Have you ever felt intimidated or uncomfortable at the thought of playing a particular character? Or a particular game? Julia Bond Ellingboe gets that response from a lot of people, because she designed a game called Steal Away Jordan. We pestered her with that same response, yet again, but she was gracious enough to join us on the show anyway. A wonderful discussion ensued about what can intimidate us in gaming, and how and when games can tackle serious and emotionally sensitive topics.
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Category: Sessions
This week, we have a special guest: the illustrious Rob Bohl, designer of Misspent Youth. He started listening to Storyjammers, and heard our opinions on game mastering, so he asked us what we thought of the GM in his game. This seemed like a great topic of discussion, so we got on Skype and had a conversation about games where GM’s work out really well, and the proper place of GM’ing in roleplaying games.
We experimented a bit with this session. OK, we really just wanted to be as cool as Stabbing Contest! I had a microphone for my iPod, and we had a long drive down I-78 on our way back home, so we recorded a session on the games we played at DexCon 2010, in Morristown, New Jersey, including Misspent Youth, Lady Blackbird, the Dresden Files, Shock:, and Jason’s own game, the Fifth World.
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Our short series on the Storyjammers’ Journey concludes with a look at how to “cool down”—how to bring those things from the liminal space of the storyjam back into our normal lives. Some games use retrospective questions to award experience points and other awards, while others have specific endgame mechanics.
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As our step-by-step exploration of the Storyjammers’ Journey continues, we get to the heart and soul of storyjamming, the activity that we want to get immersed in, the jam itself. Storyjamming has little to do with making up stories. In fact, most of its best techniques aim specifically to stop you from making up a story. It has to do with exploring the story already there. It has to do with hunting down a story that already exists.
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