First, I've been terraforming my deed. Mostly this consists of flattening it, and laying in some paths. I've also started to work down the hill to the west a bit, in terraces (well, so far, terrace). There's a deed south and west of me that will likely disband soon, and when it does, I'll expand my deed down the hill to the coast, and those terraces will then become part of the deed rather than the perimeter. At the same time, geometry of other deeds permitting, I might extend it back a bit, to lay claim to an area of woodland that lies to the east, and which would do very nicely for ongoing wood production.

I've also gained a few animals, though the generosity of neighbours. I have three horses, and four cattle. Domestic animals can be bred, and I've started that with the cattle. Two of the horses are too young still, so that will need to wait. In the meantime, all the beasts get groomed daily, and I make sure that the pens they're in have sufficient food. I'm developing the food production skills at the same slow and steady pace, and considering which crafts I'll take up in the long run.

I do like the terraforming, but taking it up as a long term skill requires a good bit of marketing in the game, and a lot of being away from my own deed. The option, of course, is to spend time developing good, solid deeds, with farmland, trees, and so on, and then sell them, and that's a tempting way to go.

The more conventional crafts of smithing and boatbuilding are also possibilities, and carpentry as well. I'm inclined in those areas to choose one that can have its products sold via merchants, rather than things where I need to negotiate the sale myself in person. Having carpentry and masonry at high levels would also be useful for when the fabled second-story houses come in. And it does occur to me that if a second story can be coded, there's no reason a third or more could not also be managed; someone with high carpentry or masonry might become a specialised builder of towers. I did mention the long-term thing.

I also want to do some exploration, after I make or buy myself some better armour. As it is, my only real option with most aggressive creatures is to flee as quickly as possible. I'm aware of some interesting looking areas up toward the mountains, though, where it looks as though there were once deeds, and no longer are. Those areas often contain treasure - that is, stuff left behind by previous players - or areas in which nice new deeds could easily be placed. Indeed, I'd like to travel to the Independence server as well, because I hear tales of large areas of unoccupied land, treasure left, right and centre, and more abandoned deeds than you can shake a stick at. A huge cotton-growing operation on an alt, say, could be very profitable.

It's a big game, and there's more to it all the time - reeds to make papyrus to write stuff down on have only recently been added, for example, and given the amount of material already in the game, I don't think I can go fast enough to try everything.

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.

The second mistake was not looking for iron before I laid down the deed. That may yet be a longer term problem, but I'm not yet certain.

For nearly all the basic things that can be made in Wurm, you need wood and iron. Wood is not a problem for me; there's a "back lot" which is nothing but standing timber, and every now and then I go on a sprout-picking expedition to make sure it stays that way. This also gets me a fair number of fruit trees, which are planted around the deed.

It's the iron that's a problem. There are two mines reasonably near me which have iron in them, and which are not locked or gated. "Reasonably near", however, is a relative term. One of them has a convenient forge, in which I could smelt down ore into lumps, the pure form of iron, and those are lighter and easier to bring home. But that one is further away, and while that's alright in terms of travel time - it's not that far - it means I'm away from the protection of my deed guard. So if something attacks me, I have to run all the way back to my own deed - I'm just about able to take on a wildcat or a lion at this stage, but not a bear, and spiders are death on eight legs. And they seem to love mines.

The other mine has no forge, and is down a steep hill with no road. That makes it a very slow journey back with ore, which is 20 times heavier than the iron lumps. And in both cases, I feel a bit guilty about pilfering someone else's iron.

So really, I need to find an iron vein near my own deed. Ideally, under it, so that the guard will protect me right there. But my deed rests on deep soil. About forty units of depth, actually, before you hit rock. And if you want to find where there's iron easily, you need to uncover rock. Basically, this means digging through a minimum of 160 actions, all of which produces blocks of dirt, which need to be moved somewhere. I do not fancy doing that all over the deed.

