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27 mai 2015

Outer Space d'Anthony Combrexelle (Yno) est arrivé dans ma boite aux lettres la semaine passée (pace que je l’ai...

Outer Space d'Anthony Combrexelle (Yno) est arrivé dans ma boite aux lettres la semaine passée (pace que je l’ai commandé). Une mise en page soignée, un texte ramassé et évocateur qui me rappelle sur les Instantanés de Casus Belli v1 : juste ce qu’il faut pour lancer le jeu, des idées riches et pas de clichés, ramenées à leur plus efficace expression. J’ai découvert un cadre de campagne avec une intrigue de fond – c’est un jeu où il faut résoudre un mystère / découvrir un secret – très sympathique, décrit à partir de quelques races extraterrestres et quelques lieux. Côté mécaniques de jeu, c’est un jeu traditionnel à meneur mais vous devrez faire votre propre tambouille. Il y a un système de création de personnage et de résolution que je n’ai que survolé. Ils ont l’air classiques et corrects ; s’ils cachent des surprises, je ne les ai pas vues. S’adressant manifestant à des joueurs expérimentés, je ne suis pas sûr de leur nécessité, mais s’il faut, ils sont là. Avant d’être joué, Outer Space demandera un peu de préparation : vous avez l’idée de base de la campagne, un paquet d’idées de situations à explorer, l’idée fondamentale qui justifie parfaitement le découpage en scénario. Personnellement, ça me suffit largement, mais il faut pouvoir étoffer soit même. C’est du sirop, il faut ajouter l’eau et les glaçons. Rythmer la campagne, développer et habiller les idées. J’ai deux regrets. Le premier : si le « secret » est bien pensé et pas cliché (dans les contraintes de ce difficile exercice), il me laisse un peu sur ma faim ; j’aurais aimé être plus surpris. Je m’attendais à quelque chose de plus métaphysique. (En fait, je suis surpris par l’absence de surprise, c’est une surprise aussi.) Le second : je n’y jouerai sans doute pas, par manque de joueurs intéressés et de temps. Mais j’ai beaucoup aimé le lire.
http://www.misterfrankenstein.com/wordpress/?p=3969

26 mai 2015

My wife and I watched The Help the other day.

My wife and I watched The Help the other day. Quite a good film, even if rather Hollywood-y and sugar coated. We decided to show it to our 8 year old son. Lessons on #racism, daring to stand against social pressure and changing the world. Talk opener. And making things a teeny bit concrete/emotional for him. (We have a sheltered live here, so he doesn’t have any experience with these aspects of life.) I was wondering if any of you could suggest better films for this kind of #sensitization? I also realized I know of no film to do that address #sexism in this way. Any suggestion?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1454029/

22 mai 2015

The Storyful Parts of the Apocalypse World Engine

Originally shared by Dan Maruschak

The Storyful Parts of the Apocalypse World Engine

There has been some talk recently about the degree of story-game-y-ness of the Apocalypse World engine, and some people are saying things that struck me as a little odd, so I wanted to offer my perspective.

There are differences between the game-design and the play-culture in terms of "declare a fact" mechanics

As designed, most of the main *W games that I've read don't have extensive "narrative control" or "declare a fact" mechanics. But many people play the games as if they do. Dungeon World's Discern Realities move doesn't say "say something about the world or the situation, and then roll to see if it's true", but some people play the game as if that is what the rules say. Also, the games instruct the GM to sometimes ask players questions, but this only gives the players "authority" to directly manipulate the fictional world if that's what you choose to read into it. I don't think a hard-assed old-school D&D DM would think it's giving a player "authority over the world" to ask a player whether their character had brothers and sisters growing up. Things like the AW "first session" questions can (and I'd argue should) operate in the exact same way, i.e. stepping into the character's perspective and giving the answer that feels appropriate and consistent with the established world rather than in an "ooh, ooh, what if we all ride around on three-headed giraffes!" direct-authorship style. However, some people assume that "player narrative control" is the unifying feature of story-games, that AW is a story-game, and therefore AW has that feature. I can't conclusively argue that they're wrong to make that assumption since every game exists in a context and Vincent didn't use his game design chops or his internet presence to get people to not play that way, but I see no mandate in the rules that you should play that way and I'd argue that the most natural interpretation of the rules that leads to a coherent system is if the players generally interact with the game through the lens of their characters.

