ars ludi

I was back on the Dice In Mind podcast with Bradley and Jason, talking about the new Microscope, the magic of This Means War, and just about everything else that crossed our minds: Dice In Mind (episode 176): Ben Robbins and His Socks Return from Lame Mage

My fellow designer Caroline Hobbs has described Microscope as my Silmaril, ‘the work of my heart that cannot be remade’.

When I was a kid watching movies with my Dad, he would sometimes frown and say, “they left out the reaction shot”.

It’s hardly revolutionary to say that in the vast majority of role-playing games, your character is your single strongest vector of contribution, so making a good character is critical.

I’m making it official: a new edition of Microscope is in the works.

I’ve talked about how This Means War strives to simulate a believable (but surprising) war.

The old Games Unlimited in Pittsburgh was the game store of our childhood.

The war between Wyverdown and Irontree continues!

or, how this weird new game relates to a session of West Marches from over twenty years ago After three wars and 15 sessions, we had our first character death in This Means War.

We’ve got our nations and we’re ready for war.

You know what This Means War is missing?

What does This Means War look like on your table?

Want to start some trouble?

“I did, by the way, literally change my opinion on Microscope and this rule as I was writing this post, which was originally going to be a piece about how weird and bad this rule is” This is a great article by Nicholas aka omophagic_beast, having a lot of…

Want to listen to people playing games?

From my original Star-Pattern post: A player can describe whatever they want their character to do but it’s not *real* until it goes through the approval of the GM, because there can always be factors the GM knows about but the players don’t, which could…

The playtest of This Means War is chugging along, alarming civilians and crushing dreams.

I’m not particularly big on audiobooks.

Power has been out for the last four days.

or, “omfg Ul-Massara offered peace!!!

Another playtest of This Means War: When colonists first came to this world, they were united under a single government, working together to survive.

My post Star-Pattern: A Pitfall of GMing is in the running for a Bloggies award.

“Naming things is hard” -some gaming guru on a mountain top, hundreds of years ago, probably Coming up with names for things is hard, particularly when (like us) you play collaborative creative games where you make the setting together.

If you’re overseas (from me) and want to avoid the spiraling shipping costs, I’ve added Kingdom, Follow, and In This World to join Microscope on Lulu print-on-demand.

If you look at the games I’ve made over the years, there a few things that are true for all of them: no built-in violence no dice deciding outcomes the players control what’s true in the world Sure, you can choose to make a Microscope history that’s all a…

I just got the Chinese translation of Microscope, courtesy of Labyrinth.

We’re sitting down to play a story game.

This is one of the examples included in Rules of Law to show how the game plays.

Gather round children, and let me tell you a tale about Santa Claus and the spirit of Christmas!

In the intro (which they recorded after the interview) Jason and Brad reflect on how we covered a wide range of topics, and let me tell you, they aren’t kidding.

Rules of Law fits very nicely on two pages.

Our justice says who we are as a people.