Tag: RPG

A Serving of Links

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A sampling of what I’ve been digging into lately. Books: Remember Choose Your Own Adventure books? Remember how those Fighting Fantasy books by Steve Jackson & Ian Livingstone added die rolls and character information to that paradigm? Now imagine reading one and not having to flip from one page to another. Imagine one that takes advantage of all the possibilities of ebooks. Is this new version of Dave Morris’ classic Heart of Ice what you imagined?  (I haven’t read it yet, but it’s getting rave reviews, and I plan on checking it out.) R.H. Kanakia presents: a Taxonomy of Readers. I’m …

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Dread: Saigon Falls

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So, the other night we played through my new scenario for Dread, titled “Saigon Falls,” with my housemates here in Vietnam. It was an interesting experience for a few reasons. For one thing: we were playing imaginary characters living in our real (shared) house. That was odd, because a lot of the story took place inside the house, and the geography of the house played a part in a lot of scenes. It was interesting secondarily because the characters were modeled on the previous occupants of the house we’re staying in, a group of frathouse morons who apparently had huge, …

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New (Free) Essay On Gaming, Education, and Agency in Korea, Published in The WyrdCon 2012 Companion Book

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For those interested in RPGs, their use in language and other teaching, and what I see as the potential political subversiveness of RPGing in Korea, you might want to check out my newest essay, which is included in the WyrdCon Companion Book, which was just published the other day.

WyrdCon is an annual American convention focused on Interactive Storytelling–which includes LARP, ARGs, and more. I’ve never attended (or even larped, really), but the editor for the non-academic section of the book, Aaron Vanek, invited me to contribute an essay after reading what I wrote about Dread and my return to gaming.

My essay is titled “Thinking Big: RPGs, Teaching in Korea, and the Subversive Idea of Agency,” and it deals not only with my own experience using RPG-like systems in language teaching, but also how RPG-like approaches to interaction might be just what’s needed to fix Korea’s utterly broken TEFL paradigm… and maybe to instill a deeper sense of agency in young people whose literature, education, and upbringing seem specifically to stifle that sense. But I’ll add that it’s just as much about my return to gaming as it is about the stuff mentioned in the title… and there’s a lot of other interesting stuff in there, too.

The WyrdCon Companion ebook is free to download from here.

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A Dicey Situation (Buying Gaming Dice in South Korea)

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UPDATE (13 Nov. 2014): I’m guessing this is your cheapest option for polyhedral dice in South Korea now. There are also polyhedral sets that aren’t too expensive, if you poke around on Gmarket. UPDATE (27 Nov. 2012): Got the polyhedral dice. The place I ordered the six-sided dice from took a few extra days to get those dice shipped, but I’m still hoping to receive them in the next couple of weeks. I’d better, since we have some Fiasco games planned for the third week of December. ORIGINAL POST: I have a bunch of dice on order, at the moment. You might …

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Talent Night, Part 4: The Dread Scenario

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This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Talent Night: My First Time Running a Game of Dread

UPDATE (20 Feb 2022): I’ve very slightly revised this scenario and made it available on my itch.io page.  ORIGINAL POST (8 November 2012): I figured I’d share the scenario documents I prepared for Talent Night–the game scenario I’ve been discussing throughout this series of posts–just in case anyone else out there might want to try run the game and liked the idea of our setup. I’m also very interested in comments from anyone who knows the game, as far as feedback regarding scenario design is concerned. I’m happy to learn more or have missteps or goofs pointed out to me. …

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Talent Night, Part 3: What I Learned Hosting a Dread Game

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This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Talent Night: My First Time Running a Game of Dread

Note: this is the second third post in a series. In the previous post, I discussed my long, long hiatus from RPG gaming, why I chose the game Dread for my first game in a decade and a half, and a bit about the game mechanics. You might want to start there. Alright, so I learned a lot of things playing this game: some about Dread as a game system, some about character motivation, some (mostly re-learned, to be honest) about dealing with newbie players. And some stuff not related to any of those things. Some of these may be obvious …

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Talent Night, Part 2: How the Game Played Out (NSFW)

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This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series Talent Night: My First Time Running a Game of Dread

Note: this is the second post in a series. In the previous post, I discussed my long, long hiatus from RPG gaming, why I chose the game Dread for my first game in a decade and a half, and a bit about the game mechanics. You might want to start there. So… we played our first session of Dread on Sunday night. I hosted a Dread game session with Miss Jiwaku, and our friends Nick, Katrina, and Ian. (Information about who played which character withheld to protect the preciously twisted minds among us, ha…) The scenario was one of mine, …

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Talent Night, Part 1: In Which I Pick Up RPG Gaming After Years Away

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This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Talent Night: My First Time Running a Game of Dread

Well, it seems like a month of returns: I picked up my saxophones for the first time in a long time, just out of curiosity regarding their condition. (I’ve not played them since 2005, and, well, it shows in the condition of the horns.) I also decided to try get and run an RPG game for an evening, and see if I enjoyed it. I’d long resisted the idea of trying out a role-playing game because they’re kind of a time-sink, or they used to be back when I last was an avid player. That was back in 1998–fifteen years …

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If I Were a Wraith…

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In the course of overhauling this site, I ran across an old character sheet I’d done up for what I’d be like if I were a character in the game Wraith: The Oblivion, which was my favorite RPG game back in the old days. Which sounds both dorky and gloomy, since most characters in Wraith are ghosts, and, er, deceased. But, hey, I think it’s kinda funny, so I did up a new one, up-to-date with my life now. For your geeky pleasure: For those who would like to try this for themselves, Mr. Gone has a whole slew of …

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If I Were An RPG Game Character, I’d Be…

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I stole this idea from… uh, I can’t remember where. Anyway, some very cool website. I thought it was funny and did it up for my someday-to-be-created “about” page. It’s a character sheet with statistics for me, were I to be a character in my favorite RPG game. Since my favorite game for years has been Wraith: The Oblivion, I used that. The premise is that I got run over by a very average Korean driver before my first novel could be published. See the character sheet by clicking here.

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