Not everything that is possible to do with "fictional positioning" is done by AW

It's very easy in RPG Theory discussions to let the games people use as examples of concepts morph into proxies for the entire concept. So people might be tempted to say things like:

1) It's possible to have "player skill" be a meaningful factor in a game that relies heavily on "fictional positioning" (true)
2) The Apocalypse World engine has a lot of "fictional positioning" stuff cooked into its core architecture (true)
3) Therefore AW has a "player skill" component (improperly formed syllogism)

Apocalypse World and "fictional positioning" aren't synonyms. That AW was attempting to more heavily emphasize fictional positioning than some of the games that were "indie hotness" while it was being designed doesn't mean that AW does every thing it's possible to do with fictional positioning. I think it is possible to make a realism-grounded "situation simulator" game that leans heavily on fictional positioning. That doesn't mean that any particular *W game or any *W game actually does that. Someone could claim that a game does, but their argument would need to connect to the particulars of the design and not just stop at the abstraction of "fictional positioning" in order to be valid.

The GM instructions in *W make the characters, not their world, the reference point

The player-facing move architecture of AW triggers off of "the fiction". But what's happening in "the fiction" is going to be heavily influenced by the ebb and flow of "the conversation". Things like how "zoomed in on the action" you are will heavily influence which moves get triggered. This is fine for a game about personal drama, but it's not what you'd expect in a game about simulating an objective reality. In one of the classic thought-experiments about RPGing we have the idea of the GM being able to get their way by calling for rolls until they get the result they want: clearly things like "quantity of rolls" or "which rolls you make" matter to a character's effectiveness and overall results. In *W games, that is going to be heavily influenced by the subjective aesthetic interests of the GM, not some dispassionate objective reference frame. The GM isn't supposed to impose a "story" on the action, but their interests and likes and dislikes are a meaningful input into what gets focused on and what gets abstracted, they have a strong hand in shaping "the conversation".

Similarly, when choosing things like hard moves on a failed roll, the GM is meant to be guided by what "feels right" in the moment. Since GMs will be operating on their instincts, and most of our instincts for RPG situations are shaped by stories rather than physical reality, we'll tend to get "storyful" results. "Dramatically appropriate" coincidences will manifest via hard moves far more often in a *W game than they would in reality. Now it's true that the games want to stress verisimilitude, so leaning on genre instincts that give the impression of realism, e.g. gritty dark fantasy or techno-thrillers, will generally make the system operate more harmoniously. That doesn't make the games into situation simulators. At their core these are dramatic character-focused games.

At least that's what I see when I look at these games.

#RPG   #RPGTheory   #PoweredByTheApocalypse

Apocalypse World est souvent mal compris. Je vois tout de même régulièrement des CR de joueurs déçus.

Apocalypse World est souvent mal compris. Je vois tout de même régulièrement des CR de joueurs déçus. Soit parce qu’ils attendent d’AW des choses qui n’y sont pas (même la plus belle fille…), soit parce que les règles furent compromises.  (Et aussi tout simplement parce qu’AW n’est pas ce qu’il cherchent, mais ça c’est pas grave, c’est même bien.) Je trouve dommage que des joueurs passent à côté d'un très bon jeu parce qu'on leur a vendu pour ce qu'il n'est pas ou parce que les règles sont tout de même un peu obscure à lire. Est-ce que cela vaut la peine de tenter de démêler cela ? De clarifier AW et ses règles ?

What’s the hardest part of running an RPG?

What’s the hardest part of running an RPG? It has to be the preparation. Unlike a board game, you can't just spontaneously decide to play—because someone has to have spent hours preparing an adventure first. Wanna run a game right now? If you haven't prepped, you're out of luck. Third time I get this in my mailbox. Sent by people who should know better (about RPG, not about my mailbox). Tsk tsk tsk tsk tsk tsk…(/me fighting the urge to rant)

21 mai 2015

My thought about game design for today is: Universalizing almost never helps.

Originally shared by Ben Lehman

My thought about game design for today is: Universalizing almost never helps.

Game designers really love the idea of flexible mechanics, which can be lots of different things. The thing is, mechanics are almost never good because they're flexible. Flexibility is just another way of saying boring, bland, uninspiring, or generic. Game mechanics are good because they are specifically interesting, inspiring, precise.

