#62: In Praise of Breaks!
I. Dear Reader,
It’s been a really busy week for me so this section is going to be short. I have my Band of Blades game on Saturday evenings and then on Sunday mornings, I run Apocalypse Keys. So I have two games in relative quick succession which sometimes let me spot patterns. And this week, I realized how useful breaks are to me as a GM.
In both games, I had moments where I saw these golden opportunities for a cool complication but couldn’t think of one straight away. In both games, a player saw me thinking and reminded that it was about time for a break anyway. In both games, I thought of something cool during the break and came back to the table with something I was excited about.
Initially, I used to find the idea of breaks strange but they’re standard procedure in the Gauntlet and now I can’t play without them. So that’s my insight this week: Schedule breaks and call for them when you’re stumped.
Yours after five or so minutes,
Thomas
II. Media of the Week
A lovely (and long) video essay about how metagaming is essential and why the “trad” way of thinking about is isn’t so useful. Embrace the metagame, folks!
Bonus: A podcast interview with Jamila R Nedjadi about Our Haunt, his cozy game of haunted houses and a found family of ghosts.
III. Links of the Week
News
Pathfinder workers have formed a union, which is really exciting. They’ve got their own website in case you want to know how to declare your support for their quest for a better workplace.
Free RPG Day happened / is happening this weekend!
Resources
A guide for designers who want to release html / epub version of their games
Articles
On the Gauntlet blog, the setup for a Fate game of adventurer-performers on a flying theatre.
Inspired by Apocalypse World, a procedure for making magic items into fun, collaborative quests on the Githyanki Diaspora blog.
The story of how Fraser Simons came to design classic cyberpunk PbtA game, The Veil. I have heard such amazing things about this game and its philosophical approach to the genre, dying to play it.
On the new wave of mystery-solving RPGs and how they approach the genre
On Cannibal Halfling Gaming, a fun article about the desire to drop everything and play the new hot game
A review of ARC, the save-the-world game with an actual timer
From the Deeper in the Game blog, a neat essay about two types of games and their resulting playstyles: “In Fantasy Game A; there’s rules for figuring out how hard it is to do the action, and what happens to the bad guys when they get hit with a rolling barrel… In Fantasy Game B; there’s a checklist of tropes – ‘Use environment in a fight’.”
IV. Small Ads
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Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. I’m half-man, half-beast, half-journalist, half-game designer.
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