Summary Post

source: ideachampions.com

source: ideachampions.com

As part of my assignment for this class, I am writing a summary covering my experiences with blogging this semester and what I’ve found useful (or not) about it. Blogging has definitely been a new avenue to explore and provides a great way for someone to lay down their thoughts in a fluid and streamlined way. I find it very helpful that you can link together so many different sites and sources under one blog.

The biggest advantage to blogging that I see is the ability to use it as a medium to network. It is so easy to find other people who share your common interests and it doesn’t take much time at all to integrate yourself into the topics that you’re passionate about.

The biggest disadvantage is that you must put a considerable and constant effort in to your blog before people begin reading it. Otherwise you simply fall off the face of the blogosphere, no matter how impactful your posts are.

Video Post: Starbound Tutorial

source: playstarbound.com

source: playstarbound.com

For this post, I’ve uploaded a 2-part tutorial for Starbound. It just aims to give an introduction to the gameplay mechanics and talks a bit about the story behind it.

Unfortunately there was an issue with uploading it to youtube, so I had to revert to another method. Here is a link to both of them.

Part 1: http://screencast.com/t/wFXiaKUjaF5

Part 2: http://screencast.com/t/d0fWsEE3nI

Video Games and Roleplaying

For many people, video games offer a medium through which they can experience an entirely new world from a completely different point of view. For me, they were a gateway drug that eventually led me to becoming a roleplayer.

I was introduced to video games at a very young age, my first game ever being The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. As a kid I was attracted to video games for the stimulating environments they provided. But as I grew, I came to appreciate the stories behind the games. Eventually I discovered online games and decided that I was going to make my own stories and that I would make them with other people.

source: runescape.wikia.com

source: runescape.wikia.com

My first experience ‘roleplaying’ was on a game called Runescape. At the time I was eleven and I played as a simple food merchant who traveled from town to town selling lobsters to make a living, eventually I joined a group of people that renovated a run-down building and were using it as a restaurant. I sold them my goods from time-to-time, and the ‘owner’ of the establishment payed me to run to the nearest town to buy goods for baking. It may seem kind of silly, but I had a blast. All the games that I had played before I was always X Hero who was destined to thwart X evil mastermind. I had never gotten to be ‘just a cook’. And it felt like I was really making a mark in the world with real people. And not only that, but the sense of community made the immersion that much stronger. Adventurers would come from far and wide to buy our goods, stay a while and chat, and then be on their way.

At the time, I wasn’t even aware of the fact that I was roleplaying at all. I was just pretending to be a chef and went wherever my travels took me.

Starbound

Starbound is a science-fiction crafting/survival game with a heavy emphasis on RPG elements. In the beginning of the game, you create your character by choosing from one of six races: Human, Avian, Apex, Floran, Hylotls, and Glitch. From there you roam the galaxy, trying to find a new place to call home.

Starbound is currently in open beta, which allows players to buy and play the game and give feedback to developers.

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More information at: playstarbound.com

App Idea

I play in a World of Darkness LARP where there are a large amount of players all vying for their own way. Political ties can become confusing, and it is sometimes hard to keep track of where you stand in other peoples’ eyes, and so I propose this app.

It’s an easy-to-use, two page app that allows players to keep track of their social allies and enemies. The first page consists of a list of characters’ names. You can click the box that a name is in to cause a drop-down menu to open with information on the character and what you know about them. This page lets you keep your very finely detailed notes on a character without having to worry about information being scattered throughout an impossible to navigate notebook.

The second page of the app provides a network of characters that you can zoom in and out on and scroll to find the information you want. When you click a name, it brings up that name and surrounds it with the most relevant relationships (allies and enemies). Allies are represented with a green line,  enemies are represented with a red line, and gray is neutral.

A page with a list of each character name with a drop-down menu option.

A page with a list of each character name with a drop-down menu option for more details.

A scrolling screen that allows an overview of the web of social influences.

A scrolling screen that allows an overview of the web of social influences.

Steps to Creating a Solid Character

This is by no means an end-all guide to character creation as there is no one-and-only way to create a good character.

Step 1: Concept

Image

A grizzled detective. Source: Hongkiat.com

Think of the characters that you would like to play and narrow them down to ones that work thematically with the story at hand. If the campaign is a realistic trek through the urban slums on a hunt for a vicious serial murderer, then it probably won’t be appropriate to play a school girl with a talking animal companion.

Step 2: Backstory

Now that you know the kind of character you want, give him a story. Why is your character so good at what he does? What were the events that led up to him being where he is today? Who were the people most dear to him? Did anything tragic happen in his past, and how did that affect him? The more details you put out there, the more you will get a feel for who your character really is.

Step 3: Tailoring to the Game

Know the kind of campaign you’re getting yourself in to. Build your character to fill a need. If you want to have things to do, then fill a role that you know is going to be necessary. Now that’s not to say that you can only be good at one thing. There’s nothing wrong with a powerhouse fighter who’s also charismatic and charming, or a wizard who’s also an exceptional armor smith.