Instead, I dug down to rock on six tiles - a little off the edge of the deed, in fact, where someone had dug a starting hole before I arrived - opened a tunnel, and mined back under the deed, essentially brute-forcing the finding of iron. Except that, thus far, I haven't found any. I've carefully calculated the amount of mining I need to do, and I'm halfway through, with no sign of any iron. In one spot, I've broken through into another mine, but that's via a long, long drop shaft that you can't get back up. That mine connects to two others, as well - one of which is the iron-containing one at the bottom of the steep hill. But that doesn't improve my logistics. Poking around the rest of the opened areas through that drop-shaft, I'm seeing a lot of copper and zinc - but not much iron.

My next thinking is that I'll finish out mining under my own deed, and then, if I haven't found anything, mine out toward the coast. That way, any beasts that arrive into the mine will have to pass through the deed, unless of course they spawn in tunnels - and even then, I'll have a straight run back to my own deed and safety.

Once I find a useful source of iron, I can get on with my other intentions - tearing down fences, levelling land, and putting in some walls. And then I'm intending to start to farm crops properly, and begin a road that runs down the hill to the coast. I'm not sure if that should go straight, or if it should zig-zag down; recent changes have made steep slopes a lot more navigable by horses, so straight down might be alright - it's certainly ok on foot as it is.

This time, I created a new character, and headed for the new server where I knew some people. I was able to make it across from the spawn point to where they live, poke around a bit, and find a spot where I could set up a small deed of my own. It's up on a hill, not an unreasonable distance from water, and the neighbours are nice folk. There have been previous deeds in the area, so the spot I've claimed - all of 11 tiles square - already contains a forge, some storage, and a cobbled area. That's immensely useful, and still leaves me plenty to do. So the first thing I'm doing is puting a fence around the deed - a simple wooden one - and the second thing I'm going to do is more-or-less level it, and establish some fields and orchards.

As with everything in Wurm, the fencing is a long process - three or four nights of work have about 60% of the work done, and I'm still debating exactly how much to fence. I could, of course, just fence the whole thing, but that actually cuts me off from a useful resource. The guard that lives on the domain (well, I say lives - she's a ghost templar) kills hostile beasts that come onto my territory. If I butcher and skin those, I get meat, pelts, teeth, and so on - all useful things. But if I fence all around, they can't come on to the deed. The fence, though, marks out the borders for me - otherwise I'll have to keep on clicking on the ground to see whether that-tile-there is mine or not - and will keep animals, when I get some, on the deed. So I might end up fencing three sides, or three and a half, and leaving some open space for beasties to wander in and become dinner.

The deed down the hill from me is for sale - it's a nice patch of coastal territory, and the owner wants 12 silver for it. You can buy game currency directly - which is about as much use as it is in EVE - so if I wanted to drop €12 on it, I could get a second deed. I don't think I do, though; I've enough going on with the current deed for now, and there is a fair chance that the owner will just disband it and move elsewhere if it doesn't sell. If that happens, I could expand into that area, or I could create an alt, and establish a new deed where his was. I think that for now, I'll sit tight, and see what happens.

Wurm is going to be my MMO of choice for at least the next few months - it doesn't demand all that much time, it won't block me from getting in if I let my paid access lapse, and I can dip in and out as I want. That means it'll line up well with the spring, when I have college and then exams, and then the summer, when I'll have, in theory, some free time. It's also as sandboxy as I could reasonably want.

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.

I've also been to K2 (a small residential convention held in February or March each year in Kerry) every year for the past four or five. And I try to make it to Leprecon as often as possible despite its terrible habit of landing on a weekend when I have other commitments.

Conventions are, for me, an essential component of the hobby. The ability to get in among a large bunch of more-or-less like-minded folk and play games for two or three days straight is fantastic. And you get to try new games. Some conventions I only try new games, and that's still enough to keep me occupied throughout.

