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g a lot of ports of rpgs my game and one of the ones in which i m participating are ports of world of darkness games on some level partly because it s an rpg system that lends itself to this product well eventually though i suspect we ll see a move away from seeing storium as a new way to play rpgs and towards seeing it as a way to play an entirely new type of game i very much look forward to seeing that journey and to seeing what types of games emerge as this medium comes into its own in its alpha build storium is one of the most stable and most polished web products i ve seen in a long time we have no word about how they mean to monetize participation but its kickstarter campaign opens soon i know i ll be throwing a good chunk of money behind it partly because i am so delighted that someone has offered us up this kind of new experience it s a way to bring gaming storytelling to groups of people who cannot meet together face to face but it s also a way to ask people to think differently about the stories they tell as they game i wish the protagonist labs crew the best as they go into the next stage of development and i hope to see the majority of you on storium before the year is out this post is for mike november 26 2013 in star wars ffg vampire 2 comments so my friend mike complained the other night that i never update this blog anymore this is true as happens to so many of us work has overtaken my life however i am making some significant changes to my work schedule which should perhaps allow me to get back into doing some roleplaying from time to time i ve had a couple of excellent rpg moments that i haven t blogged about i got to play in stephen chast s excellent halloween marvel rpg adventure as invisible woman which was a real treat i had read the system several times but hadn t gotten to do more than roll a few dice in example encounters before our online game one of my friends not mike had told me that the system was a bit rules heavy and while i did find that we often spent time puzzling out our dice pool i found the mechanics of figuring out how to justify the effects of your superpower surprisingly fun i m still a little bummed that i wasn t allowed to use iw s talent which i had read was created by bending rays of light to change the wavelength of cell phone light into an imitation of sunlight to combat some vampires but i guess this is where my limitations as an english major instead of as a science major come in chast was an excellent and patient gm and balanced out the rules of the system with a fun narrative that was just right in flavor and in length for halloween evening tonight we are having a quick wrap up of our infamous vampire campaign when we last left it my character had been was is prince and she had left things in a bit of a mess a handful of major npcs were incapacitated after a botched mission to eradicate the sabbat in our little town including our storyteller s favorite npc i expect to pay for that tonight my character had also kindasorta run off just after the botching to find the previous prince who had always been good to her and to whom she felt indebted even though he was kindasorta blood bound to her because it was the only way to keep him alive after they d found that he was actually never mind that s a long story suffice it to say that things were a mess and it was all my fault so this session should go totally well also my lucky dice are somewhere in a sea of packed boxes so that bodes well too i m basically expecting my poor character to die at any rate now that i ll have more free time i m hoping to get back into playing and maybe even running some rpgs my husband has talked about running star wars and i m curious about torchbearer and of course i still have that dread game ready to go that i never ran last year oh and call of catthulhu s coming from kickstarter soon too with my wonderful hand knitted catthulhu scarf oh and becoming that s coming too did i mention that i have an rpg buying problem perhaps i should rename this blog llany s rpg buying and not playing problem so there it is mike i hope this keeps me on your favorite blog list is meguey baker this awesome 100 of the time april 30 2013 in indie rpgs tags meguey baker night sky games leave a comment is it even possible for meguey baker to do something that isn t awesome and inspiring i ve talked in other places about my awe for her game 1001 nights one of the most advanced and engaging systems for storytelling gaming i have ever seen in that game you play characters who then play other characters as they tell stories to embarrass or exalt one another a fantastic combination of immersive storytelling and interesting metagame mechanics ensure that players have almost complete narrative freedom at the same time that they have specific concrete goals the game goes out of its way to make players think about how identities shift and change and about how those changes can have political repercussions both great and small i m also a big fan of psi run a great game with a neat mechanic that allows for players to fill in the information about the other pcs backgrounds as each amnesiac pc discovers something about his own background other players at the table fill in missing details a unique dice mechanic allows each player to decide what actions are most important to him during a given scene and allocate the best dice to the things that matter most at that particular moment players can consult and discuss how best to distribute dice both game world and mechanic emphasize group cooperation as the pcs scramble to get away from the mysterious chasers who want to recapture them because of their psychic powers this week though i was rendered speechless by baker s clever google rpg doomed pilgrim which i happened to catch during a few minutes of downtime at work on monday it s an odd game in fact i m not exactly sure it should be called an rpg at all or rather you play such an odd role that it feels like no other rpg you ve ever played in doomed pilgrim the gm takes on the persona of the pilgrim trying to get from an unspecified place in the desert to the temple of no gods across the dangerous sundered lands as the pilgrim journeys players take on the role of the landscape their goal to kill the doomed pilgrim before he reaches the temple it sounds easy enough right just hit the pilgrim with a rockslide and you re done the catch though is that players can only answer the questions that the pilgrim asks they may answer in any way they see fit but the pilgrim can ask questions that make it tricky for the players to kill him baker ran the game in a google thread and she took the first appropriate non disruptive answer to each question to forward the plot we managed to kill the poor pilgrim pretty quickly although i missed his demise since i actually had to go work while at work the nerve while i wouldn t necessarily have found the rules to doomed pilgrim enticing if i had read them the experience was great watching the story spin out in unexpected directions under the hands of so many different storytellers made the adventure exciting and yet the story held together well because we had to answer the pilgrim s carefully crafted questions you can see a transcript of that game here i am always astounded by the tidy relationship between rules and intent in baker s games certainly many rpgs try to encourage a kind of synergy between mechanic and experience