Don’t Waste My Time: Tips for Keeping Your Games Moving

Gnome Stew
via Don’t Waste My Time: Tips for Keeping Your Games Moving.

Intellectual obesity

Reposted from blue collar space:

A useful method for analyzing complex systems is to find pressures and follow what things flow naturally through the system under that pressure. I tried to do this with RPGs once with limited success — I still think it’s viable, but it needs more brain-juice than I am currently willing to [...]

Why Immersion Matters – We Fly Spitfires – MMORPG Blog

When we i.e. me talk about the subject of immersion we’re looking at more than just roleplaying and wandering around an online game world saying “hail, good sir” and taking every opportunity to talk about heaving bosoms any fantasy reader worth his or her salt will know exactly what I’m talking about here cough Robert [...]

When Inspiration Is Not Enough: Time Travel in RPGs, Part 1

Campaign Mastery
via When Inspiration Is Not Enough: Time Travel in RPGs, Part 1.

All the World’s a Stage: Pros and cons of total-immersion roleplay

When you decide to roleplay, a whole new world of imagination opens up to you — soon you realize that all the World of Warcraft is a stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players.
There are degrees to roleplaying. Some people like it "light," so that it never gets too intense, you never have [...]

5 Must-have Chrome Extensions for Writers and Roleplayers

One of the things that gave me pause when considering the move to Chrome from Firefox was having to give up the wide range of add-ons that the Mozilla service provides. But while Chrome can’t yet match Firefox’s huge extension ecosystem, it’s rapidly catching up, and many of my favorite “must-have” Firefox add-ons are are [...]

Why do we play video games?

This image explores the motivation behind several of the most popular video games. Explore it and keep these things in mind when designing your roleplays!

Building NPCs

There is a model of diagramming the world of a game that I call the Starbust – it’s basically elements that could be put together to build a relationship map, but the individual bits can be a lot easier to present rather than doing up a map all at once. At it’s simplest, it’s an [...]

Turning A Simple Sentence Into A Paragraph

Turning a small thought into a full-blown post can often be a difficult process. I stumbled into Joe Davis’ demonstration of exactly that process today, so I’m publishing it under the “Asides” category for everyone to enjoy.
Joe Davis presents “Telescopic Text” – an interactive demonstration of expanding upon content, word by word.

Roleplaying Tips by Johnn Four

I really want to take a moment to give a shout-out to Johnn Four of Roleplaying Tips, which has over four-hundred guides and articles about roleplaying.

If you’re a regular feedreader, I recommend subscribing to the Roleplaying Tips feed. He’s got some great posts, like his guide to How to host the perfect game and [...]