It also gives me a look at what RPGs are popular - not what's on the schedule, mind, since that's deliberately aiming for diversity, but what's on the stands. In the last few years, the stands have actually been very limited. White Wolf, D&D, and a few others - very little sign of the Fate games, Smallville, or any of the other games that get discussed a lot. Whether that's an accurate representation of the Irish games market or not, I'm not sure. It's possible that with games that consist of only one book, it's more trouble than it's worth for a retailer to stock it.

There's a fair degree to which conventions are the community celebrations that mark out the year for me. Gaelcon at one point, K2 at another, the minor celebrations along the way. Kind of, if you like, the gathering-of-the-community equivalent of Easter and Christmas for Christians, compared to the normal church service of the weekly game session. I'm sure you could make a case for rites of passage, too.

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.

There is a silly streak in gaming. I don't mind it, as long as it's kept behind closed doors and doesn't bother the horses. Personally, I don't get it. I can see how Paranoia, for instance, is a funny sort of situation, but it's always struck me as a Cold War-era form of desperate comedy in the face of an incomprehensible threat. Much like the more modern Laundry game, although the Laundry is more existential and less daft. And if you're inclined toward silly games, interruptions, and not being able to get a word in edgeways, well, on you go. Just keep it away from me.

Which is not to say that I don't use any elements of comedy, or that my games are all serious. There have been plenty of segments, events and characters that were surreal, comedic, or just plain bizarre enough to make people laugh. But they've never been silly. Silly is cheap.

Further, the particular kind of silly that leads to non-stop Monty Python quoting, well, it isn't funny. It's vaguely amusing if you know the exact thing that's being quoted, but otherwise it's an out-of-context quote of something that depends on good delivery to be funny. So it's just frustrating for everyone else, and I can't honestly see the enjoyment in it for the quoter, either.

But it happens a lot, even if not to that degree. Gamers absorb references and pop culture like few other subcultures do, and can often reproduce them at a moments notice, even if they're decades old. The plots of episodes of Firefly get redone in games worldwide, over and over and over. I know of one gamer who can be relied up on bring up Gilligan's Island at any opportunity. I'm not sure if Gilligan's Island was ever aired in Ireland, so the references are pretty lost on the rest of us. And in latter years, Community and Big Bang Theory get quoted, and they're strong enough in the geek zeitgeist that many people don't quite seem to understand that I've never seen them.

Maybe it's because I don't watch much TV, and maybe because even then I will very, very rarely watch something more than once. I think there are two New Who episodes I've watched twice, and one of them was because a downloaded episode was of extraordinarily poor quality. So I don't end up memorising sections of dialogue.

These days, with the added gravitas and confidence of a further 17 years in gaming, I reckon I'd tell those players to either shut up or push off. It might be rude, but it wouldn't have been such a mess of a game.

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.

Let me backtrack on that a bit: I have a terrible tendency to lecture. Show a combination of ignorance and interest on any topic I know about, and I will talk your ear off for a few hours, send you links by email, and generally make you wish you'd never brought it up. This is an inherited tendency, I hasten to add; my father does the same. In social situations, I've no particular fear of this; glazed eyes will give me the hint after only an hour, in most cases.

But in a game, I don't want players chasing off after irrelevant details, so I tend to outline rather than lecture. If the type of rock the buildings are made of is relevant, I'll mention it. If it's not, I'll just say "stone" and keep going. And in principle, that's fine. The issue is that "relevant" is a very movable line.

For instance, if I say that the walls are granite, and go on to note that there are coal fires burning, then it is perfectly obvious that the coal is very likely imported, and whoever has the coal fire is therefore rich. Coal is a metamorphic rock, and if you have granite at the surface, you won't have much access to coal. Obvious, right?

Likewise, if I note ornate clothing, or frequent changes of clothing in a pre-industrial setting, well, it's clear that there's a massive underclass in this society, right? You can't have ornate clothes without weeks of work, and if someone has been working for weeks on one garment, and you have lots of them, clearly there's a low-paid level of society there.

These are two examples of things I was using, and I was blind to the fact that they're utterly incomprehensible if you don't have a background in geology or pre-industrial economics. Needless to say, none of my players have either. On the other hand, I'm not the best in the world at body language, so I tend to over-describe that when it comes up, making it often much too obvious that there's a Clue there.

