No consequences, no regret — and no pride either. On why you should let your characters regret everything they've ever done, and why so many games quietly forget the consequence that makes it possible...

Some games treat the people who matter as pure flavor. The good ones make them the point — bonds that grow and sour in Ironsworn, playbook friends in Scum & Villainy, and the spy game where the only w...

Distance is the gap between places, times, and people — and the quiet one between you and the game you keep meaning to play. Here, at last, it gets crossed with a live solo delve into a haunted barrow...

Fortune is only worth tracking when it's out of the ordinary. Abstract the everyday down to a single trait, and keep the real bookkeeping for the cargo nobody else can price.

He reads D&D's history beautifully; the story-game side of his spectrum he clearly never cracked. They're bound by the fiction, not the accounting — which is exactly the mechanism he's missing

Designing a death spiral is easy; designing your way out of one is the trick. Boundless absorbs it, Loner sidesteps it, and the eldritch chickens just push their luck through it.

A tour through the open-licensed games in the library — what each license actually lets you do, why 'open' means you can publish for money without asking permission, and which SRDs are worth building ...

ALT: Alien Xenomorph Confronts Ripley

You owe the table one thing: to play in good faith. If the table stops honoring that, that's a table worth firing.

Desire is the only stat that matters. What a character wants, the wall between them and it, and what they're willing to bleed to get past it — that's the whole game.

A derelict in deep space, an uninvited ship on the hull, and a long way from direct — one solo Starforged run in search of data logs.

Adjusting scenarios to fit the table in front of you isn't hard. You come with the wit of a child and the intellect of an adult, trust your ability to tell a story with the people at your table — and ...

Intensity is anathema to a certain class of modern player, and everything that might spike the cortisol — the threat, the violence, yes even the heat — gets sanded off. The answer isn't comfort. It's ...

Composure, sanity, and every clever or clumsy way the Cthulhu Mythos games have tried to put a number on your head — from Call of Cthulhu's SAN to Loner's three-step track.

A post about the real endurance race in tabletop RPGs: the GM who burns out, the way out through GM-less and co-op play, and the finish lines that make it worth running.

Want a world that has regard for your characters? Stop at zero to hero and hand them a past to live up to.

Crossing the streams again: my favorite vampire show becomes a Sundered Isles faction, complete with flamethrowers, necromancy, and shipboard cannons to take the bastards down.

You can't feel loss for a sword you never loved, and you can't love a character you never connected to the world. Loss is the price of attachment — and it's worth it.

The point of being blunt is to perturb — to shake someone out of a local minimum. Tact is overrated, and sharp criticism is how we make each other better.

Secrets are a problem in RPGs: you can't react to what you don't know. The fix is to play with open hands — put the facts on the table, or leave the answer undecided.

Skip the weepy takes about who has time to play. The only privilege that matters is the one a system grants your character — and the best games hand it out, not lock it away.

Every TRPG resolution system collapses into a single question: what happens next? I walked ShadowDark, Ironsworn, and Ensemble to prove it — and I'm resolved.

Mercy is overrated, and the games that actually sell seem to agree. I went and looked at what's moving — and the stuff that sells wants to kill you.

Reach out, sure. But don't grasp. The love of reach is the root of all evil, and everyone's out here shilling for the blessing of the masses.

The burden of tabletop RPGs is other people, just like hell is. The traditional GM carries too much of it, but it needn't be that way. Choose your burdens carefully.

An unflappable hero is a self-caricature waiting to happen. If you want characters worth playing, give them something that makes them flinch.

The collection of every year's RPG a Day creations.

What would a sleep paralysis demon be in one of the earliest fiction-forward RPGs? Let's find out.

If you ask about erotic gaming in Western RPGs, it turns out I'm actually the guy to ask.

A reply to discourse about an ontology of board game versus wargame versus RPG.

Suggestions for modern horror RPGs for a new teen group? I'm on top of it.

A new release from the super solo-friendly, hyper-minimalist Loner series. Loner: Cthulhu!

RPG Inspiration of the day: What happened to the Georgia Guidestones? What were they? Where did they end up and how is it relevant?

I am thoroughly disgusted by modern, risk-averse players who coddle their fictional characters, so I am telling GMs to stop begging for permission and start driving their campaigns like they want to b...

Mad Max: Twilight 2000 or Starforged? tags: #thoughts #game/rpg/starforged Starforged (cover).jpg Starsmith Mecha Mercs (cover).jpg This is another one of those things where I pull from my Reddit r…