The Wizard of Duke Street

I've been thinking, as I carefully meander around the creation of a new campaign world, about how to maximise the potential for stories within it. I don't anticipate giving up my old world, mind; there's still more I can do there, particularly once I wean myself off the world-changing epic, and have a go at the character-changing epic instead. But in this new one, everything I put in is being considered, not on the basis of "is this cool?", but on "What stories does this enable? What stories does this block?" Here's some of my current thinking.

Continue reading "Maximising Stories"

Posted by Drew Shiel on May 28, 2013 at 12:55

When I set out to develop a fantasy campaign world, about fifteen years ago, I hadn't really had the chance to run proper long-term campaigns before. Sure, I'd run games that lasted up to a year, maybe even more, which in the tempestuous world of false starts and abandoned games that constitute table-top roleplaying, are quite long. But I hadn't done multi-year games, and I certainly hadn't done sequels, prequels, or other campaigns in the same worlds. So there were a few places where I shot myself firmly in the foot, and one of these was in the area of gods - specifically, interventionist gods.

Continue reading "Interventionist Gods and Limited Narrative"

Posted by Drew Shiel on May 27, 2013 at 15:40

The new Arrow series has started broadcasting. On the one hand, it's a clear successor to Smallville, and on the other, it's a lot more. Spoilers follow.

Continue reading "Arrow"

Posted by Drew Shiel on October 22, 2012 at 14:24

This post contains spoilers for the first five episodes of Season 7 of New Who. You have been warned.

Continue reading "Doctor Who Series 7, First Half"

Posted by Drew Shiel on October 1, 2012 at 11:46

This post contains spoilers about the Doctor Who episode entitled "Asylum of the Daleks", the first episode of the seventh new series.

Continue reading "Doctor Who: Asylum of the Daleks"

Posted by Drew Shiel on September 4, 2012 at 13:15

I have a new deed in Wurm Online. I haven't really pulled up stakes as such; it's only slightly down the hill from my old place, which has now been handed over to Carawyn, as a character can only own one deed at a time. Importantly, however, the new deed is on the shore, and even more importantly, I don't need to farm it for food at the same time, so I can go about stripping it back to rock for terraforming and prospecting purposes.

Continue reading "Wurm Online: New Deed"

Posted by Drew Shiel on July 9, 2012 at 14:07

I've been making use of relationship diagrams in tabletop games for years, at the campaign level. It's only recently that I've learned to make use of them at a session level.

Basically, the idea here is that any session must move toward revealing, exploring, or changing a relationship, or even more than one.

Consider this diagram, which describes the situation known to the player characters some way into a campaign. Or maybe even at the beginning.

Continue reading "Relationship Diagrams for GMs"

Posted by Drew Shiel on July 3, 2012 at 16:31

I realise that television is rarely a fount of originality. I'm not saying the new shows coming out in the US in the autumn will be bad - I'll be quite interested to see how they go, and at least one of them is around one of my favourite characters. But they are derivative in the extreme.

Continue reading "New TV? "

Posted by Drew Shiel on May 21, 2012 at 16:14

The college term is over, and I have enough spare brain to write some blog entries again. The only game I've been playing for the past couple of months has been Wurm Online, mostly because it works very well as a background game. I click a few times to set some activity going, I do something else for a few minutes, and then I click things again. If I'm on my deed, it's a very rare thing to need to react to anything.

Continue reading "Wurm Online: Terraforming Territory"

Posted by Drew Shiel on May 14, 2012 at 16:54

I am getting enormous enjoyment out of Wurm Online at the moment. I've established myself on a nice spot on the West Coast of Deliverance, and I'm slowly building toward having a solid deed there.

There have, of course, been problems. The main problem in Wurm tends to be that if you want to do thing X, then you need to back up and do things A, B, C, and so forth before you can get back to X. And I made some mistakes as well.

Continue reading "Wurm Online: Let me tell you about my deed!"

Posted by Drew Shiel on April 3, 2012 at 10:33

Apologies for the long break in posting; I've been away on holiday. However, before I went, I was inspired by Stargrace, posting about Wurm Online, to log in and have a look around again. I liked what I saw - there's been a graphics upgrade, new servers, and other improvements.

Continue reading "Wurm Online: A Return"

Posted by Drew Shiel on March 7, 2012 at 13:11

Question #24: Have you ever been to a game convention? What was it like to be surrounded by so many other gamers? If not, would you like to go to one? Why or why not?

I've stared at this question for a few minutes, and tried to get my head around the concept of gamers who wouldn't go to conventions. I mean, if you're new to the hobby and don't know about them, or live hundreds of miles from the nearest convention, or.. I don't know, suffer from a fear of crowds, then maybe. But otherwise, it's a games convention, you play games, it's full of games, why wouldn't you go?

So yes, I've been to conventions. Not as many as I would like, but time and money sometimes get in the way.

Continue reading "Reverb Gamers: Conventions"

Posted by Drew Shiel on February 13, 2012 at 10:25

Question #22: Describe the worst game you've ever played in. What made it so bad? Did your fellow players help, or make it worse?

It was Gaelcon. 1995 or so. D&D. I was running it. There were six players. One of them couldn't string a sentence together, and seemed to hope that by rolling the dice, he'd convey his intentions. One of them drew on the paper tablecloth - drew very well, I might add - throughout the session, not really participating otherwise. And two of them appeared to know the entirety of Monty Python by heart, and took every single sentence I managed to get in as a cue to quote something, both of them in near perfect unison. Further, any time anyone mentioned horses, they'd sit there pretending to knock coconut halves together, and making clip-clop noises.

I didn't run a game at a convention for about a decade after that.

Continue reading "Reverb Gamers: Worst Game"

Posted by Drew Shiel on February 9, 2012 at 11:01

Question #21: What's the best bribe you've ever given (or received as) a GM? What did you get (give) for it?

My players don't really tend to attempt to bribe me. Or if they do so, they're subtle enough that I don't notice, or else they just say "Oi, Drew, I want more of this in the game", and then we get into the long discussion about what "this" is, which never seems to go quite right.

It is, however, a well-established fact that if you want something to happen in my games, give me some content to shape it around, and I'll happily do just that. This does mean that players from whom I get more material - be it character background, world material, or whatever - get more of what they want in the game, but that's as much a return on investment as anything else, so I don't feel bad about it.

Continue reading "Reverb Gamers: Bribery & Information"

Posted by Drew Shiel on February 8, 2012 at 12:18