Tom Van Winkle's Return to Gaming

There was a period of years early in the hobby’s history when there were no adventure modules at all. In those days, everybody made their own adventures by hand—without computers . You can, too. Lately I’ve returned to the quiet pleasure of developing hand-crafted adventures and setting materials on my own. I have no intention of sharing my materials with anybody but the players of my games. I draw on sources of inspiration both inward and outward, and a personal sense of vicarious wonder and adventure, to develop playgrounds for the players of my games. I rely on my experience running games and my observations of my players’ preferences, and I ignore what the critics and bloggers think is cool. My games are not about what’s trending in the scene, but about fun for my group. There is overlap but they are not the same. By hand-crafted I mean just that. I write my notes and sketch my maps by hand. When I have a moment of inspiration I jot ideas down, not with a computer keyboard to...

Do you enjoy acting out your character’s words, even adopting a different voice for your character? Do you hate it when people do that? When I got back into gaming a few years ago, I noticed that “amateur thespianism” has become one of the things in role-playing games that a certain sort of player now complains about. Thespianism means acting. We are told that acting has no place in “old-school” play. As an old-time player, this made no sense to me. Sure, everybody has play-style preferences, but I never saw a role-playing game in which players did not dip into acting out their characters at least occasionally. It was not as if my games were degraded by that, either. Putting down acting in a role-playing game seemed odd to me. So, I decided to figure out where the negative attitude toward this part of the hobby, which I thought to be essential, came from. This post looks at the phenomenon of disdain for acting out a part in role-playing games and the claim, explicit or implied, t...