Every game makes you a promise: the game will be about this thing and will support you this way. Some games wisely under-promise and over-deliver. That’s just good life advice. But under-promising is hard to do when you need to generate excitement for your game, otherwise people won’t buy and, hopefully, play it. So we live in a world where games frequently...

This is part 9 of our 10-part text AP of Stonetop. We posted part 8 a few weeks back, and if you want to start from the beginning here’s part 1. If you want to see what all the fuss is about, here’s the deep dive on Stonetop I posted a few weeks ago. Enjoy! Sometimes I get very excited to nail down all the fun details of our sessions right away....

This is part 8 of our 10-part text AP of Stonetop. We posted part 6 a few weeks back, and if you want to start from the beginning here’s part 1. If you want to see what all the fuss is about, here’s the deep dive on Stonetop I posted a few weeks ago. Enjoy! In November 2023, it had been really hard to get sequential sessions into this game. The...

This is part 7 of our 10-part text AP of Stonetop. We posted part 6 a few weeks back, and if you want to start from the beginning here’s part 1. If you want to see what all the fuss is about, here’s the deep dive on Stonetop I posted a few weeks ago. Enjoy! Content warning for self-harm in this episode. We played this session in mid-November....

One of the most frustrating things about being deep into RPGs in a serious way for a very long time is that the same conversations seem to keep coming up. Year after year, decade after decade. Every few years a new cohort comes along and convinces itself they’re the first ones to have thought of these questions or these answers. I’m not sure what to...

I have a theory: there are two kinds of licensed games. Or, perhaps, licensed games fall on a continuum. The first kind is where the rules provide as little friction as possible while you Do License Things. The game expects you to bring lots of knowledge of the license to bear, and the system does the bare minimum (usually some flavor of task...