So getting through my own knowledge filters to know what to show and not show is hard, and it's often something I have to stop and think about, which isn't a thing I can do mid-game. I am, I think, getting better at this over time, but the requests for "can we have more of this thing in the game" and my blithe response of "it's there already!" works to show where the gaps are. It's not a particularly satisfactory exchange, though, and I'd like to improve that.

Failing all of the above, of course, buying me new game supplements, dice, tokens, stationery and beer will work wonders.

It wasn't, I think, until I saw a poll on rpg.net about campaign length with the "1-3 months" option way ahead of everything else that I realised I was doing something different.

Part of this is personal preference, of course. Having put the work into a campaign setting, I'm not going to waste it by running six sessions and calling it done. And I'm physically incapable of not developing a campaign setting once I get started. But I also suffer from some confusion around the topic. Players are barely getting to know a character after, say, ten sessions. As the GM, I'm only getting a grasp on what they really want out of the game at that stage. How could you run anything shorter and have it turn out well?

So my campaigns tend to take years to complete, and to have enough plot threads to fill that span of time. My instinct isn't actually to have an end at all; my simulationist soul claims that endings are a narrativist trick, and not worthy of attention. I'd simply have the player characters continue through interesting lives for ever, given the chance - pursuing their own interests, and uncovering a conspiracy here, a small war there, a jaunt off into the planes for whatever reason, and have the return of old nemeses happen occasionally and organically. Players, however, demand coherent plot, and plot demands resolution.

At some point, I think I'd like to run the kind of game my instincts demand. It would need player buy-in from the beginning, of course, and no expectation of a resolution that won't be coming, nor indeed an expectation of an over-arching plot. It would also need characters carefully designed for it, with clear ambitions from the start which they can work toward over the very long run - and they should also be the kind of characters who generate a "things to do" list as they go, so that when that initial ambition is completed, they've more to get on with. And it would probably need to be run in a different area of my own cosmology, rather than on the main campaign world, because by its very nature, it would develop tendrils of story that would interfere with everything else. But I think all of those are surmountable.

I've an article brewing on the practicalities of "How to Run a Long RPG Campaign", or thereabouts, but it is - appropriately - taking a while to put together.

This, I think, is where the D&D rules and I parted ways. Character death - player character death, at least - is not usually interesting. There are two ways it happens: either the player is tired of the character, and opts to have them leave the campaign by dying, or the dice come out badly, and the character runs out of hit points. In the first case, all the interest is moving toward the new character that player will have, and in the second, well... there just ISN'T any interest.

This ties back to the notion, which comes up again and again, even in such tactical games as 4th Ed D&D, of making failure interesting. And certainly, there has to be a risk, or the whole structure of the game, whatever the characters are striving for, becomes meaningless. And if a player insists on having their character do something absolutely stupid, then death is on the cards. My players, however, tend to be a lot smarter than average, so this doesn't arise.

"Failure should be interesting" is one of the things that, in my mind, distinguishes modern games from the old-school kind. The old-school games go: You don't find the secret door in the first level of the dungeon? Tough, the other nine levels remain inaccessible. You rolled six ones in a row, and now your 21st level character is dead? Tough, roll a new one. You can see how that's not interesting. Even "this door is locked" can be a show-stopper if the party's only rogue fails the "pick locks" roll, and the party are left standing outside a locked door. The failure has to do something; events have to have another fork to follow.

So, I don't have memorable character deaths because I'm not interested in them. One of the major, major advantages of the Fate system, for me, is the "taken out" result at the end of combat. Sure, that can be "dead". But it can also be kidnapped, injured, missing... all of those are far more interesting, and lead to more story.

I've played many strange characters from behind the screen. At this stage, I don't really think about how weird or not they are, just about how they think.

One of my campaign world's central notions is that it has a very deep history. It's had sentient life for about three and a half billion years. There's also the possibility of immortality. So over that span of time, quite a few creatures have become immortal. Immortals are weird anyway, but some of them are downright alien.