I've never once had "I should make a more general system for this" be the right answer to a game design problem. I'm not saying it can't happen. I'm just saying it's never happened to me.

Fall of Magic Traduction en français pour le pdf assurée :) Plus que 15 votes pour la version "rouleau" physique


Fall of Magic Traduction en français pour le pdf assurée :) Plus que 15 votes pour la version "rouleau" physique ! On vient d'essayer la bêta avec Eric Nieudan Philip Espi  et deltacorne et c'était vraiment très très sympa. C'est un jeu qui vauy la peine d'être découvert !

Originally shared by Ross Cowman

guess what? We've got our first unlocked translation!

Je profite de ce CR très intéressant de Thomas Munier pour poser une question qui me tarabuste depuis quelques temps...

Je profite de ce CR très intéressant de Thomas Munier pour poser une question qui me tarabuste depuis quelques temps (années) : ne pensez-vous pas qu'une analyse à posteriori / un CR / un débriefing de partie puisse totalement transformer votre ressenti par rapport à une partie et, le cas qui me gène vraiment, transformer une bonne partie en mauvaise partie par l'altération du souvenir ?
Note importante : je ne dis pas du tout que c'est le cas ici, je suis même à peu près sûr que non, c'est juste un "cela me fait penser à" de ma part.
Note 2 : je suis aujourd'hui à peu près convaincu que oui, un débriefing mal fait peut gâcher une partie (et, plus difficilement, un bon débriefing peut en rattraper une).

Originally shared by Thomas Munier

[Article Invité] Apocalypse World : Comment jouer avec le feu ?

Un jeu en terrain accidenté ! Sur les Ateliers Imaginaires, je debriefe une chaotique séance de création de personnages pour le jeu de rôle Apocalypse World. Où l'on voit comment le jeu encourage les thèmes crus, et comment il nous laisse les gérer.

http://lesateliersimaginaires.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=3517&p=31582#p31582

19 mai 2015

Prévisible, mais quel dommage... c'est uniquement la boutique qui ferme. Pas l'éditeur.

Prévisible, mais quel dommage... c'est uniquement la boutique qui ferme. Pas l'éditeur.

Originally shared by Seb R

Copié du réseau de Mark
RIP la BAH :(   

La boutique (vente directe) de la BaH ferme, alors...on SOLDE !!!

Prix valables jusqu'à épuisement des stocks.

Comment procéder : envoyez nous un mail (bah.editions at gmail.com 
) ou un mp en précisant ce que vous souhaitez acheter, nous vous confirmerons la disponibilité et les frais de port (calculés au plus juste, en envoi pli simple / mini max ou colissimo sans suivi en fonction du volume et poids des jeux). Frais de port offerts à partir de 45 euros d'achat pour la France métropolitaine (nous contacter pour le reste du monde).

Agon -50% : 12.5€
Annalise -50% : 13€
Apocalypse world : 27€
Bliss Stage -33% : 20€
Breaking the Ice -50% : 6€
Cold City -13% : 20€
Dirty Secret -50% : 9€
Misty Harbour 5€
Monsterheart -30% : 16€
My life with master édition luxe (couverture rigide) -50% : 10€
My life with master -50% : 5.5€
On mighty thews -50% : 5€
Perfect édition luxe (couverture rigide) -30% : 17.5€
Perfect -50% : 10€
Polar base -50% : 10€
Poltergeists -30% : 7€
Remember tomorrow -50% : 6€
Scénario parsely games : La Isla Loca & Le donjon de l’effroi -50% : 1€ le lot de deux
Superclique 10€
Sweet Agatha 18€
Lot de 6 Figurines Agon -60% : 10€

(poke Gherhartd Sildoenfein  , Pierre M  pour AW.... il doit en rester si il l'a mis dans la liste )

Title



Apocalypse World Today – Morceaux d’apocalypse. Seuls les fous vont à la surface. Pour décoincer une des turbines qui nous fournit l’énergie ou pour mourir. Souvent pour les deux. Les vents sont tellement forts, même ici on entend leurs hurlements. Je ne suis jamais descendu assez bas pour ne plus les entendre.  Mais ça c’est rien, ils sont tellement chargés de poussière et de débris que l’atmosphère en est solide. Tu peux pas respirer. Ni rien voir.
   Les fous qui vont à la surface, ils  finissent broyés par les turbines s’ils ont de la chance. Emportés par les vents. Foudroyés par la statique. Réduits à rien en trois minutes par l’abrasion. Laminés par un rebut volant. Non, reste avec nous. Viens plutôt travailler dans les champignonnières. Mieux vaut patauger dans notre propre merde que d’aller là-haut. Ou va…

18 mai 2015

Fall of Magic allez les souscripteurs francophones, votez pour une trad' en Français!