but hers do a wonderful job of encouraging a broad range of play styles each of which relates to the unique setting of the game many game designer often re theme the same game but each time i read a new game by baker her innovation and ingenuity surprises me under her guidance even the six simple rules of doomed pilgrim make great storytelling magic happen if you re curious head over to night sky games and check out the selection and be on the lookout on twitter for upcoming doomedpilgrim games i wouldn t want myself as a gm i don t want to run most of the games on my shelf april 6 2013 in gaming conventions indie rpgs mouse guard rpg vampire wfrp 3e tags fortune s fool freemarket gamist mouse guard night sky games pax rpg wfrp 1 comment so this piece started off as a short narrative about a couple of gms who run really great games but it might have spiraled a teensy bit out of control and ended up as a long meditation on different modes of consuming rpgs the games i love to play while at pax we had the pleasure of playing in a game of fortune s fool with pantheon press s rob trimarco and jason keeley they had planned on running the introductory adventure that we had run several years ago the first time we met them but when they realized we wanted to play rob suggested with glee that jason just make something up on the fly i had a little heart attack as you all know i m a planner so i would hate having to ad lib in the middle of the chaos of a convention but jason seemed into the idea and off we went i won t spoiler the original fantastic demo adventure for ff but just know that it involves saving pinocchio from a very bad event on his seventh birthday this follow up adventure returned the characters to his home on the evening of his eighth birthday but gepetto had gone missing apparently kidnapped by a large man smelling of wood chips and death i won t spoiler this adventure either except to say that it involved a magic ferris wheel people being turned into donkeys and a ghastly workshop what most struck me about our game session though was how much it differed from our weekly vampire session and how much both of those tended to differ from other games i ve played our vampire st knows the goals of every npc during the span of the upcoming game and if we cross paths with an npc he knows the backstory of each one inside and out so that it s easy for him to explain what that character would do to us if push comes to shooting as it so often does he plans his npcs carefully and the rest of the story evolves logically from their needs and wants in fact if you catch him in a good mood and ask about one of the npcs backgrounds you can easily get a short story about what happened from the time that npc was a child until now his npc backgrounds are always fresh and interesting including lots of unexpected twists and turns things in our st s world always make sense and if they appear not to make sense at a given point it s just because we don t yet know the whole story our job usually involves uncovering it we progress with caution because the world is dangerous and the plots are meant to hurt us but it s absolutely thrilling when we make a discovery about how pieces of the plot fit together during play our st remains very calm because we really can t derail him he simply works out the npcs logical response to whatever madness we ve decided to do of course i also think he remains calm because it drives us insane when we know we face im mortal danger and he sits there placidly staring at the ceiling keeley on the other hand personifies energy he races from idea to idea with a lot of shouting and gesturing not everything in his games has a logical reason for existing in fact many things seem purposefully illogical but it doesn t matter because everything in his worlds floats in an atmosphere of childlike wonder that makes details symbolically and atmospherically sensible even if they don t fit together logically his games have a breathless vertiginous feel to them that suits the whims of the fortune s fool universe the tide sweeps players from one event to the next out of the sheer delight of seeing what kind of wackiness will happen around the next corner i haven t talked to him at length about the depth of his npc backgrounds but they don t seem to work in quite the same way as the npcs in our vampire game npcs stand in for familiar fairy tale types so players know them immediately upon meeting them and the puzzle comes from uncovering the ways in which they deviate from expectations i said quite a bit about this in my review of the ff campaign too it s a delightful use of the familiar i certainly don t mean by any of this that his adventures are saccharine on the contrary they re often just as creepy as our vampire adventures partly because the game so skillfully juxtaposes the cute with the grotesque despite their extreme differences in style these two gms run some of the best gaming i ve every played partly because both show a willingness to let their players engage fully with their worlds whatever we ask we can try and the mechanics assist rather than hinder us theoretically most rpgs work this way but in my experience some games and some gms just wind up making the players think more about mechanics than story a great gamer can tell a nuanced story with almost any system but i do believe that system matters if you have a sheet full of powers and a bunch of monsters that only respond to certain powers you ll spend your brainpower working out the relationship between those things instead of asking questions about how the monsters got into the royal society meeting house in the first place when i play games with the gms i most enjoy i feel as though i m going head to head with another first class mind in a strategic game of investigation and question can i figure out what s at stake will i have the resources to outwit the limitations on my character sheet and find a workaround that can happen regardless in games i like less i feel as though i m pitting my wits against the game itself can i figure out how to use these skills most effectively to anticipate and react to what someone has set up i think of a pathfinder con game in which we were supposed to know from lore to use a particular kind of spell on a particular kind of creature the challenge of the encounter was in having purchased enough product to anticipate the correct answer and to match a specific skill to a specific encounter the games i love to run it s a strange thing to say but i m not really sure i would have liked playing in my own warhammer campaign all that much in spite of its significant problems i still love the unwieldy wfrp3e and loved running it the crazily rich warhammer universe and all of its passionate fandom provided plenty of interesting quirky engaging background to use when planning my games and the design of the rules made it easy to create and run many different types of encounters effectively note though that i say run encounters rather than tell a story even as much as i wanted my players to immerse themselves in the warhammer universe and love it as i did i ended up thinking of our games primarily as a series of individual puzzles that the players could solve using different skill sets i think my gming suffered from our emphasis on gamist play i inadvertently encouraged that play in a few different ways i think miniatures and terrain tended to make my players focus on the tactics of winning rather tha...