Davonian life is fecund. Species, as Linnean taxonomy usually uses the term, don't quite work. It's not the case that anything can crossbreed with anything, quite. Dragons can, though, and once a few of them have, normal processes will carry some of that capability down through successive generations. So anything that had an ancestor intelligent enough to appeal to a dragon has a chance of having some draconic blood, however small a fraction. And fiends and celestials, of course, have the same capability. So many of the immortals are of mixed blood.

The upshot of this is that there's a creature out there who has lived for two billion years, will never die, and is half-dragon, one quarter coral-starfish, and one quarter intelligent tree. He's lived long enough that remnants of his birth culture's artworks are turning up in igneous rocks. Every intelligent thing on the planet younger than him is probably a descendant. How do you play something like that?

I've done a lot of thinking about this, and arrived at the idea that any immortal who is out and about, rather than dormant, hiding, or in stasis of some kind, has self-selected for the ability to deal with and understand the world as it is. So while they're alien, they're at least used to getting on with humans, or their immediate ancestor species. That makes it one step easier.

Fiends, celestials, and the like are easier to play in many ways. They have aims that are more or less comprehensible to humans, and they're busily getting on with them.

Second, I don't completely have to understand them to depict them, any more than an actor playing, say, Winston Churchill, needs to understand everything of Churchill's life and thinking. And in a lot of cases, one or two strange habits of mind can account for a lot of alien-ness.

For instance, there was one relatively recent race who left very little trace in the world, called the Siroose. They left little trace because they did very little; their major cultures valued indolence, cowardice, and efficiency above all else. That alone makes for a very alien creature from our point of view; a paranoid couch-potato who occasionally acts very swiftly and decisively in order to ensure it can go on being paranoid and stationary. Playing a Siroose is therefore weird.

A lot of my thinking on the immortals - and indeed, deep history as a concept - comes from Vernor Vinge's books, A Fire Upon The Deep and A Deepness In The Sky. The interactions between different species there, and the communications between them on what looks very like usenet have been a massive influence.

And I take a certain comfort in thinking that even in the selection of weird creatures I've played, I still have things as peculiar as the Tines and the Skrode-riders to reach for.

Once more, the reversal: some thinking about rewards in games from a GM point of view. There's a very simple formula to this: the more mechanical the game, the more the rewards of loot and levels matter. The more story-oriented the game is, the more outcomes matter. This is a pretty stark difference between my campaigns at the moment.

The Fate games, though, and even our older D&D games, from 2nd Ed through 3.0 and 3.5, have always emphasised story rewards. We stopped tracking gold coins in possession very early on - somewhere around 6th level in the original 2nd Ed game - and by this point, we only keep an eye on signature pieces of equipment. Levels, or their equivalents, come slowly, and we're still experimenting to find a rate of advancement that's comfortable - Legends of Anglerre's one skill point per session as in the rules isn't particularly balanced for a regular weekly session in a long-term campaign.

Indeed, material rewards tend to get in the way a bit in the Fate games. They're extra material to keep track of, and there's already plenty of information floating around. It's a natural thing, in a D&D game, to go digging through your character sheet's appendices and find that you actually do have a Staff of the Nine Winds or whatever; it's a lot less so in a Fate game where you're more used to considering how you can bend an aspect to what you want it to do.

Instead, we work a lot more with the story rewards. For characters in organisations, promotions work very well. For a lone artist, an offer for an exhibition is a very nice thing to have in there. New apprentices, family members turning up, a chance to talk to a very notable NPC, all of these work as rewards, and then there's the slightly more meta-game idea of material the player developed entering play.

