My dad wore a tie to work almost every day of his adult life, and still had a vast collection when he passed away in 2019. My mum asked if I’d be interested in them, but a) I wear a tie for job interviews approximately once every three or four years, and b) I don’t […]
I’ve spent the last five or six years running Marvel Heroic at our weekly game sessions, which usually meant carting around a buttload of dice and ten years worth of game notes every time we had a session. When that campaign ended last month, we transitioned to John Harper’s Blades in the Dark–a game about […]
We recently dug out the big box o’ board games here in Casa Del Brain Jar, separating out everything that we can rock with two players and working our way through them. I haven’t played board games regularly in about six or seven years—not since my primary board-gaming friends decamped for Melbourne for good—and I […]
The most read posts on this website, year after year, are Thirteen Things I’ve Learned About Superhero Games After Running 30 Sessions Of Mutants And Masterminds and its follow-up Fifteen Things I’ve Learned About Superhero RPGs After Running 150 Sessions of My Campaign. They’re both RPG-centric posts about an ongoing superhero game I’ve been running […]
The most recent session of our Superhero RPG was an interesting one in terms of seeing the gap between our style and the nature of the system we’re using. With this in mind, I’m going to quote from the player notes Adam keeps from session to session on his gaming wiki: We have a terrible […]
I was a GM before I was an writer, which means I occasionally awful affliction that many gamers suffer from where I get all Let me tell you about my game. I’m also a GM who’s had a few recurring items on my to-do lis like run better sessions, do better prep, and test drive rules from […]
So back in 2012 I wrote up a list of 13 things I’d learned running a Superhero RPG campaign for thirty sessions, and it quickly became one of the most read posts I’ve ever done. Now, six years later, we’ve just played session #150 of the same campaign, which definitely makes this one of the […]
I ran session 108 of my ongoing Superhero campaign last night. That’s rather a lot, for a campaign that started while the players were in their thirties, and I finally did something I probably should have done in session one: throw out the XP system. I’ve always hesitated to do this because XP is one of […]
I’ve been running a superhero campaign for a few years now, and tonight we hit ninety-seven sessions. In contrast to our usual approach, this one was dice heavy – the heroes raided the compound of an demonic ninja cult, fighting lots of guys in black outfits along with mystically endowed sumo-wrestlers, shadow-warriors, claw-wielding pretty-boys, and […]
So the last time I blogged about Supers gaming, I was in the middle of putting together a list of things I could use to streamline my preparation for games. This is still a work-in-progress – despite my efforts, I came to our last session with fairly minimal prep work outside of NPC stats and […]
So we ended our Mutants and Masterminds hiatus last night, although in retrospect I wish I’d waited an extra week or two – working a whole bunch of weekends in a row means I don’t get a lot of time to prep sessions and, man, I really wish I’d had time to do a little […]
It’s been five days since we wrapped up GenreCon and, well, I’m yet to bounce back to my normal self. Cons are mentally and physically exhausting, doubly so when you’re running them, and you always have to pay your body back for the sleep debt and three days you spend operating on adrenaline and caffeine. Net […]
