RPGs to play with your kids

I just found out about the latest Bundle of Holding, which is a collection of amazing RPGs that you can play with your kids. This is the perfect way to introduce your children to roleplaying games, and you can do it for about five bucks.

Check it out:

Adventurer! The fellowship of Friends and Family brings you a large assortment of tabletop roleplaying games especially designed to introduce young players to the joys of roleplaying. With these .PDF ebooks, parents can teach these introductory games to their kids, and the kids can learn and play some of these games all by themselves. For just US$5.95, you get all the rulebooks in our core collection as DRM-free .PDFs:

Hero Kids: An ideal introduction to fantasy roleplaying for children aged 4 to 10.

Mermaid Adventures: Exciting undersea adventures and strange mysteries. (Ages 6-11.)

The Princes’ Kingdom: Young heirs to the throne of Islandia, visiting the citizens of their land and solving problems. This bundle is the first .PDF version of The Princes’ Kingdom sold anywhere! (Ages 5+, plus an adult.)

Happy Birthday, Robot!: The charming storytelling game by Daniel Solis for families or classrooms. (Ages 9+ — and especially good for grownups.)

And if you pay more than the threshold price of $13.06, you’ll level up and receive our entire collection of bonus games:

Adventures in Oz – Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road: A loving journey into the lands of L. Frank Baum. (Ages 8+.)
Camp Myth: The RPG: Third Eye’s adaptation of the Chris Lewis Carter YA novel series about mythic creatures at summer camp. (Ages 8-13.)
Project Ninja Panda Taco: Jennifer (Jennisodes) Steen’s game of competing Masterminds and their biddable Minions. (Ages 8+.)
School Daze: It’s high school the way you wish it could be. (Ages 13+.)
The Zorcerer of Zo: Chad Underkoffler’s classic game of fairy tales set in the Zantabulous Land of Zo. (Ages 5+.)

There’s just about 20 hours left on the sale, so get on this while the getting’s good, as they say in those old movies.

Not everyone is going to like the thing you made, and that’s okay

I recently worked on an upcoming video game from Double Fine, called Broken Age. I got to play a really fun character, and I had a super good time working with one of my favorite directors in the industry.

Double Fine announced my participation in a video that includes some shots of me recording, and the response from people who chose to respond was overwhelmingly positive.

Earlier this morning, the following Tweets appeared in my timeline, back to back:

Perspective

When I was younger, I would have completely ignored the first one, and obsessively focused on the second one to the point of feeling shitty about myself. Part of having Imposter Syndrome is believing that people who praise you are dupes, while the people who criticize you can actually see through everything. But the thing is, the guy who isn’t thrilled has every right to feel that way, and I don’t take it personally. Not everyone digs what I do and what I bring to a project, and that’s totally cool. At the same time, it’s also pretty awesome that a lot of people do dig what I bring to a project, and that is also cool.

Consider this, about having perspective on criticism: If you enjoyed making a thing, and you’re proud of the thing you made, that’s enough. Not everyone is going to like it, and that’s okay. And sometimes, a person who likes your work and a person who don’t will show up within milliseconds of each other to let you know how they feel. One does not need to cancel out the other, positively or negatively; if you’re proud of the work, and you enjoyed the work, that is what’s important.Don’t let the fear of not pleasing someone stop you from being creative.

The goal isn’t to make something everyone will love; the goal is to get excited, and make a thing where something wasn’t before.

a little bit about games, and choosing a tabletop game you’ll enjoy

On Tumblr, t wrote:

My birthday is coming up next week and my brother insists on getting me something. He asked me what I wanted and told him I wanted a board game. He asked which one and I kind of blanked ajd told him I’d get back to him.
Being a fan of Table Top I went through and picked out my favorite ones but can’t decide on which game I want. Currently it is a choice between Munchkin, Betrayal at House on the Hill, Elder Sign and Pandemic. Which one would you pick?

This is a fairly common question, though the games are a little different each time. Here’s what I answered:

Those are all very different games, so it depends on what kind of gaming experience you want to have.
Munchkin is silly, pun-filled, and about messing with your friends. It also has about nine million expansions.
Pandemic is about working together in a game that you’re probably going to have fun losing.
Elder Sign is about working together in a heavily-themed game that is very random because of the dice.
Betrayal is about working together — until you find out that one of you is trying to murder the rest of you with kill death. It’s more of an RPG in a box, and is really fun if you treat it that way.
So I can’t tell you which one is best, but hopefully that information can help you make an informed decision.
Happy Birthday!!
Wil

I can’t say “Oh, if you are choosing from these games, this is the one to play,” because they’re all great games in their own way. I would, of course, try to direct t away from a game that wasn’t fun at all, or had a terrible rule book, because I believe that’s a moral imperative when games are being discussed.

