Campaign Mastery

A change of pace this week, as I want to talk about some observed trends in internet usage patterns and the impact that they have on sites like Campaign Mastery. This is not only directly relevant to the value that I can offer our readers, but – since many RPGs are set in the ‘now’ […]

“Lessons From The West Wing” is a series of occasional articles inspired by the Television Series. I’ve had this article sitting around in partially completed form for a couple of years now, waiting for the right example with which to illustrate the concluding point. Finally, that condition has been met, so it’s time to look […]

This irregular column resurrects (relevant) lost blog posts from Mike’s 2006 personal blog on Yahoo 360 and updates them with new relevance and perspective. Mysteries are hard to write. Ones for Roleplaying are even harder – or maybe that should be the other way around. There are a lot of unique challenges that have to […]

I thought I was done with this series, I really did. But then I watched a seemingly-unrelated TV documentary series called The Genius Of Design from the BBC, (available on DVD from Amazon), and a persuasive new perspective was opened for my consideration. (You might want to read of the series to see why it […]

Our special effects gurus get better all the time, and at the same time, their product becomes more affordable with improving technology, making it more ubiquitous in entertainments. I first wrote about the impact of this phenomenon back in 2009, when I asked Are Special Effects Killing Hollywood?, a question which shed a new light […]

One of the most contentious issues in modern times is set to escalate to a whole new level. That’s right, people, copyright law, trademark law, and its enforcement is about to get messy – well, messier than it already seems. At the same time, recent developments have given me a new perspective on past events […]

Last night, I caught up with a documentary that I’ve been waiting to view (lack of time) since early February. The subject, and title, of the documentary was the question, ‘Are We Still Evolving?’. And, as with many subjects that I digest, it sparked a number of thoughts, all of which are relevant to the […]

Video Games and RPGs have shared a parallel evolution throughout their histories, going all the way back to the original such games (Colossal Cave Adventure in 1967 and [Original] D&D in 1974, which was based on 1971’s Chainmail rules for miniatures wargaming). Throughout their histories, they have fed on each other, sometimes in a fairly […]

With the Christmas season apon us, I thought it an appropriate time to talk about Christmas gifts suitable for tabletop gamers, some obvious, and some not-so-obvious. My family often complain that I’m hard to shop for; I disagree, and this list is the reason why… Rulebooks The most obvious thing to give another player is […]

Debate is still going strong over my last article taking a closer look at what constitutes good storytelling techniques (Deus Ex Machinas And The Plot Implications Of Divinity), but – never one to back away from potential controversy – I’m about to dive headlong into another, and one from the same technique. Anton Chekhov famously […]

Wikipedia defines a ‘Deus Ex Machina‘ as a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability, or object. It can be roughly translated, they say, as “God made it happen,” with no further explanation. They also state that the […]

Introduction: The Online World The internet changes everything it touches. New production models, new distribution models, even new funding models. It blurs the line between professional and hobbyist by enabling the hobbyist to produce work of a professional standard – simply by replacing the infrastructure that an old-style game manufacturer needed to have with technological […]