This kind of thing can carry a lot of meaning even in the more equipment-and-points oriented games. Some years ago, an offshoot campaign, run under D&D 3.0, had a player character called Athel. Athel's player is a military history buff, so he took great pleasure in drawing up plans of the triangular fortress the group were building in a border marches area of the campaign world. Soon after the fortress was built, events conspired to take the group away on a long trip across the planes, and they didn't get back for more than year in-game. By the time they returned, the fortress had had a small town built around it, and it was becoming one of the regional capitals of the new province - and was called Athelstown. The player was floored when this appeared on the map, and he still talks about it now, the best end of ten years later.

All these questions are aimed at players, you know. In my experience, GMs are much more likely to be blogging about their games... so I'm turning this one around again, looking at enemies I've used. Or, rather, why they're enemies, and what they do.

Irichallanak (detailed in Shades of Grey) started out as at least a potential enemy, before he became an ally. Avaldan, a character with a history long enough to feature in three eras, was very definitely an enemy when he first appeared. And of course, the enemies that didn't become allies tend to become dead instead.

In my campaigns, I don't like to designate "enemy" NPCs. I find it leads to those NPCs eventually basing actions on "because I'm the bad guy", and whatever about anyone's cognisance of being evil or otherwise, few people think of themselves as the "bad guy". So instead, enemies are a more fluid category of characters whose intentions are opposed to those of the PCs. Sometimes they want to rule the world. Sometimes they want to rule some small part of the world. Sometimes, there's someone they want to kill, for whatever reason. Or there's something the player characters have that they want. Or they're conservatives, when the party is trying to change things, or radicals of one stripe or another when the PCs like the status quo.

I prefer rational characters, so generally, my NPCs will go for subtle routes to achieve their objectives first, negotiation second, and only go for violence if it's a last resort. But there are some who are not rational - which I've some difficulty playing, I'll admit - and there are some who have gone through the rational process and concluded that direct violence is the only workable answer. Those two kinds will find ways to attack, straight off the bat, and generally, anyone who attacks gets classed as an enemy straight away.

Something that's never really apparent to the players - and deliberately so - are the interactions between these NPCs. Even as the PCs can make allies of someone by negotiating to a mutually satisfactory position, so too can people whose aims they oppose. So at any given time, there are alliances being formed and broken all over the campaign world, some of which are aimed directly at the player characters, and some of which will be much more incidental.

And sometimes, too, those alliances go wrong. Several times, there've been situations where it was clear to me that two current enemies could no longer cooperate, and one of them had to take out the other. I do struggle a bit, sometimes, with how to work that into player knowledge. "In a place far away, one chap you've never heard of has murdered another chap you'd only met once, and who you didn't even know didn't like you. Well done!" - it lacks a certain something. Mostly, they find the remnants of conflict, bodies or just abandoned strongholds, and have to try to work out what happened. Often, a mystery like that can hang around for a while, which isn't a bad thing.

I've little enough interest in the "betrayal" trope so common in fantasy. But sometimes allies, or apparent allies, have their interests diverge. This happened, certainly, with a fiend called Tamergrin, in the Kingfisher's Way campaign, and he definitely turned out to be an enemy. I'm not terribly sure, though, that anyone was particularly satisfied with that outcome.

I think at heart, many of us are happier with honourable enemies becoming strong allies, and dishonourable enemies becoming dust.

To be honest, I have difficulty in conceiving how someone could not make this distinction - and I suspect that the only people who think this happens aren't gamers. And they're probably the people who think that the actions of fictional characters represent the opinion of the author, too.

There's a strip in Knights of the Dinner Table where BA is saying that he spent a long time on the orcish threat gestures, something that has plainly never entered play. That's me. I know stuff about the geology and climatic zones of Davon that will never, ever enter the game - but it gives me a considerable sense of satisfaction to know them anyway.

I do try not make the parallels clear. I feel it's jarring if someone can say, "Hang on, this happened in Spain in the 17th Century!". The material I'm currently studying in a History module, for instance, concerning the Wars of Religion in France, likely won't be identifiable when it appears in the game. But it will appear - though probably separated into distinct pieces, with a weak monarchy there, rapid switching of allegiances over here, and maybe two enemies with the same name in an entirely different campaign.