I was recently at a game shop to pick up this game called Hive that is insanely fun. While I was there, I watched an employee try very hard to help a young woman pick out a game. They went through all the aisles, and he explained each game in depth long after she’d lost interest in it. This happened because he wasn’t asking the right question: what kind of game do you want to play? because he was asking questions about theme (you like Torchwood? Well, this game is blah blah blah) that didn’t help her at all. I didn’t want to jump in, but it was killing me to watch this happen. He was trying so hard, and it was like they were speaking the same language but weren’t able to exchange anything of substance between them.

I don’t know what, if anything, she decided to get, but I hope she left with something because the world needs more gamers. One way we can help make that happen is to know how to talk to them, so they can find their way into our hobby, and feel at home there.

some kind of verb, some kind of moving thing

This guest post was written by Will Hindmarch, a freelance writer and designer of games and fiction. Read more at his blog at wordstudio.net.

A few years ago, inspiration struck me a few times in a row and I started work on a new tabletop game. It was a story game about journeys. I knew that much. Sitting down at my kitchen table, writing in my notebook, ideas collided and threw off sparks that I distilled in handwriting as quick as I could.

One idea sparked another. I wrote down design questions and then answered them, right there on the spot. Not every answer was right. I learned that much. Actually playing the game showed me new questions and confounded some of my answers. No worries, though, that’s just the way that goes. Onward.

A few months ago, I described this game to a friend of mine who digs these sorts of things. I discovered as I talked that the game felt pretty finished. I’d been testing it for years, playing it with a myriad of new players, but I didn’t know how to tell myself it was ready to show people. So when I described the game to this friend of mine and he said “That sounds great!” it gave me the jolt I needed to turn my notes into a manuscript.

I’d been sort of writing this thing, in bits and pieces in my head, for a year. I knew what I wanted to say but I had been slow to turn my thoughts into text. Part of it was fear: this was a new kind of game for me and I’d be measured against giants when it was done. Another part of it was … also fear: what if what I wrote sucked out loud? I write for a living and I still feel that way sometimes.

A few hours ago, I launched the crowdfunding campaign to pay artists (and me) to finish the game book. The game’s called Odyssey. I think it’s pretty good.

I wanted to make this thing. I’ve wanted to make this thing for a while. What I needed was to get excited. It was a spark of enthusiasm — from a friend I wanted to inspire — that helped make this thing.

We participate in the creation of so many things, sometimes without knowing it. I don’t know if my friend knows that his casual enthusiasm powered this project’s creation like a life-giving bolt, but it did. Sparks start engines.

New Tabletop: Betrayal at House on the Hill

This week, Ashly Burch, Keahu Kahuanui and Michael Swaim join me to play one of my very favorite RPG-in-a-box games: Betrayal at House on the Hill.

I’m a huge fan of Ashly’s work in Borderlands 2, and after I met her at Valve last year, I became a huge fan of her as a human. She’s really awesome and a hell of a lot of fun to play with. If you like things that don’t suck, check out Hey Ash, Watcha Playin’?

Keahu and I have a ton of friends in common, but we’d never met until just before we shot this episode. Since then, we’ve become very good friends, and I even get to be a Bad Idea Bear for him from time to time when giant pizza is involved. Thank you, Tabletop Gaming, for helping me make a new friend. Oh, and Keahu is on some TV show about wolf hunters or something like that. I think it’s animated.

Michael Swaim knows Felicia, and is a lifelong tabletop gamer, just like me. He also writes for Cracked.com. Felicia suggested that I invite him to the show, because he’s hilarious and fun to be around, and she was pretty sure we’d like each other. I hate to admit it, but Felicia was right.

This was so much fun to play, and so much incredibly awesome stuff happened, we ended up cutting it into a two-part episode (but fear not! Part two comes out next week, because we love you and don’t want to make you wait two whole weeks for the second part. Did I mention that it was awesome? It’s awesome.)

When I get home from Texas, we’re shooting a Very Special Episode of Not The Flog, where I’m going to share some of my favorite horror-themed tabletop games. I have a pretty big list in my head, but I’m sure there’s something awesome that I’m forgetting, so if you wanted to maybe get onto Not The Flog, tell me the title of the game you love, why you love it, and what your favorite Halloween candy is. I’ll pick some and put them into the show, which is coming out sooooooon.