Wargaming, Card-Gaming, Roleplaying. These three words represent markets whose core audience demographics overlap to such an extent that it is often thought that the markets are in competition. Even gamers, who otherwise have a huge amount in common, often refer to the above terms as a form of segregation. Which I feel is total rubbish.
I finally broke down and picked up the core book for the new Star Wars using Wizards d20 system. What drove me to this you ask? Well, I decided that for better or worse, I really wanted to see what a non-D & D d20 game looked like. There are others that I could have chosen, but Star Wars seemed the best bet for me. At least with Star Wars, there would be some cool pictures and background information that I would enjoy reading, even if I thought the game sucked.
Remember when LEGO sets came in one big box? With no more guidance than a few pictures on the lid and a bit of creativity, you could build a house, or a tree, or a dinosaur, or a plane. The building blocks were simple, standard, somewhat abstract, and made sculptures tending toward the representational. Today, LEGO comes in little kits with specific instructions and specialized pieces that let you make a single item: Windsor castle, a Corvette, the space shuttle... The final product is interesting and intricately detailed, but the kit really only makes that one thing. Once you've built it, it often goes up on a shelf like a model airplane and you go shopping for the next object. In many ways, this is a lot like RPG modules.
Rogue Publishing sent me an email asking me to do a review of their game Pariah. As my wife can attest, I can't pass up the chance to acquire and read a new game, even if I never get to play it. Pariah uses the FUDGE rule system and centers over psychic children. The basic gist is that all of the characters are under the age of 18, and there are groups after the children and their powers.
So who hasn't, after a particularly rewarding game of Truncheons and Flagons, sat with their gaming buddies and fantasized about how cool it would be to slay dragons "for real?" Many of us get over these fantasies about our fantasies, or else they remain compound fantasies that we'd never actually do anything about. But for some, the lure of getting dressed up in silly clothes and whacking each other with sticks is too overpowering to resist, and thus was the LARP (Live Action Role Playing) phenomenon born.
We GMs may sometimes wish we could devote ourselves to nothing but campaign planning and evil schemes, yet real life intervenes all too often. The result is a frighteningly sparse or nonexistent set of campaign notes and the horrible sinking feeling that even if you pull off an astonishing feat of last-minute game planning, you'll never be ready on time. What's a GM to do?
Difference. We cherish it. But just like playing one RPG doesn't make us sufficiently different - we've got to play different RPGs, and play them differently - sometimes garden-variety miniatures just seem too garden-variety, too vanilla, too much of some bland-meaning but inappropriate-sounding food metaphor. Just going ahead and painting the little guys is one good way to set yourself apart. (Remember: a well-painted figure or army is always a moral victory.) But a couple of relatively easy conversions or additions can jazz up a relatively ordinary mini even further.
We've seen the movies: Hackers, Real Genius, Antitrust, Wargames. Now we can play role of the 'leet system hacker struggling to save the world from an evil corporation. Uplink - the Hacker's Shadow is a game published by a small company in the UK called Intorversion.
It's anything but a well-kept secret that most GMs have a mean streak a mile wide (though they may pretend otherwise to lull their players into a false sense of security). There's a certain sick thrill that comes from outsmarting your players, and an even sicker one from killing off a PC with a well-placed trap or a monster that's a little smarter than they originally thought.
Any roleplayer will tell you that character development is at the core of most roleplaying games. However, not many roleplaying systems cater for the final development of any character: their death. So I am going to put this question out there: should the roleplaying of character death be an integral part of the roleplay experience, or is the death of a character just bad luck?
