Posts Tagged ‘a gaming curriculum’
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.
A Gaming Curriculum: Four Stage Roleplaying/Behaviour Management
Roleplaying sessions are quite hard to plan. They’re frequently quite long and include diverse and multiple encounters – indeed, they are sufficiently long that a break is often needed midway through. So prevalent are the issues surrounding this pastime that the very matter of snacks and the best moment at which to interject the takeaway has been a matter of debate and discourse - yet I assure you that the four-stager has merit here. Planning at session level is inappropriate; the conventional lesson plan would elongate to disinteresting and demotivating proportions if stretched over a four, or six, or eight, or twelve hour session of play, so instead, treat each ‘lesson’ as a particular instance within the session as a whole.
Introduce each with a recap; develop it by presenting an environment, encounter, problem, puzzle, fight…; the main part of the session will be dedicated to resolving the whateveritis; the plenary to addressing the fallout and aftermath; then break, reintroduce, next instance/encounter/scene. Simple enough. However, thus far we have considered primarily the playing of wargames and the writing of posts in which the learning behaviour we have discussed is our own, confined within one head and manageable. In roleplaying we have multiple people at a table, and the dynamic – one person invested with power to shape a shared experience and the responsibility of making it a good ‘un, and others whose entitlement to fun is paramount, whose definition of fun varies, and whose capacity to engage with the game in hand is easily challenged – is much closer to classroom teaching. As a result, we have to think about differentiation, to account for different needs and priorities and playstyles; we also have to think about behaviour management, or what to do if your session goes wrong.