There's also the observation that if you put the events of real history into a game, stripped of the national identifiers and half-known narratives that surround them, players might well refuse to accept that NPCs could be that stupid, arrogant, or evil, and go looking for the demons or compulsions that are clearly behind such actions.

Likewise, this year's entire sociology module will reappear at some stage, chopped up and made into a sort of narrative soup. Hegemonic ideas have already made an appearance; that was too juicy a concept not to press into immediate use. Effects on societies of inequality will be another one; I've already done a lot of thinking about the effects on human societies of long-lived elves and dragons, and how those creatures' societies would handle, say, inheritance.

News and current events are an obvious thing to add to the mix. I keep notes for myself; abstracted out so that I don't connect them with the real events, and look back on them every couple of years for stuff to include. I don't know where "weak leader establishes power-base by clever use of gutter journalism" came from, nor "personal beliefs cause rift between politically aligned families". But they're good things to integrate into a game world.

I've done a lot of reading in geography and economics over the years, and that turns up in the games too. Climate science, chaos theory, causality, all those are elements from the pages of New Scientist and Focus that have landed here and there.

I can tell reality from fantasy perfectly well. But I get great entertainment out of bringing one into the other anyway.

Quite aside from the fact that I disagree strenuously with the article, this is one of the things that drives me spare about computer game reviews. I'm sure it happens in other fields as well, but I don't read many film or book reviews any more. That is, the reviewer plainly doesn't like the genre. Jonathan McCalmont doesn't like open world games. So why have him review one? It seems clear that he'd be much happier reviewing something with a wholly pre-written storyline - there are excellent examples out there like Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age: Origins.

Indeed, it's worth arguing that unless you like the genre, you can't identify good or bad within it. Broadly speaking, I'd be hard put to identify good or bad country & western music, because it all makes me grind my teeth and look for a hammer.

But in this case, McCalmont sits down, ploughs his way through the game, and then proceeds to whine through a long article (as web articles go), wherein all the points can be summarised as "I don't get it". If you don't get it, a) play something else, and b) review that instead.

Each has their place. I like dungeon crawls, because I don't have to think after I've written the scenario. I like mysteries, because it's often fascinating seeing how players and characters go about solving them. I like freeform roleplaying, because it immerses me much more in the campaign world.

My main groups don't do dungeon crawls much. That's mostly reserved for the D&D 4E crowd, although one of the main campaigns is venturing into the Underdark soon, to try to work out what's happening down there to push all kinds of unpleasant creatures to the surface. Even that, though, won't be the open-the-door-roll-for-initiative-kill-the-monster-and-grab-the-treasure routine; the group just doesn't work that way. On the other hand, the 4E game is essentially a series of dungeon crawls, some more blatant than others. They're entertaining, but they're... not really RPGs, more sort of a scenario-based tactical boardgame. And that's ok, too.

Mysteries underlie a lot of my game sessions. There is some piece of information that's being sought, or there are unexplained events that need to be stopped. Someone has to be located. Unknown information, and the assembly of new facts into a coherent (or semi-coherent) whole has been a major focus of most of my longer campaigns, so mysteries are important to me.

Freeform roleplaying is a fuzzy enough term; I'm choosing to interpret it as conversations between PCs and NPCs taking most of the session, with a minimum of dice-rolling. In any campaign I've ever run, this becomes the default play-style for a good chunk of time toward the end. It can crop up earlier, as well, of course, and I find that the decisions that guide the rest of the campaign usually happen in these sessions. Players from Spellbound still recall the long session of discussion about who to give a particular artifact to; they were down to two choices, which looked about equal. Eventually, they settled on one. Had they given it to the other, I'm pretty sure the entire history of the campaign world since would have been different, and involved a lot more in the way of smoking ruins and glowing craters.

Political intrigue has been a varying factor. Sometimes, it's an absolute mainstay of a campaign, usually in the early-to-mid stages where the player characters are still working out who's in power, and who's not. And sometimes it never comes up at all. It seems to depend on active decisions by player characters, rather more than most styles of game, and that varies greatly from character to character.

