Primeval Games Press

Trials of the Grail

Assume the role of questing knights in an archetypal Grail Quest of your own making.

City of Birds

Take your place in the greatest of cities through diceless stoytelling.

Blessed

Post-apocalyptic RPG. Serve your corporation; cleanse the world.

Me and the Rat

A tactical parlor game of resource trading and hammy spy action.

Clash of the Ancients

Crush your pitiful enemies in this live-action strategy game.

Competition and Role-playing

Serious competition around an idea of simple winning is problematic. Players want to have their success determined in a non-arbitrary way: not by anyone’s subjective decisions. So victory is then logically tracked, made dependent on mechanics. This reasoning cascades from the final victory conditions to every other aspect of the game, leaving something that is primarily about strategy, little about role-playing. Even where joins are suggested by the game text, they will — very logically — be ignored, because they are tangential to the real goal of the game. I see but two solutions.

Role-Playing Structures II

In my previous essay, I introduced what I see as the two major “structures” of role-playing, mechanisms and imaginings. Here I’ll explore them further: their components, their interaction, and their use.

Role-playing Structures

I’ve often struggled with the definition of games. What is it that makes role-playing role-playing? How is it different from board-gaming or wargaming? These terms may be useful but the boundaries they set are fairly arbitrary, and they could be abandoned.

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