.

Taking a break from my kickstarter (and the worrrrrrlllldd) to talk about a character creation trick that’s extremely applicable to Kingdom, but also applies to a whole host of other games. Say you’re playing a game (like Kingdom) where the characters are supposed to all be part of the same organization or group. Naturally you […]

I’ve spent most of my life playing roleplaying games at the table, in person. I’ve only started playing online much in the last few years, so I’m no expert, but here are some things I’ve learned so far. I follow the “simpler is better” approach with technology. I want no bells and whistles, unless those […]

I see a lot of anguish on the internet. Sadness that the latest epic franchise didn’t stick the landing, or didn’t turn out quite the way you hoped, or maybe threw characters under the bus and utterly betrayed what you thought the whole concept was. Other people’s fiction will always disappoint you. Because those creators […]

I love good, dramatic conflict in a story game. But sometimes players shy away from or downplay an established conflict or history. Our clans have decades of grievance and blood feud, but yeah, that’s not such a big deal, let’s just forget that and work together, okay? And now we’re buddies. Sometimes the player is […]

I talked about good antagonism a while back, so let’s talk about the flip side of the coin: good protagonism. When you’re playing a protagonist in a story game, you have a very important job: want something. Have desires. Have needs. But merely wanting something, deep down inside, isn’t enough. You have to *show us* […]

“We expect kindness and maturity from everyone who attends and so should you.” That’s what it’s said on the Story Games Seattle website for years. When your charter is to game with strangers every week, maturity and civility is fundamental to making that work. We did not tolerate bigotry or discrimination in any form and […]

This is a simple trick we’ve been using at Story Games Seattle for years. It may seem trivial but it’s not. Your physical environment has a huge impact on your social interactions, and a role-playing game is just one big social interaction. In the kind of games we play — story games with no game […]

In story games, a character can defy everyone else and succeed entirely on their own. A player cannot. Big, important distinction.

You’re sitting at a table, playing a game, and someone across from you says: “I grab your neck and put a knife up to your face and say “Tell me what I want to know, or else!’” Story games can be intense. Sometimes too intense. If you need to cool it down and avoid scaring […]

(This is an excerpt from Kingdom, but it’s a good recipe for making scenes in just about any story game.) The secret to making a good scene isn’t coming up with an amazing or surprising idea. The secret is painting a clear picture so players know exactly what is going on. Being able to visualize […]

But first a caveat. Nailing down definitions can turn into a horrible quagmire, particularly when we’re tackling words that lots of people already use but define differently, or use without an actual definition just a case-by-case “I can’t explain it but I know it when I see it”. But without definitions words can be treacherous. […]

Jay Loomis put together a great video interviewing folks from the Seattle-Olympia story games family, including yours truly, flanked by ducks. “Play more! Less talk, more play! More play!”

or, being the right kind of mean “So, you’re trying to expose government corruption. Well, a car drives up, and a bunch of guys jump out. With guns! And… they shoot you! Uh, dead! Conflict!” “Allll-right…” We play a lot of story games where there’s no GM, and each character has an arc or agenda […]

I wrote the first draft of my first indie game (codename: hicks) on the plane back from GenCon 07. It was the perfect recipe for writing: post-con euphoria, extreme exhaustion, lots of caffeine, and complete captivity in an airplane seat. It helped that my partners in con-crime quite sensibly passed out so I was on […]