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| Of the nearly 50 posts this morning, roughly half were from three bloggers – Pseudonym, Mailanka, and Generic Universal Eggplant, who are firing on all cylinders. |
New Blogs
This week, we have a new blog, Path of House Rules. As of starting, the main focus is converting Shin Megami Tensei style demon contracting into GURPS conventions. I can't imagine that's too difficult. Maybe expensive, but oh well. Still an interesting system with interesting lore.
Everything Else
On Dungeon Fantastic, I take some umbrage with the idea that Only heroes get to resist. He's a smart guy, and knows what he is talking about, so I'm sure he isn't missing the forest for the trees, and saying it as a blanket statement though; in the same stroke, I can think of times where it makes more sense to do so. No school grognard has an interesting post on enriching the intelligence role in mass combat. Shane Plays has a radio interview about GURPS. The Collaborative Gamer made some cool battlemats for Dungeon Fantasy. The Phantom's Belch has some interesting racial templates for a fantasy setting, and I'm really amused by the human racial templates from Generic Universal Eggplant.
Other Thoughts and Self Reflection
Traffic is plummeting, oh well! I actually had two sessions in one week, and trying to find time to post updates because I don't consider a session recap a real post for the sake of posting once a day. I can't imagine anyone finds them interesting, and I've been told recently I'm kind of a rubbish GM by a few somewhat important people in the community, so that's discouraging, but oh well.
On that note, we, the bloggers, have a community theme for next week, so I guess that starts tomorrow here and ends on USAsian Thanksgiving on Thursday next week. Social Skills? Social Contracts? Boardroom and Curia? City Stats? That works, I need to do a tiny bit of world building if the campaign I'm running is progressing again.
Most popular post this week is... a mention that GCS had a really cool update. Followed by the review of Dungeon Fantasy Denizens - Swashbucklers and Dungeon Styles. Noteworthy, my firefighter magical style is pretty high in the list too for only being out for less than a day. I wonder if pokemon posts aren't popular because they are pokemon? Because people don't cotton to lists of abilities? Maybe my lack of enthusiasm is showing too hard? Ah well.
When is GURPS Discworld coming out?
Session recaps are indeed 'real posts'! They are a challenge to write well though. Generally, it helps (for me) to be a campaign type I'm interested in, but it needs decent writing to boot. ...And a good call-out to something familiar helps. >.>; (I started following Dungeon Fantastic more when I came across the PHB-inspired fight, and paid more attention to the short ATE campaign on Don't Forget Your Boots because of the Tripods reference.)
ReplyDeletePlanet Mages doesn't look like my thing so much, but I really need to take a look at Until it Sleeps.
Yeah, I just can't see how a recap helps anyone. It feels closer to fanfiction with director commentary than "GURPS content."
DeleteOn a purely practical level, they can be an invaluable aid for the group. "What happened last time again?"; "Where did we leave off?" Session report to the rescue!
DeletePast that, it's harder. You are effectively telling a story, and you need to write with that in mind. There are plenty of ways to go about it, but I think its best to balance out both the character and player side of things. Summarize, but point up the fun moments of the session. Things like the banter that turns into in-game things in Dungeon Fantastic.
I admit that a lot of session reports out there that leave me a bit cold, and I'm not sure why. I think most people could do with a bit more summarizing. There are people who tell good war stories, and that's what a good session report needs.
True on the first point. I mostly write them for my players, I don't think they read them often anyway, because usually the first question asked is "what happened last time?"
DeleteMy response is "Try checking the blog and filtering by the recap tag or the campaign name."