Robin Laws
Yet another THURSDAY LINK DAY!!!
- More DMing advice from Penny Arcade
- The movie Gattaca is being made into a sci-fi, police procedural TV show. Sound pretty cool!
- How we’ll cope (or not) with the Dollhouse cancellation – the 5 Stages of Grief. But, maybe we’ll get more Buffy?
- Setting up your Mac to play PC games.
- Michael Chabon on breaking out of genre and the role of fan-fiction in popular culture.
- What Stormtroopers do on their day off.
- Some guy at the Guardian reads George R. R. Martin for the first time.
- Robin D. Laws does a great real world RPG inspiration. Maybe we should change the way we do ours?
- i09′s take on what SFF books you might like if you liked some recent movies. It’s a cool idea, done well and the recommend some great books!
- Finally, The Onion A.V. Club gives us more geek fun with their New Cult Canon write up on Army of Darkness, a movie I have never seen but now really want to!
Adventure ideas as TV guide write-ups
Superstar RPG designer Robin Laws has made a pretty awesome suggestion on his blog on the concept of ‘player generated premises’. Basically the idea is that players give a short ‘tv guide’ style suggestion for next weeks adventure. Each session a different player takes a turn to suggest one:
- El-Haumarzeid unwittingly becomes the centre of a new religious movement.
- Lacklow learns that not every problem can be solved with a swift thrust of a blade to the eye when a thiefmaster’s convocation is held in a mysterious temple where violence is impossible.
- A normal mission suddenly gains deadly stakes when Lacklow learns that one of his missing family members may be involved. Are they a hostage? Slaves? Or something more sinister?
- Saltiamara discovers a little more about the potential destiny of the orc child she adopted.
- The local mafia tries to convince Shoryu, in his role as a pit fighter trainer, to help set up a bunch of games.
All the above are from Robin’s post – I particularly like the first of the Lucklow ideas.
The main problems I see with this are a) the issues around weaving these into a single campaign and more importantly b) the players who will do the most with this aren’t the the players who need the most help.
Players who can come up with snappy ideas about the direction of the game and their characters don’t need tricks to get them into the campaign. It’s those players who do need the help (in my experience the friend of a player who has never played before) who will never come up with quick ideas like these. Still it’s a cool way to help take the load off the GM as well…