Economic maneuvering has never been a major factor in any of my games, although it's starting to appear now in the D&D 4E game. It requires a few things in the system - specifically, explicit tracking of equipment and money - so any game that has, say, a Resources skill can't run anything meaningful in that field. Within the rules constraint, there are two ways it can come up; a player character can decide to get rich, or to take down someone whose power depends on money, or alternately, it can be the background reason for missions and jobs the PCs are sent to do by some mentor or employer. The 4E game is headed in that latter direction.

Creeping horror is a thing I've used touches of here and there. There are two major ways I've approached it; one is the subtle (or not so subtle) implication of really physical, gross aspects of bodies and interactions. This, I find, can creep players out, but can also result in them being too grossed out to actually continue playing. The other approach is the more cerebral; is this NPC actually on your side, or has he been stringing you along? Betrayal is a very visceral horror. I use it lightly, though - it's such a staple trope of fantasy that I don't find it all that interesting anymore.

The action mission is a very simple concept - go here, do this thing, fight if need be, come back when you've achieved your objective. There are a million and one episodes of TV shows based fairly directly on this, from Charlie's Angels and Mission Impossible to Star Trek. It's well suited to episodic play, and also to situations in which the player characters are members of an organisation that can direct their actions. This gets a lot of use in my main campaign at the moment, and also in the 4E game. It's possibly too broad a category to really be useful, though.

Swashbuckling rescue is a specific kind of action mission, but it seems to have its own tropes and rules. "Go here, rescue this person, come back" is obviously the core, but there's a lot of swordfighting on stairs, swinging on ropes, swinging on chandeliers, and climbing up balconies implicit there too. I've mostly encountered this in convention scenarios, and I tend to think of it as more single film than TV series. Rescue missions of any kind are not a thing I've made a lot of use of, since it hinges on there needing to be someone to be rescued. That means using the player characters' contacts as an "X is in danger!" motivation. Any more than a little of that, and the PCs start to maneuver toward having no friends because they're clearly a liability, and that's not a kind of game I'm interested in.

High-fantasy exposition is a particular type that has come out of me trying to pin down types for sessions I've run. Plain old exposition for a full session is boring, but occasionally you need to provide a massive information download so that the campaign gets moving again. This works far better if the player characters take a trip through a new plane in which they see bits of history and prophecy rendered as dreams, or find a talking magical item which has the information but has to be coaxed into letting it go, or a massive archive of books and objects collected over centuries, or... you get the idea. Anything other than "So, the sage says..." and then the GM talking non-stop for three hours.

I'm sure there are a few I've missed; I might have to return to this question again.

I'm not a competitive person. Sure, winning is nice, but it's hardly the point of a game. If it was, then we'd all play nice, easy, solo games, which we could win every time. If there are other people involved in a competitive game, you're sometimes going to lose, and if that's a problem, you shouldn't play them. So the collaborative/competitive divide isn't as stark for me as it for most people, I think.

Collaborative efforts result in good RPGs. This is particularly true of the newer breed of RPGs, where player input helps shape the setting and the story, and where building on what someone else has contributed makes for a better experience for everyone. While my main group has been slow to take up the notion of guiding a narrative in play, they're old hands at contributing material to the world - a number of priesthoods, an order of paladins, and more cities and kingdoms than I can track have been formed either around small details provided by players, or fully developed by them.

The simple (or, in the later stages of a campaign, not so simple) process of coming up with a plan is one of the things I really like about RPGs. It takes the Irish tendency to bluesky, the process of logic, knowledge of the campaign world, and the burst of inspiration, and blends them all together.

On the competitive side, a little internal conflict isn't a bad thing, but it has to be carefully managed. It can very quickly become the focus of the game, and therefore uninteresting for anyone who doesn't have a stake in the conflict, and it's remarkably easy for an in-game conflict between characters to wash over into being an out-of-game conflict between players.

So overall: I don't mind competitive games, but I really like collaborative ones.