Role-Playing

Warning: this is long, rambly, and has no context. I will write a part 2 with more context, when I’ve had some time to process what I experienced. My flight left Denmark before I had time for a proper debrief, so this is also me pouring out my thoughts on my character. I noticed afterwards how much I could’ve used the debrief: the game was very present in my mind afterwards. Note on the person used in this text: I deliberately create a difference between myself and my character by referring to him in third person, as per debrief-instructions given after the game. ...

I ran a simple jeepform scenario based on Reservoir Dogs a few years ago. I recently became interested in larp again, partly because of Monitor Celestra. Inspired by my experiences in Celestra, I started rewriting the jeepform scenario again. I still don’t have a proper name for the scenario: I called it Reservoir Hounds the last time I ran it, but that sounds a bit too much like copyright infringement, so I need to come up with a better title. ...

A couple of years back I ran a game of Dungeons & Discourse. It’s based on the brilliant web comic, Dresden Codak. It ran very smoothly, but mostly thanks to good luck and excellent players, not because of any brilliant design on my part. I used Donjon as the rules, and that worked surprisingly well. Donjon is designed for that kind of off-the-top-of-your-head kind of wild speculation Dungeons & Discourse seems to call for. ...

It is very common for role-playing games to extend rules meant for one thing to cover other fields. The archetypical example of this is using combat rules for other conflicts. This has been the standard way of building rules since Dungeons & Dragons started extending rolls beyond hitting things. First, it was resistance rolls, then skill rolls, when adventuring needed to include things beyond monsters in damp caves. But the overall structure of things remained: you roll a D20 and add some bonus (possibly negative) to see if you succeeded. This is extending the original combat rules beyond the scope they were originally designed for. ...

I used to run a lot of Mage: the Ascension. Nobilis has almost perfectly taken its place, but for a nostalgia trip, there is no replacing the original. Having tried Mage: the Awakening I feel like they are not even remotely about the same issues. Awakening has a nicer rule system (with its own problems and issues), but that’s about all it has on the older game. I really liked the metaphysics it was based on, even if some of it was really ad hoc. ...

I’ve recently been playing Apocalypse World in our weekly playing session. It is a generally good game, at least if you prefer the style: violent, apocalyptic, sexy (certainly the first two, not necessarily the last one). It is also interesting when it comes to issues of gender. And it is definitely gender, not sex, that is in question. Let me elaborate by describing the character creation process: You choose a name for the character from a list of names provided. Most of them are simply absurd enough to be gender neutral - like objects from a time past, with purpose long forgotten. I’m also told Baker plays around a bit with this in his writing, playing around with gender assumptions. I chose the name last in creating a character, but opted for “Man”, adding “the” to it after consulting the other players. ...