The previous instalment can be found here.
Weird history rules. Well, here and everywhere else as well. One of the easiest things to make your world feel lived-in and unique is to just take a piece of obscure history and place it in your world, whether its an invention or an actual event or garment or hairstyle. I just find all of this very interesting and it just happens to coincide nicely with RPG hobby.
Here’s why: I was trying to fix a problem with a plugin on this site and there seems to be a cache I can’t figure out, which stops me from doing what I want to do. So, just to get out of that frustrated mindset I decided to do some other light coding instead. For some reason, I had also been thinking about this rule we had in our D&D games back in early 90s, so why not combine these two?
Here’s a tale from Finland’s past. It’s probably not wholly true, but who cares. (There’s probably some truth to it, but due to Christian propaganda and lack of historical documents, it’s all kind of on a shaky ground. I mean, in my childhood, this all was said to have happened in 1155, but now we are not even sure about that.) There’s probably also several versions of this, but this is how I’ve heard it.
In my current campaign (or chronicle, or whatever), the players are part of a cult and that’s the thing that binds them together. The thing is, they don’t actually know much about their god.
There’s a MtG-related Discord server, which happens to also have a channel for tabletop RPGs. It isn’t very active, but someone noted that Blades in the Dark was available in a bundle of some sort, so that sparked a little bit of discussion, as I claimed that because of how the game approaches the role of players, it’s actually easier to run than D&D, because there is not a lot of planning needed. Someone disagreed, so, as Ryan Hollinger would say, let’s talk about it. (Have I already used this somewhere? Not sure.)
The two previous articles:
It took me five years to come back to this subject, but here we are.
Ever notice how players don’t trust anyone and just kill everyone over anything and with any excuse? Well, it might be your fault.
Now, I would like to note that this might not be only you. If players have learned from through previous games and GMs that violence is often the answer, perhaps the only answer (I’ve played under GMs, who have actually forced combat encounters, when players were actively trying to find other solutions), these players will have learned certain modes of operation, and unlearning them might be difficult. Continue reading