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TOM VAN WINKLE'S RETURN TO GAMING

Musings on table-top role-playing games today after spending a quarter century
away from them.

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YES, YOU ARE TELLING A STORY.

February 01, 2024
But you aren't composing a novel or reading a script . (Not during an RPG
session, anyway.) This is a long blog post about pervasive mistakes and
miscommunication in the debate about "storytelling" in RPGs. "D&D is
storytelling , so it needs a plot ." You can find plentiful resources on the
internet today offering advice for Dungeon Masters on how to prepare a D&D
campaign plot so the players will have a good story . Even though they are not
the same thing, the words campaign and plot and story seem almost
interchangeable in these discussions. The advice suggests that DMs begin by
deciding how the campaign will end, typically with a "boss battle." You should
devise a story arc before play. The DM is supposed to write a campaign before it
happens . The advice can be personal or highly generic : Devise your plot. [...]
Plot can roughly be defined as the action that will occur no matter what the
player characters do. The models for these DM-de
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FIFTY YEARS OF DUNGEONS & DRAGONS

January 10, 2024
Fifty years ago this month, the first 1000 copies of the original Dungeons &
Dragons were printed and then boxed up at Gary Gygax's house. It's supposed to
have been late in January of 1974 , but we don't have a specific date. January
1974 is good enough for me. And what counts as the specific origin date, anyway?
The final draft? The actual printing? The availability for sale? We're close
enough. I'm saying it's been fifty years right now. Without more precise
information, it's not too early to begin commemorating the half-century of D&D.
It was not the first role-playing game. It barely represents the range of
role-playing games that exist and have existed. Still, its influence is
undeniable, incalculable. When David McDaniel ( Tedron ) tried it in 1975--this
was the guy who coined the convention that we all use now, of saying
dee-[number] to specify a kind of die--he wrote, It's a hell of a game. It is,
as I suspected, a new order, a new dime
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THOSE WHO CROSS THE BOUNDARIES MAY BE ATTACKED: GAMERS HATING OTHER GAMERS

January 05, 2024
Millions of people have had a chuckle at the short YouTube video about the guy
outraged on the internet that other people like the thing he doesn't like.
Probably all gamers will identify with this in one way or another, either
because they have felt those feelings or they've been targeted by the rage of
those who feel those feelings. "Your games are bad! My games are good!" This is
not a new phenomenon, of course. Along these lines, already in 1983 Gary Alan
Fine had an interesting observation in his book Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing
Games as Social Worlds of 1983, on the sociology of RPG players. The passage
deserves attention on its own (p. 154): Even though this is a relatively small
social scene, considerable fragmentation exists. Although the number of
hard-core fantasy role-play gamers probably does not exceed 5,000 persons,
schisms are common. … The gaming world is not made up of individuals who love
and respect each other. Gamers have their own styles of p
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A REALITY CHECK FOR LANGUAGE RULES IN YOUR FANTASY GAME (AND RATIONALIZING
ALIGNMENT LANGUAGES)

December 28, 2023
People enjoy being impressed by multilingualism. “Wow, Mary speaks seven
languages !” One hears this kind of thing. It sounds amazing. Speaking a lot of
languages seems to mean you are especially intelligent. (As I will explain, this
is not really so.) If you tested Mary and her seven languages, you would find
she is not equally capable in all of them. She’ll have one, or maybe two, main
languages of daily use with high fluency and a wide range of expressiveness, but
varying and limited degrees of proficiency in the others. It’s cool to be able
to order food at a restaurant and to ask for and receive directions in Italian,
but that doesn’t mean you can have a profound conversation about your feelings
or discuss the aesthetics of nineteenth-century paintings or explain physics in
Italian. You know enough to get by in those other languages, and that’s all.
It’s also a lot easier to learn to read a language with a dictionary than it is
to attain spoken conversational fluency. Peop
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PREVIOUS POSTS

 * 2024 3
    * February 1
       * Yes, you ARE telling a story.
   
    * January 2
      

 * 2023 9
    * December 3
      
    * October 1
      
    * September 4
      
    * February 1
      

 * 2022 6
    * December 1
      
    * August 2
      
    * June 1
      
    * February 1
      
    * January 1
      

 * 2021 15
    * December 1
      
    * November 1
      
    * October 2
      
    * September 1
      
    * April 4
      
    * March 1
      
    * February 1
      
    * January 4
      

 * 2020 61
    * December 2
      
    * November 5
      
    * October 4
      
    * September 4
      
    * August 2
      
    * July 6
      
    * June 9
      
    * May 12
      
    * April 11
      
    * February 6
      

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ABOUT ME

Tom Van Winkle
I started playing role-playing games in 1981 and played non-stop until the late
'90s. After almost 25 years I got interested in them again. When I started this
blog in 2020, I was just reacting to the state of RPGs. Now I'm blogging more
about the history of RPGs. I also run regular games with my house rules.

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