Role-Playing

I recently ran into a blog post discussing role-playing games using the play modes from various typologies since the 70s, including for example the Threefold Model, GNS and how the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons frames player preferences. The problem with these typologies is that they are typically based on people’s personal experiences at the gaming table (a valuable source of information!), but lack a systematic way of collecting and validating that information. ...

Posthuman studios has always been confident in how they sell their books: they licensed Eclipse Phase with Creative Commons, meaning that the files are free to legally share with others. You get everything free, and they hope that it turns into you buying their books. It’s a tactic used by some other book publishers that are convinced that the problem today is not to get buying customers, it’s to find customers in the first place. In role-playing games the challenge is still to stand out from the shadow of Dungeons & Dragons. Even if your game is not about killing orcs and stealing their stuff, you still have to convince people that whatever you’re offering is preferable to that. Giving away your books and then hoping that the people playing the game also want to buy them is a possible approach, one that seems to be working for Eclipse Phase, which is now in its second edition. ...

A bunch of role-playing game scholars wrote a handbook for role-playing game studies. It’s published by Routledge, but as an academic handbook, it’s fairly expensive. For Free RPG Day, the editors suggested that the authors would share their authors copies of the chapters they wrote – according to the publishing agreement, authors can share their own versions of the texts, but only the their own chapters and only the versions that precede the professional layout. So if you are interested in what we wrote and don’t care about how pretty it looks, here’s most of the chapters as author’s copies. ...

Note: This is not an explanation of what Halat hisar was. If you need to understand the context, you can read an explanation written by the organizers. Right as I am leaving home I read that there would be a “patriotic” day for children and families held in a park near where I live. I feel an unease that someone would do that in my town, right next to where I live. Indoctrinating children to fear foreign things seems terrible to me. More often than not, patriotism, flags and nationalism are symbols of xenophobia, racism and even violence. The nationalism I know and recognise is something that is used to quiet and control, an excuse to hate and fear. ...

We recently finished a campaign of Night’s Black Agents, after playing it for 1.5-years and 29-sessions, making it one of the longest campaigns I’ve played. Night’s Black Agents is a role-playing game where – to put it like the designer does – Jason Bourne meets Dracula. Drawing from the paranoid world of spy fiction and the classic vampire tale, it reveals the terrible truth about the supernatural to a group of international spies and criminals, leaving them with just one choice: take out the vampire conspiracy before they take you out. Zalozhniy Quartet is a four-adventure campaign for Night’s Black Agents, which we dove into right after the introductory adventure in the main book. ...

This is the second post about PanoptiCorp. The first was about personal experiences, so it actually makes more sense to read this first to get some context for the first one. PanoptiCorp was a larp about a dystopian marketing company with all the worst parts of capitalism. Everything and everyone was on the line of not being good enough, everyone’s performance was constantly evaluated and the company ran under a spirit of constant competition. Deadlines were usually very soon and the office worked more or less around the clock. ...