PAX made it to the East Coast, so we went to join the party. Each night, we recorded from our room in the Sheraton Hotel in Boston with our thoughts and experiences from that day.
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Archive for March, 2010
Story Games! Do they even exist, or does the phrase just mean RPG’s with a dose of pretension and identity politics? What makes a “story game” different from other roleplaying games? What do we love—and what do we hate—about them?
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A specter is haunting the tables of gamers—the specter of the GM’s girlfriend! Whether accused of preferential treatment from the GM because of their relationship, or for throwing a wet towel on the roleplay by joining the game just to spend time with her man, many a group has seen the arrival of the GM’s girlfriend as the herald of the group’s end. Mike couldn’t make it to record this weekend, so Jason recorded an episode with his wife Giuli to take a look at the much-feared phenomenon.
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Mike never played any of the RPGs that now count as “old school,” and Jason never liked them, so we invited John Scheib to come on the show and talk to us about the “Old School Renaissance.”
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Roleplaying games have traditionally asked us to learn them in the most difficult manner possible: reading a huge book to absorb complex systems all at once, from one, big info-dump. Fluency play tries to change that by teaching games the way humans learn—by doing. By continuously adding the next effortless thing, fluency play builds up your “fluency” in the “language” of the game. Along the way, it addresses issues like flow, warming up, and pulling character creation into play just for kicks.
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