The spiked mace crashes through the warrior’s helm, the fully charged energy rifle burns a hole right through the smuggler’s chest, the vampire detective lost in the desert, unable to escape the deadly sun, is consumed by flames… if there’s one thing tabletop roleplaying games are good at, it’s finding ways to kill characters. But how often should that actually happen? We’ve talked before about dealing with bad rolls and how you can use to them to advance the story , but sometimes killing a Player Character is the right thing to do. How do you know when that should happen, and what happens after that? In worlds where resurrection is just a roadside temple or replacement clone body away, what implications should character death have, and when should a character be killed off for good? - B   A: Death is a tricky enough subject to deal with in our regular lives, not to mention including it in what are supposed to be our games. If you’re playing a lot of roleplaying games though, char...

There may come a time in your campaigns where you want the fun of combat without the stress that can bring. You probably want something a little heavier than pure roleplaying, possibly a team challenge featuring the thrill and random chance of combat, but less dangerous for the Player Characters. Enter... sports! (Something many of us into tabletop games haven’t been good at.) Sports offer an opportunity to include a game within your tabletop game. You can frame it as a local game regularly played wherever your players are currently visiting, a touring exhibition, or your universe’s very own Olympics. No matter what route you take, players love opportunities to test their luck, their character’s skill, and get a chance to win prizes or accolades without (too much) danger involved. It can be a great break if your campaign has been full of tense moments, and makes a good pause between major story arcs. The Olympics of our own mortal plane present a ton of great examples: protected, monit...

It's been a tough week, a tough month, a tough year... If your lives are anything like ours, things are a bit hectic right now. Whether it's climate anxiety, the "open everything up" push running smack into the Delta Variant, the conflicts and contradictions of school reopenings, or plain, everyday, run-of-the mill chaos, it all gets to you. This week, we thought we'd return to the topic how real-life stress intersects with gaming... and the stresses gaming can bring. - B   A : The fighter just went down and is starting to bleed out. The magic user appears to be out of spells and seems to be floundering on what to do next. The rogue? They're looking pretty rough, and without the fighter to play off of, they might be brown bread after the next assault.  The Big Bad Evil Guy looks like he may be on the ropes, though.... but maybe they're faking? What do you do? Should you rush to the fighter and dump your last healing spell on them? Perhaps you should launc...

No matter what (or who) we're engaging with, first impressions carry a lot of weight. But even before we've made them, we already have a set of expectations and preconceptions. These can be based on deliberate signifiers (this taxi is available because it's parked and the light is on), cultural preconceptions (I can talk to the driver, but they won't engage with anything I say in-depth), and underlying, unquestioned fundamentals of reality (the driver will appear human). This takes place in media as well, and largely defines the way we engage with genre works . When our actual experiences don't line up with expectations, we experience a sense of confusion as our brains struggle to catch up and make sense of what it's been presented, confusion that may (or may not) be proportional to the nature of the dissonance. If someone was familiar with anime conventions and the types of stories typically featured in anime, but not, say, the convoluted, darkly comedic crime ...

We just figured out Blue's Clues, we just figured out Blue's Clues, we just figured out Blue's Clues, because we're really smart! If you have had or known a kid at any point between 1996 and now, you might be familiar with this saccharine refrain or some variation of it, which has appeared in every episode of the popular children’s series. If you’re not familiar with the show, an animated dog leaves clues with their paw prints for something they’d like to do, and the human host of the show bumbles along constantly talking directly to the young audience, asking for help and advice. Educational content aside, this is the premise of Blue’s Clues . What in the name of Gary Gygax does this have to do with storytelling and tabletop gaming, you may ask? Mysteries are something many of us like to feature in our games, but planning them can be difficult, and players are often quite good at spoiling your carefully-laid plans. As a series, Blue’s Clues uses basic storytelling an...

There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call The Twilight Zone. A Side :  If you’re familiar with the words above, you’ve probably seen at least one episode of the stalwart classic The Twilight Zone . (Or maybe you remember them from our previous Twilight Zone post where we reviewed a few episodes and the series itself? In which case, we hope you went and watched a few episodes afterwards.) The 2019 series revival may have been cancelled this year, but that doesn’t mean we can’t welcome these newer entries into our strange home. While some of the new Zones may have been rehashes of old material, a number of new episodes can join the ranks of that "middle ground between sc...

POW! BIFF! ZOT! Fight scenes have been a part of narrative media for... well, as long as there has been narrative media . The Illiad , for instance, is full of the granular blow-by-blow we expect of fight scenes today, regardless of medium . So this is not a topic for which I can do any kind of justice - I'm sure there are people who have dedicated their entire careers to the study of narrative combat, and there will always be more to talk about, more to discover. Rather, this post will explore some recent thoughts inspired by (what else) a mostly-forgotten twenty-year old video game. Oni is a third-person action game with a focus, despite the arsenal of weapons featured in the official art, on melee combat. Today, it's remembered mostly as the game Bungie made after Marathon and Myth , but before Halo . Culturally, it's a rather bizarre relic: a western attempt at making an "anime game" based on limited reference points that the creators lifted wholesale, partic...