Fall of Magic allez les souscripteurs francophones, votez pour une trad' en Français!

Originally shared by Ross Cowman

Translation progress. French is getting close! Only 6 more for Digital translation. Make sure to leave a comment for translation in your language. You have to be a backer, but you can always cancel your pledge if the translation doesn't happen. 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rosscowman/fall-of-magic-a-role-playing-game-of-profound-fant/comments

Apocalypse World Today – Morceaux d’apocalypse.

Apocalypse World Today – Morceaux d’apocalypse. Dans ce monde de misère, il y des zones où le maelstrom psychique fusionne avec le monde physique.  Regarder à travers la frontière fait naitre une douleur frémissante au fond des os. Passer la frontière, c’est comme une seconde naissance : pressé de partout, tu étouffes ; c’est sans fin, épuisant, sanglant et tu arrives de l’autre côté en hurlant. À l’intérieur c’est…

15 mai 2015

Ars Magica ⨯ Gumshoe? Tales of the Quaesitors!

Ars Magica ⨯ Gumshoe? Tales of the Quaesitors!
Ars Magica ⨯ Fiasco? A Grog's Life: Love, Loss, and Secrets in the Covenant's Shadow! & A Covenant on Fire: Diabolism, Jealousy, and Revenge in Mythic Europe!
6th Edition? Maybe later.

14 mai 2015

Palette de description pour Apocalypse World.

Palette de description pour Apocalypse World. Tant que j'y suis dans ma préparation de partie (oui, on peut préparer la 1ère séance à AW autrement qu'en bloquant les règles, la preuve), je ressors ceci que j'avais posté à l'époque sur CasusNo mais qui a (comme trop souvent) disparu dans les limbes de pandapirate.

Si vous vous en servez ou si ça vous intéresse, ça serait chouette que vous me le disiez.

Apocalypse World pour les nouveaux joueurs.

Apocalypse World pour les nouveaux joueurs. (Mais déjà rôlistes.) Je lance une nouvelle table d'AW en juin et j'ai envie de démarrer la 1ère séance sur les chapeaux de roue. J'ai mis dans ce document le B-A-BA du joueur d'AW, toutes les petites explications qu'il faut fournir quand on commence. Pas la création de personnage, non, mais les règles fondamentales et le pitch de base. Ça tiens en 15 points, je vais en envoyer un presque chaque jour aux joueur avant la première partie. (Imprimé, le tout ferait 5 faces A4.)

Qu'est-ce que vous en pensez ? J'ai oublié des choses importantes ? Je dis des choses qu'il serait plus efficace de donner plus tard ? Je risque de bloquer les gens  plutôt que de les intriguer / motiver ? Je raconte des conneries ? Dites moi ! Merci.

More AW2e info.

More AW2e info.

Originally shared by Meguey Baker

Things I am excited about in the upcoming second edition of Apocalypse World:

-streamlined combat system
-streamlined Hx section
-shuffling the basic playbooks around
-expanded vehicular combat section, specifically the bits about terrain dangers
-getting our hands all over every page again and making new bloody fingerprints
-the way everything starts looking like AW to me; hello Mr. Stark, I see you are a Savvyhead.

#AW2

13 mai 2015

"Vincent Baker is creating a window into game design -- Most games don't survive their own creation. Watch them die."

"Vincent Baker is creating a window into game design -- Most games don't survive their own creation. Watch them die."

One of them is Apocalypse World 2nd Edition
https://www.patreon.com/creation?hid=2443127
Deux cent seize !

Derinkuyu.

Derinkuyu. A real underground city that sheltered up to 20,000 people, founded in the 7-8th century B.C., used till 1923 and  connected with other underground cities through miles of tunnels.

