Here's our first gathering to prepare for Primetime Adventures, a game whose title will invoke more blithering, partisanship, and sprayed terminology than any other I can think of. Which is too bad because the actual game is quite wonderful.
You are here
I've shifted our focus more fully into the concrete experience of designing a game. I'm also finding it useful to consider the practitioner's general outlook of "this is how I did it," vs. the observer's or analyst's outlook of "but how does a person do it," without falling into the trap of tossing it back into the observer's lap by saying, "well, you just do it and then you'll see."
Justin Nichol and I continue our discussion, or training, regarding game design. This session (in 5 videos) delves into the way we talk / the way we roll. The topic shifts quite logically from whether & when describing things colorfully works, to gaudy and painful consequences of moment-by-moment decision-making.
Dustin isn't a naive game designer, having produced Synthicide and generally navigated modern publishing. He asked me how to promote a game which did not fit neatly into "trad or indie," "OSR or story game," or any other dichotomy which people presented to him. Which is a perfect opportunity for me to stomp upon those dichotomies with my hobnailed boots, both for him and as a general PSA.
... Has This Been Goin' On? Alternative equally music-meming title: My Only Friend, the End. Or, wait, how about, Stop! In the Name of What?
This is about how long we play, in real time. It can refer to the length of a session, how many sessions relative to a given fictional situation, how long
Intent, Initiation, Execution, Effect - fictional things, probably the single most direct fictional content to be interfaced with real-people speaking and using rules, in the hobby. In a recent dialogue with Zac Porcu, he called it "the beating heart of role-playing."
Looking at the topic of distributing GM-tasks all sorts of different ways, which we all know well, but maybe its widespread use doesn't reflect enough of its potential.
The topic is group preparation, when you spend some time together creating and customizing the setting and situation. Whether it's a pitch, a series of rules steps,a suggestion-and-approval process, or anything like that - we hit it from a lot of angles and a lot of examples.
Joining me are Ray, Herman, Ángel, Santiago, and Moreno, for what appears to be my first real success at production for a group activity. At last, no tiny head.
I’d really like to recover the nearly-unique power and fun of playing Primetime Adventures. This video is intended to help people join me. It’s about scenes and real-play as opposed to workshopped-play.
I have a long history of discussing this issue, as I recognized it as a problem all the way back in 2005, and so did Vincent, as he puts so well here:
I've stitched together two consulting sessions with Petteri Hannila, the author of Tales of Entropy. The first part is audio only, but please view rather than listen, because I've filled it all with visual content. I'm beginning to make these sessions work both privately and publicly.