Sean Does Games

I’ve been thinking about glitches for the gadgets in my Epic Gnomish Inventing supplement. The rules as they are now are very much focused on practical mechanics. There’s nothing wrong with this; some folks like concrete rules to follow and I wrote those glitch rules with that in mind. I like storytelling. For me, it’s the most important creative element in any RPG. I already use natural 1s and natural 20s as story elements whenever I DM. It only makes sense that gadget glitches should be treated in the same way. Really, what could be more capable of injecting unpredictable events into a game than a gnome invention gone amuck? I mean, they are perfect for those sorts of shenanigans. To that end, I’ve been toying around with this idea of narrative glitches. Like the dreaded natural 1s, narrative glitches introduce new elements or creative complications into the game that make life a little more challenging for the characters. It’s even possible for a gadget to achieve the desi...

I was relaxing in my little walled courtyard, reading Hotel Berlin 1943 and partaking in this year’s harvest of Sam Adams Oktoberfest, when my phone began to frantically inform me of an astonishing turn of events. People were tweeting on Twitter. Tweets! Twitter! On! Utterly baffled by this bizarre news (who would ever use Twitter to tweet), I dutifully opened the app. Among the hundreds of wonderful tweets in my feed, I found a simple question that caught my attention. "How did you get started in role-playing games?” I was about to fire off a short reply when I realized that this was something I could blog about instead. What follows, then, is a tedious brief scene of young Pyramus, and his love Thisbe; very tragical mirth. No. Wait. That’s a different story by a far better writer. Let's try again. What follows, then, is wonderfully brilliant monologue of my life-long love of games, much dice-rolling goodness. Someone had to write it. That someone might as well b...