I haven't been posting lately because I've been busy with life, busy with putting Sagas of the Icelanders together but most importantly because I haven't been playing much. And when I'm not playing I'm not writing about stuff that comes from playing but instead crank out stupid stuff like that dwarves thing a few posts down. I did play some Pathfinder and a little Murderous Ghosts but nothing happened that would inspire content.
There have been quite a few very interesting discussions happening around the blogosphere, on g+ and on Story Games however, and I've been mostly following them from a distance. If I tried to consolidate it all to a few points it would be:
-the "story games community" and the "OSR community" have began to actually communicate in some ways, I guess you could say it was always meant to be, with all the similarities, but it's nice to see how people are talking to each other even if things still get heated up sometimes
-fruitful, honest and generous criticism of games and gaming is something that keeps popping up in conversations recently - how do you analyze play, how do you communicate your results, how can we talk about games in a critical but non-predatory manner; how do you scrutinize the play experience in a way that's not entirely subjective or self-involved, very important, very interesting stuff
-talk of one-hour games and games for non-gamers is all the rage and it's coming from completely different corners, in completely different contexts. Mearls is talking about it in relation to D&D, Chris Chin is talking about BW, Vincent is talking about making more games like Murderous Ghosts that are accessible & don't take a long time to play - basically it's all about the social level of design.
-the above ties into the discussion about reaching out to non-gamers, to a wider audience. Tabletop is part of that.
There's also all the talk about 5E/D&D Next. The Pundit has been hired as a consultant as has Zak. The blogs on the official site make me worry sometimes, but overall I'm very optimistic. PAX is next week and the public playtest probably begins after that, which is awesome. We'll see soon enough. The only problem are the people who simply refuse to charitably read the info WotC is releasing and flip their shit at every little (objectively) inconsequential detail or interpret things negatively despite all the proof to the contrary.
Anyway that's all kinda floating around my head right now. Interesting times.
There have been quite a few very interesting discussions happening around the blogosphere, on g+ and on Story Games however, and I've been mostly following them from a distance. If I tried to consolidate it all to a few points it would be:
-the "story games community" and the "OSR community" have began to actually communicate in some ways, I guess you could say it was always meant to be, with all the similarities, but it's nice to see how people are talking to each other even if things still get heated up sometimes
-fruitful, honest and generous criticism of games and gaming is something that keeps popping up in conversations recently - how do you analyze play, how do you communicate your results, how can we talk about games in a critical but non-predatory manner; how do you scrutinize the play experience in a way that's not entirely subjective or self-involved, very important, very interesting stuff
-talk of one-hour games and games for non-gamers is all the rage and it's coming from completely different corners, in completely different contexts. Mearls is talking about it in relation to D&D, Chris Chin is talking about BW, Vincent is talking about making more games like Murderous Ghosts that are accessible & don't take a long time to play - basically it's all about the social level of design.
-the above ties into the discussion about reaching out to non-gamers, to a wider audience. Tabletop is part of that.
There's also all the talk about 5E/D&D Next. The Pundit has been hired as a consultant as has Zak. The blogs on the official site make me worry sometimes, but overall I'm very optimistic. PAX is next week and the public playtest probably begins after that, which is awesome. We'll see soon enough. The only problem are the people who simply refuse to charitably read the info WotC is releasing and flip their shit at every little (objectively) inconsequential detail or interpret things negatively despite all the proof to the contrary.
Anyway that's all kinda floating around my head right now. Interesting times.
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