The Gaming Philosopher

If you have any interest at all in pen and paper RPGs, you should get the Indie Intiative Bundle of Holding (for sale for another 20 hours, so be quick). It contains many of the most important games to start the indie RPG movement. So much so, in fact, that the list of games basically is a list of everything I bought and played between 2002 and 2007. I can assure you that the following games are all excellent, both to play and to study: Breaking the Ice The Shadow of Yesterday Trollbabe Dogs in the Vineyard Inspectres My Life with Master Polaris Sorcerer Universalis I have not played octaNe and Munchhausen, but they are well spoken off. All for less than 23$! It's an offer you should not refuse. I didn't refuse, even though I already owned nine of them in physical book form.

Another week, another Breaking the Ice session using Google Hangouts. This time I played with Sam Kabo Ashwell, prolific author of interactive fiction and reviews of works in that medium. We once played a game of Gloom together, which is almost a role playing game; but that's the limit of our shared gaming experience. However, we are both veteran RPG players, and years of contact in the online interactive fiction community have given us a good idea of each other's tastes in fiction. Character creation We therefore jumped into the game without much ado. Sam had read the rules once, but long ago. That wasn't a problem. Breaking the Ice works well as long as one of the participants know the rules. As a switch we chose "being an immigrant" (Sam being an Englishman living in the U.S., and I being a Dutch guy living in the Netherlands). I would play an immigrant man, he would play a non-immigrant woman. Sam's web of words contained: orange, [hothouses,...

This is the second part of an actual play report that began here . Remko and I got together on Google Hangouts to play the second and third date of Sjoerd and Doortje, using Emily Boss Care's game Breaking the Ice . At the end of last session, Sjoerd and Doortje had had a great date that lasted far into the night. (They ended up with 2 points of attraction, and the compatibilities "they like hanging out in nice bars" and "they understand about each other's unhappy childhood".) Doortje's conflict ("feels guilty when she claims time for herself") and the fact that she had a small child didn't feature in that first session, and I was determined to change that. Second date We started the second date by narrating how Doortje, unwilling to leave her baby alone for another night, had asked Sjoerd to meet her some afternoon in the Vondelpark , where she would come with the baby in a pram. Sjoerd didn't object, although he was less than h...

I'm finally getting back into role playing. I've been doing far too little of this for far too long, and it feels great to be back in business. Back in 2005, I played my first online RPG sessions ever, using IRC, with Remko van der Pluijm. We played Breaking the Ice , and I wrote up an actual play report here . So what better way to get back into role playing than by meeting up with Remko again -- who is by now a very good friend of mine -- and play Breaking the Ice again, this time using web cams and Google hangouts? Breaking the Ice is an RPG for two people written by Emily Care Boss and published by Black and Green Games . Two characters, one controlled by each player, have a series of three dates; by the end of the game, they either stay together or stop dating. I concluded my original actual play report as follows: This game is brilliant. There are no two ways about it. It is an ode on human vulnerability. [...] In this game, you do not overcome obstacles by stren...