Step 4: Personalize

Think about your character, does he have any quirks? Any special phrases that he holds close to his heart? Think about what makes your character unique and use that to flavor the story. Perhaps your character has a superstitious belief that a certain charm will bring him luck on the battlefield, or maybe he wears a necklace that once belonged to a long-since-lost lover. Use your character’s quirks to create an engaging and meaningful story.

GM Tips & Tricks – Post #1

Over the years that I’ve been tabletopping I’ve met some wonderful GMs, and I’ve also met some pretty awful ones as well.

This is the first post (of hopefully many) throughout the course of this blog that will be devoted to giving advice to GMs on how to keep their players happy and enthralled on the chronicles they’ve worked so hard to create.

Tip #1: Players Want to Feel Like Bad Asses

This is a universal truth with very few exceptions (especially for the High Fantasy genre). For the most part, players want their characters to be awesome, and good GMs should facilitate this. When narrating, hype up characters based on what they do good good at; make them feel important. When the rogue Mission Impossibles his way through a situation despite all odds, don’t just say, “You make it past the guards.” A good GM should always take the opportunity to embellish in these situations. This makes the player feel awesome, and gives the rest of your players something cool to watch while they wait for their turn to do something awesome.

The same goes for players that fail miserably. There are plenty of ways that a GM can describe a dramatic failure without making characters look like buffoons. After all, the characters didn’t choose to roll poorly.

That being said, if a player insists on making stupid decisions, he should face appropriate consequences.

Tip #2: Combat can be Boring, so make it Interesting

Don’t be afraid to embellish when you’re running combat either. Combat is usually the most tedious and lengthy part of a game and players can become easily disinterested and bored during long combat scenes, especially if there’s nothing to stimulate them. If a player lands a particularly nasty blow, then reward them with an awesome scene where the Dwarf Barbarian charges into the fray, cleaving the Orc Warlord in half.

Tip #3: Let your Players make the Decisions

A GM should always be prepared for a player to come out of left field with some crazy idea. Quite often it’s something that works. It might not be what you want it to be, but nothing breaks immersion like telling your party that they can’t do something and then giving them no good reason. Always know what you want to happen, set the events in motion, and if things don’t pan out like you wanted, just adapt.

Related articles

Pathfinder – A Recommendation

In this post I will be discussing Pathfinder, a pen & paper game by Paizo Publishing.

Original Image at: Paizo.com

Original Image at: Paizo.com

If you’re looking for an introductory system into tabletop, then you can’t go wrong with Pathfinder. It’s got everything you need to start playing with your friends packed neatly into one comprehensive rulebook. And if you’re not looking to drop $40-50 on a game you’re not sure about, then good news! Paizo offers all of its content for free on the Pathfinder SRD.

Pathfinder is widely celebrated among its community for being one of the most balanced games of its type out on the market and does a great job of capturing that epic level of fantasy you’d expect out of a traditional pen & paper game. It caters to all audiences, newbies and D&D 3.5 veterans alike, and supplies players with plenty of content to entertain them for years.

It’s out there, it’s free, and it’s the perfect way for you to get into tabletop! So there’s no reason for you not to try it.

Introduction to Role Playing

Source: Kotaku.com

So, you’re interested in learning about role playing. That’s fantastic, and I’m going to tell you all about it, but first I’m going to give you a little history lesson.

 

What is an RPG?

An RPG, or Role-Playing Game is a genre of game that has, in recent years, been attributed to video games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Borderlands. These games drop you into an open world setting and allow you to take on the roll of a character who can improve in their abilities with time and experience. However, this is not a concept novel to video games.

The term ‘role-playing game’ originally stems from a group of games commonly known as tabletop (or pen and paper) games. This type of gaming has been around since the 70s, starting with the very popular Dungeons & Dragons in 1974. Since then, a vast array of tabletop systems have emerged, becoming more and more intricate and refined as the years go on. Modern day RPGs get much of their inspiration from tabletop games and I would even dare to say that they might not exist if not for games like Dungeons & Dragons.

 

Tabletop Games

The basic idea behind a tabletop role-playing game is to go on an adventure with a group of players as a character that you create. Quite often the adventure entails saving the world from some great threat, but that is not always the case. One person takes on a narrator role. Commonly referred to as the dungeon or game master, he is the primary facilitator for deciding the details of your adventure and controls all aspects of the imaginary world that your character lives in. From there, it is up to the players to influence the world through their characters’ eyes. These games often require heavy immersion and allow a player to truly ‘become’ their character. Or in other words, role play as their character.

 

Role Playing

Role playing is exactly what it sounds like. You are playing the role of a fictional character. Some people want to role play but don’t because they’re afraid of looking silly or messing up. Some people don’t role play due to a negative connotation that role playing is too ‘nerdy’ or weird. But in reality, role playing is something that many people do without realizing it. If you’ve ever played pretend when you were a kid, you were role playing. If you’ve ever acted in a play, then you were role playing. If you’ve ever taken part in a workplace simulation, then you’ve role played. Role playing is just another word for acting or pretending. It’s the process of using your imagination to reach an end goal, whatever that goal may be.