Steal This Idea: Fringe Season 4 “Steal This Idea” is an ongoing series in which an element from the media is examined for use in games. These articles will provide a basic description of the scene in which the element occurs is necessary to introduce the idea for gaming, and hooks to use that idea…
Tag Archives: Character
Adventure stories that fuel roleplaying games often focus around people who can change the world. From the starship captain to the prophesied return of the king, we like to tell and participate in tales of epic proportions. However, this competes with the egalitarian concept of player balance. RPGs generally try to balance player ability according…
Sometimes, when I’m interested in learning more about a game system before I buy it, I’ll check out “Actual Play” podcasts. These, as you might have guessed, are recordings of people playing the RPG in question. One of my favorite sites for these is rpgmp3.com. In fact, it was one of their community podcasts, that…
Team Intwischa has another cabin trip coming up. This trip will present the post-penultimate (the way folks in academia say “last”) adventure of “The Krystoran Quest for Purity”–an adventure in a Middle East-type setting featuring characters from a variety of castes. The quest has us searching for many things: personal redemption, a disgraced Sultan, and…
The recent case of Jerusalem Jax generated some discussion here at the Intwischa office. Not quite the lengthy philosophical debate that kicked off the White Crown quest, or our ongoing argument about who’s the best Batman. However, Matt’s response to that question of my greedy character’s alignment really brought things into focus for me: Alignment…
Faithful readers have encountered the exploits of the ambiguously-aligned Jerusalem Jax and the born-of-luck Ailmar Ploughman, two of the PCs in our recent Pathfinder campaign. Both these tales mentioned the Rev. Dr. Abraham “Doc” Wallace Kilgore, Esq., although I will note that neither got his name right. What you haven’t heard is how “Doc” Kilgore…
Today we remember another player character that has fallen through the years, as has been done previously by Chase, and by Charlie, and by myself (more than once). This entry is different, however, because today I am eulogizing another player’s character. Father Emry Wicks was the creation of my good friend Frank, for use in…
As mentioned in an earlier post this month, few topics in the gaming arena get players more heated than the time-honored tensions between ‘role-playing’ and ‘roll-playing’; that is, the primary focus of a player or group of players tending toward adept acting (role, as in character) or mechanical mastery (roll, as in dice). As I’ve…
Sometimes our characters seem to run together. John the Fighter starts to look suspiciously like his predecessor, Bob the Fighter, just with a battle ax instead of a sword. In fact, maybe some of the other players have unconsciously referred to your character as “Bob.” So what can you do to let everybody know that…
The demands of real life sometimes force a game session to continue without its full compliment of players. For instance, I regrettably live over two hours from my core gaming group and my absences outweigh my attendance by a fair margin. However, once introduced, my characters presumably continue to live in the game world right…