Derinkuyu. Une ville souterraine qui abrita jusqu'à 20.000 habitants, fondée aux environs du 8e siècle av. J.C., utilisée jusqu'en 1923 et reliée à d'autres viles souterraines par des kilomètres de tunnel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derinkuyu_underground_city

12 mai 2015

Je voudrais pouvoir racheter un Apocalypse World VF neuf, le mien est tout cassé

Je voudrais pouvoir racheter un Apocalypse World VF neuf, le mien est tout cassé ! Et puis comment je l'offre à mes amis, hein ? Il est bientôt réimprimé ? Boite à Heuhh 

(For English speakers: the French version of Apocalypse World is long out of print. I'm asking the publisher for a reprint.)

11 mai 2015

Also this, obviously.

Also this, obviously.

Originally shared by Ben Lehman

So a term I use repeatedly in my last post [1] about Sarah Lynne Bowman's article [2] is "aesthetics," which I do pretty much without explaining what the heck I mean. What I mean is, a set of artistic values that tell us what art is beautiful and what art is not beautiful. I think that there are pretty widely varied aesthetics in role-playing games, although for the most part we wouldn't necessarily use the term "beautiful" to describe it, preferring "fun," instead.

This dovetails with some thoughts I've been having about a conversation between Caitlynn Belle and Vincent Baker [3] on Vincent's blog a couple of weeks ago, about the narrow range of goals that currently exist in tabletop role-playing.

So, following on that and taking Murderous Ghosts as our example, there are a lot of different possible aesthetic goals for "explorer gets murdered by ghosts." Including, but not limited.
* Trying to succeed by avoiding ghost murder, at least for as long as possible.
* Telling a story about ghost murder.
* Experiencing ghost murder feelings and sensations and thoughts.
* Experiencing being an explorer in a dangerous, haunted situation.

These are all very different things, and they require very different games.

--

I don't think any sort of broad aesthetic taxonomy would be profitable (or, for me, possible) but I'd like to talk a little bit about personal history and my development as a designer.

Starting midstream in college, I was pretty heavily invested in the "we're going to tell a story by having a very strongly immersed character experience guided by a GM" school, which was very frustrating, because (particularly in large LARPs where there's less GM oversight) it's very hard to really get a satisfying story out of a bunch of dissociated people bouncing off of each other and, as one can expect, also a lot of interpersonal drama and hurt feelings. I felt like there must be a better way to get at story, but I wasn't sure how to do it. When I played games that let me write my own powers, I specifically gave my characters powers to alter and shape the story, trying to push things towards a more coherent narrative.

I was right in my intuitions: there was a better way. Riddle of Steel [4] is, I think, the first game that really did it right, building the story and emotional arc right into the character's stats (and it remains a great game if you can find a copy). Riddle's Spiritual Attributes aren't functions of the character's emotions or personality, they are literally aspects of the character's story arc. The idea that the story arc was something that could have actual mechanical [5] existence, rather than just a nebulous hand-waving, was a big fucking deal in terms of the aesthetic of story-telling.

But by the time I played Primetime Adventures [6] for the first time, I realized that this wasn't actually an aesthetic I could design towards. Mostly because PTA did it so extremely well and so extremely precisely, and it was very hard for me to design a "tell a story" game that wasn't just a minor variation on PTA.

There's another aesthetic hidden in that one, though, which was also something that harkened back to when I played D&D as an after-school program. When you draw back from the "immersion is the absolute good" school of aesthetics, choice becomes an extremely important aspect of play. Tabletop roleplaying games are unique in that the player can make an infinite number of choices, which can have an infinite number of consequences. Rather than trying to constrain this, as a lot of games do, we can instead blow it open, allowing as wide a degree of choice as possible. This massively informs Polaris [7] and a huge amount of my subsequent work (pretty much everything I've designed touches on this, but loosely, I'd say Polaris, The Drifter's Escape, Mud Dragon, and Amidst Endless Quiet embody the progression of my thoughts here).

This informs a lot about what I care about in play, which I would both call "immersive" (under some definitions) and as far away from possessive method acting as you can get. I am interested in what decisions the characters make (or, the players make for the characters, depending), and the context in which they make those decisions. I'm not particularly interested in watching someone portray this in any sort of realistic or realisticish style. I mean, if they choose to do that, that's fine, character-acting is a perfectly reasonable and sometimes very efficient form of communication, but what I really want to see is the choices that they make and try (although not necessarily succeed) to understand why they make them. For these games, for me, that's the thing that matters.

