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I’ve been GMing for years in various systems, and I’ve been subject to burnout, I’ve lost campaigns as session after session gets canceled until the whole thing just collapses in on itself, I’ve given up on GMing for years at a time, and I’ve come back to it again, only to run against the same frustrations time and again. This time though, I’ve come out on top, at least for now, and it’s been because I’ve adopted a different philosophy towards my games....

I like lockpicking. I think it’s an interesting task that provides a great opportunity for rogue-types to provide benefits to the party in terms of stealth, safety in the case of traps, and it just fits really well into the fiction. I love the image I have in my head of the rogue frantically trying to pick open the lock to the study in a manor while the rest of the party tries to distract the guards around the corner during the masquerade ball, each second that the rogue takes increasing the chance of discovery....

There’s an assumption that I see in a lot of discussions by roleplayers in various places, especially in OSR-types, or people who prefer games with fewer mechanics. This assumption is that mechanics exist in opposition to the fiction, rather than in service to it. And I think that this assumption isn’t exactly a bad one, but is more something that doesn’t have to be true, even though it is for many people....

I’ve been GMing What’s OLD is NEW for a while, about 5 years at time of writing, and I came to it from a background of playing and GMing the world’s most popular fantasy TTRPG, the one with the dragons and the dungeons and stuff. If you are also coming from there, or perhaps any number of other TTRPGs, I think you might find this article useful, as it compiles my learnings from my last 5 years GMing WOiN into the things I wish I had known when I started out....

I’ve been GMing games of WOiN for probably about 5 years now, and I’ve been drooling over the game since I saw its Kickstarter go live way back in 2015. It’s my favorite tabletop roleplaying game, bar none, and it’s not even close. WOiN is far from a perfect game though. It has a number of idiosyncrasies that are results of the fact that the game is an indie game and didn’t have a line editor or a final pass before release to ensure that all the wording was consistent, or that every rule was accurately reflected across all three genre books....

Update November 14th, 2023: News Feeds has been published in Mythic Magazine Volume 35! You can find it on DriveThruRPG. Huge thanks to Tana Pigeon, working with her on getting the completed version of this system there. While the rules and inline examples remain the same, the article published in Mythic Magazine includes a big example showing how all these rules come together, as well as a beautiful worksheet for keeping your News Feeds organized....

If you’ve been programming in Clojure for any amount of time, especially if you’re working with webservices, Discord bots, or any other long-running process that you may want to update the behavior of without restarting it, you’ve probably had an experience where you re-evaluated some code, tried to run it again, and it acts like it did before. You can evaluate that code as many times as you want to and it just never runs the updated code....