In November 2018, I presented some thoughts on the integrated history of American comics and the early superhero role-playing games. Briefly:
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Seminar
What is this table-top role-playing thing? How does it work, what does it do, what kind of designs do which things? I've got some ideas, and so do you. This is where we talk about it - like this!
Some of my posts here present a concept, game title, or a historical hobby event for discussion in the comments, so join in with a will. You'll also find interviews and conversations.
I'm also recording what I guess I call "labs," which are organized and prepared at the Patreon. I run them on Mondays using Discord, and anyone pledging there can participate when they feel like it.
It’s been a while, but the new Discord functions are serving my needs to renew Monday Labs! To review the concept, these are discussion topics which patrons (any level) can participate in.
It turned out to be a week for interviews. At long last, I may be conducting this "presence on social media" thing correctly, because people I don't know, working from venues I haven't encountered, have been getting in touch.
Follow-up to this post, June 30, 2020
Here's the follow-up to Conversation: Introducing role-playing, in which Ken Oswald presents an intensive and interactive summary of the hobby as activity. It's hefty, at just under three hours, but full of titles (not summarized here in tags yet) and open doors for further discussion.
Sean Hillman and I discuss some confusing things about situations in play, specifically, what does preparation have to do with them. Seems easy, right? You prep it, then the group plays it - hey, the real (digital, video) games do it all the time, so we should just do that, right?
As part of my recent swim-about in the internets of Glorantha and its associated games, my friend Nick Brooke and I had the chance to mix it up a little! It's regarding the long-standing interpretations of human ethnicities in Glorantha, including those which made it into published form
Andy Goodman's Expedition to the Grizzly Peaks podcast is a worthy artifact - essentially, this guy missed all the ins & outs of the role-playing scene for about twenty years, mid-80s to mid-00s, and now he's looking at today's scene in mingled love, curiosity, and understandable bemusement.
I've finally realized how regularly people ask me to explain RuneQuest, HeroQuest, the Chaosium, and Glorantha, specifically because they've bounced hard off the apparently extensive setting and apprently impenetrably insider-oriented fanbase. It's usually private, and they often present the question as if it's their last fatigued try at finding out what "there" is there.
During one of my consulting sessions, I told Ron one of my major design concerns regarding my current project is the concept of interdependence: it's a game about a group of people fighting things that should be well beyond the possibilities of the common human being. How do they do this? I want one of the answers to be "together".