The games themselves vary widely on how the decisions are made, from "totally in-setting" in Amidst Endless Quiet to "totally based on the player's sense of humor" in Mud Dragon.

(Interestingly, I might paraphrase the Jamie Macdonald quote in Bowman's article as "immersive role-playing is beautiful to be, decisive role-playing is beautiful to do."

So, that's an aesthetic of mine. But lately I've been drifting somewhere else. I'm going to poke at it indirectly, but it's still not formed, so don't expect to understand what I'm getting at.

One of the things you notice when you watch a lot of people struggling with fictional decisions is that it matters. Yes, the immediate consequences are physical, but the act of making a decision changes our identity and our personality, not in a short-term, split way like described in Bowman's article, but in a long-term integrative way. We come out of a game of (say) Thou Art But A Warrior as subtly different people than we went into it.

(I think this is true of all media and all conversations, and roleplaying games are both. But there is something particularly efficacious about roleplaying.)

This leads me to Beloved, a game which I wrote to teach myself to get over a break-up. This leads to other games, too. But I think I'm going to leave it there for now.

[1] https://plus.google.com/u/0/117301572585814320386/posts/Ry3YkZDoZcr
[2] http://analoggamestudies.org/2015/05/connecting-role-playing-stage-acting-and-improvisation/
[3] http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/834#19800
[4] A great game if you can find a copy.
[5] I mean this in the broadest possible sense. Don't interpret this as "rolling dice" or I will scream.
[6] http://www.dog-eared-designs.com/pta.html although if you can find the first edition I'd recommend that even more.
[7] http://tao-games.com/polaris

I share this as a memo to myself, because I don't have time to explore it right now -- but I have a feeling this is...

I share this as a memo to myself, because I don't have time to explore it right now -- but I have a feeling this is significant, so I share publicly.

Originally shared by Ben Lehman

So, Sarah Lynne Bowman wrote this article [1], and posted in a comment on my post [2] about comparing tabletop role-playing and improv, namely that they are not the same thing, and thus borrowing improv theory to describe role-playing is an intellectual dead-end.

It's worth reading Tim Koppang's comment as well [3].

I think this is a very good article. I enjoyed reading it a great deal, and I think that there's some good insight there. That said, I'm going to start out by talking about some of my frustrations with the article.

My first frustration, which I gotta imagine is shared by the author and also basically everyone involved in studying role-playing, is the incredibly narrow range of literature on the topic, which results in a pretty myopic view of role-playing. Props for including more than just the standard set of Nordic LARP books, but, really, there's very little coherent theory work done outside of Nordic and Nordesque LARP circles. (The Forge [4], while it produced a lot of good theory about tabletop RPG, is neither coherent nor navigable.) This is frustrating to me simply because the article ends up discussing only one aesthetic of roleplaying games -- maximal immersion -- but, honestly, what other literature is there? Nonetheless, I think that this is the aesthetic of role-playing which overlaps the most with Johnstone's aesthetic of theater, and that creates an illusion of more overlap between the fields (role-playing games, acting) than actually exists.

I am also skeptical of the claim that LARPers are reporting their experience without being familiar with acting theory, particularly Johnstone. Johnstone has a ton of currency in LARP circles, and his ideology has already shaped a lot of the immersive ideals of LARP play. Even if a particular player hasn't read Impro, it seems very likely that someone in the non-Vampire, non-NERO based LARP community will be familiar with the ideals of his work, if by another name. Ultimately, the comparison is still pretty interesting, I'm just not sure if they can be claimed to be separate origins of the same thing.

I think the best insight of the article, at least to me, comes right at the end, from the discussion of dissociation and immersion. I think this is very insightful, and it strongly agrees with my personal experiences of both medicalized, psychologically disabled dissociation and also recreational, characterized, ludic dissociation. But I wonder if the category might be applied more broadly? It seems to me like all creative activity is dissociative, by which I mean, represents a cognitive break from reality. The exact nature of the break, and its purpose, and its relationship to the audience, are where the forms begin to differ.

Also, reading this made me very conscious of the aesthetic departures that most but not all tabletop roleplaying games have from the total immersion aesthetics of much LARP. I think the article does a very good job of drawing this distinction, even if, for whatever reasons, it really only investigates the total immersion aesthetic. It's sent me off on my own flight of fancy about aesthetics and games, which really belongs in another post.

