A problem I've had in the past was player progression. Not that they wouldn't progress but rather that they would get too wrapped up in the silly parts to move themselves forward. I tried throwing in random battles but that made the game even slower if anything. I've had them interrupted by interesting NPCs or by natural events, but that often just caused more distraction. I even tried putting an open time table on how long they had to complete a mission objective, but I'm terrible at

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So, a few days back, a friend of mine invoked me to post on my Tumblr blog about a certain infamous player I knew of from the halcyon days of running Dungeons and Dragons in college. I spent most of my free time yesterday typing out the post, and, having finished, I figured you guys might also enjoy it. So, without (much) further ado, I present to you the legend of Gene, Destroyer of Games.

Lo, what fool calls me forth? What boon do you seek?

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I’ve recently been sending out notice/invites to the MLP community for help on an RPG project I’ve been working off and on for the past year or so. I can only give mostly generalities to anyone who asks in the comments, if you want to know more are are interested in working on the project with me send me a PM and we’ll go from there.

Over the past nine years that I’ve been playing and GMing various games I have noticed that there are various styles of game play. Anything from the power gamer to the method actor, but the one thing that I’ve noticed not very many people discuss is probably the one thing an entire game is built around; styles of Gamer Master. Players come and go, and can usually learn to work within other player styles. Yet we never discuss the different styles of Game Master, nor the types of players that

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BABScon is doing a volunteer meet-up today. Fool that I am, I'm attending; I'd like to be able to run tabletop games there and help out in the gaming room, including this Apoc World hack I'm doing that may be of interest to the target audience of MLP. The actual target audience, I mean, not us college-age johnny-come-lately's - I'm trying to do a kid's RPG, specifically a girl's adventure RPG, is what I'm saying.

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You know what I feel like when someone introduces a new house rule for a game, doesn't tell me about it, and then penalizes me for breaking a rule I didn't know?

Seriously though, it's not a good thing so today I'm going to talk a little bit about guidelines on house rules.

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I have been working on a chapter of Fine Steps featuring Diamond Dogs but, after trying to fit it together for months, I think it needs to be two separate chapters. While I re-engineer that, I've also been working on a follow-up chapter that features Somber Dreams (earlier chapters here and

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I know it looks like I haven't been creative much - at least, if my writing output's any indication. To some extent, that's true: chalk it up to work, my parents being an incessant thorn in my side and good old-fashioned depression. But truth be told, there's been at least some work there, and I've gotten enough requests from folks I know to share it that I figure I should share what i have, complete or not.

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I mean, I'm kind of proud that I gave the most epic post despite having the weakest power set, at least.

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