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I feel I may have talked about the "limited palette" approach to gaming here before. If I haven't and am misremembering, or if I have and you missed it, it's a fairly basic philosophy. By limiting the number of colors you paint with, you create extra mood; a painting done entirely in...
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Last Saturday was one of those days when Aileen and I happened to be driving around while Wait Wait Don't Tell Me was on the radio. It's a fun show, if you haven't heard it; a quiz show based on the week's current events, but from a comedic approach. And you can tell that some of this...
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Ah, here we are. Brand new site, delicious spanking new software — let's put this to the test, shall we? Inspired by the website changeover, last time I talked about changes, in the sense of deep and fundamental changes. I think there's still something left to say on the subject of change, though...
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Some people say that gamers are inherently conservative. Others say that people are inherently conservative, and gamers are just a subset thereof. Now, this isn't talk about politics, mind: it's a discussion of that big mess of psychology that deals with how we approach things we ran into at...
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John's on vacation, and can't do "Chambers of Love" this week. Ethan's neck-deep in Geist . I haven't done a non-Monday Meeting blog in forever. There are all sorts of reasons, but the reality of it is that we spun the chamber, and the bullet that came up had my name on it....
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Late late, like a white rabbit holding a watch. Things happen, don't they? Quite a lot of that around here of late... but eh, that's hardly newsworthy. So let's talk about something else. Let's talk about characters. The roleplaying game is an interesting beast. It produces war stories...
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"There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt. " — Audre Lorde One of the things that fascinates me most about building and playing RPGs is the aspect of myth. We talk quite a lot, justifiably so I believe, about Storytelling — that a game is telling a story, and one...
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I have probably talked before about how opinions tend to be pretty split on things like in-character narration or fiction being treated as part of the actual "supplement" material of a supplement, rather than just flavor. Back in the days of the oWoD, many a book was written largely from an...
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Yes, it's the day before National Gluttony Day here in the United States, in which we actually do give thanks and are grateful to spend time with the family, but lay out as much of a feast as we can. I enjoy the holiday on an intellectual level, myself. The tradition of deliberately setting out a...
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There's the severed leg of a dead calf in the back of my pickup that isn't getting any fresher, so I'll make it pretty short this week. Hope you'll forgive me. No, seriously. This is the sort of thing you can't make up. Or, well, you can. And if you want to be at all memorable when...
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So last time I talked about inspiration and passion, the things that essentially light the fire under a developer to go to work in the first place. This week I'm going to go in exactly the opposite direction and talk about the other part of the equation: the cold-blooded mercenary aspect of being...
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The record doesn't lie: the World of Darkness got its start with games that were about things that the creators cared very much about indeed. You see it in the first edition of Vampire: The Masquerade , where the "gothic-punk" sensibility involved a certain amount of rebelling against entrenched...
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One of the the trickiest aspects of development is selecting the people, new or old, who are the kind of writer you want. In that respect, I think we have a harder time of it than the art directors. Not that I want to say that art direction is an easy job — far from it. But the thing is that everybody...
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The question came up recently of whether or not hunters, specifically capital-H-hunters-that-aren't-actually-c apitalized, count as having a major template or not. Is being the star of a major game line enough to give you immunity to the Embrace? And the answer is "no." With some caveats...
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First off, let's talk about last week. As you may have heard, we went up to GenCon last week, and did pretty well for ourselves. Hunter: The Vigil was flying off the shelves, deservedly so. We took a couple of boxes of Witch Finders and Night Horrors: Grim Fears, too — and sold out quick. We didn't...