Anyway, it's an extremely thought-provoking article and you all should read it and then write your own responses.

[1] http://analoggamestudies.org/2015/05/connecting-role-playing-stage-acting-and-improvisation/
[2] https://plus.google.com/u/0/117301572585814320386/posts/HSd2oWa6gNv
[3] https://plus.google.com/u/0/113060679603173178673/posts/gvGKZwMHLYw
[4] http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forge/index.php
http://analoggamestudies.org/2015/05/connecting-role-playing-stage-acting-and-improvisation

Et maintenant une page de mendicité ;)

Et maintenant une page de mendicité ;)
   Grammelecte est un correcteur orthographique, grammatical et typographique, un ensemble de dictionnaires et un conjugueur pour le Français. Ce logiciel libre (GPL-v3) et gratuit aide à l’écriture en essayant de parasiter  le moins possible l’attention avec de fausses alertes. Je l’utilise régulièrement et j’en suis déjà très heureux.
   Aujourd’hui, Grammalecte prend la forme d’une extension pour LibreOffice et OpenOffice. Les développeurs mènent une souscription sur Ulule pour améliorer le programme et en faire également une extension pour Firefox et Thunderbird. En palier on trouve une version serveur, des outils supplémentaires et une extension pour Chrome.
   À première vue, les contreparties (ajouter des mots dans le dictionnaire) ne sont pas affriolantes, mais la réelle contrepartie est la continuation et l’amélioration de ce logiciel qui est et restera accessible à tous, licence libre oblige. C’est aussi un moyen de remercier pour l’impressionnant travail déjà effectué ces 8 dernières années.
   Le porteur du projet, Olivier R., est un passionné, sérieux et très investi dans le projet depuis des années. Grâce à Ulule, j’apprends qu’il est également rôliste.
https://fr.ulule.com/grammalecte/

9 mai 2015

I wonder why I'm doing this?


I wonder why I'm doing this?

Originally shared by Melinda Samson

We know Google+ isn't dead. Please +1 and re-share to help us prove it!

When I talk to clients in Australia about Google plus, many of them reply that they “heard it was dead” or something similar.

It seems that negative opinions about this wonderful platform reach more ears than all the positive aspects of Google plus that active users have experienced and know to be true.

Let’s share our support of Google+ as a fantastic platform, particularly for:

- really getting connected with people
- generating engagement around your content
- tapping into the value of communities
- getting your online content found in Google search
- Hanging out
- plus discovering content, laughing at funny stuff and enjoying magnificent photos.

To show your support of Google+, please + 1 this post.

The number of +1’s will accumulate on the article at the link a bit like signatures on a virtual petition showing that real people really interact on Google plus and we want to prove it to the world!

The more +1’s, the more we can show evidence that Google+ is not dead, and is, in fact, truly awesome.

Read more at 
http://clickwinningcontent.com.au/google-plus-is-not-dead/

Thanks in advance!

#googleplus

8 mai 2015

And also this one. Enjoy !

And also this one. Enjoy !

Originally shared by Cam Banks

Cam Thinks About Tabletop Game Tech

What's the most interesting new tabletop RPG mechanic you've seen lately? Is it new or just more mainstream because of a high profile game?

I was thinking about asking that myself, but I incidentally found this fantabulous thread :)

I was thinking about asking that myself, but I incidentally found this fantabulous thread :)

Originally shared by Ryan Macklin

I was talking with a someone yesterday evening about what tabletop roleplaying games to play in order to better understand the hobby. I said I would send them a list of games I think they should play. But I’m just one person with a perspective that, while educated, is still singular. You know what isn’t singular? A bunch of (hopefully educated) perspectives.

So I ask you this: Name one or two tabletop RPGs you’ve played that you think are must-play games for creators. Required details:

- State two or three different things a creator would get out of playing that game. No more than three points, to keep it focused.
- State a flaw that game has or demonstrates. Note: stating "it's dated" or "maybe the theme isn't your jam" or similar isn't a flaw.

Later this week, I’ll edit this post to collect responses from the original blog post and this companion G+ thread. Please hold to the guidelines, including sticking to two games max, as that’ll lead to a wider variety of (hopefully educated) perspectives. :) I may share my own at that point, but I don’t want to taint the results by doing so right away.
http://ryanmacklin.com/2015/05/what-are-your-must-play-rpgs/