Unleashing the Beast

Those of you who keep up with my increasingly irregular diatribes on the House of Paincakes have no doubt bewailed and bemoaned the recent loss of my RPG mojo (and if you haven’t, I don’t wish to hear about it, so could you just feign a spot of bewailing and bemoaning for the sake of appearances? ta very).

The good news is, I’ve found it again, down the back of a sofa in Wolverhampton. Over half term, the Dark Ages Vampire game received a monumental boot up the arse as I finally got to run a proper RP session of some eight hours. With all respect to the in-house group, whose preferences are clear, valid and informed, two and a half hours of intermittent play is not as rewarding as eight hours of sustained play, and that’s an end to it. The Dark Ages game is everything that I think a good game should be – by turns moving, hilarious, wildly improvised by the minute but excruciatingly planned in the grand scale.

Should I Stay Or Should I Go Now? – a meta post on concessions

I concede games quite often. More often, I suspect, than is widely considered proper, and perhaps more often than I should. It’s come to my attention of late that my motives in so doing are frequently unclear. If even the woman I love is sufficiently in the dark about said motives to be greatly confused and offended by my bowing out of a board game (and she is), it’s clear that some territory needs to be staked out and explored, and a case for concessions made.

WFB – All Aboard the Clapham Omnibus

I live in London now. This is presumably a good thing, although I haven’t had the chance to do masses of exploring just yet, as it’s still busy busy busy research season and I have nine days to produce something like eleven thousand words of material. No pressure, then.

However, last night I did manage to sneak out and pay a visit to some nice chaps who claim to be the Clapham War Gamers. Rain very nearly stopped play (ten minutes into the walk, the heavens opened and I spent fifteen further minutes cowering in a bus stop) but I just about made it in time to play some WFB against a nice enthusiastic chap of Teutonic extraction (hi Max!) and his nasty Skaven (boo, Skaven!).

A Gaming Curriculum: Feedback and the Internet Argument

I’ve had this post brewing since the last Gaming Curriculum entry – and what a long time ago it was! – when we talked about behaviour management, and how you, the blogger/gamesmaster/gamer-about-town can get people to do something constructive. It’s been sitting around since then and recently I’ve come across more and more motivation to actually write it up and get it out there.

Have you ever come across someone who’s just wrong? Aggressively, thick-with-authority wrong, intoning blatant falsehoods and obvious misconceptions with the weight of holy writ?

Have you ever told them they’re wrong?

Has that ever resulted in an Internet fight?

Have you ever considered that that might not be their fault?

Today I’m here to help you to not start Internet fights. Or actual ones. Maybe.

Ask Uncle Von: So What’s This Blood Bowl Thing Then?

A while back I promised docbungle I’d write up an introduction to Blood Bowl and now Panzar of Whelp Slayer has been asking about Blood Bowl too.  I’ll talk briefly about the game itself, and about the Orc and Human starting teams (who represent two basic ways in which a good team is good).  There will be pictures, but they won’t be of my Blood Bowl models because they are either not painted (bad Von!) or badly painted (bad former owner!).  The pictures are all used without permission in the spirit of fair use (and promoting this AWESOME game that you presumably like if you’ve taken pictures of it) and if you want me to stop using yours you only have to ask.

So!  Blood Bowl.