Author: David Heyes

I may have not looked hard enough for this, and my apologies if that is the case, but – Is there a document that describes who the Gauntlet Staff are?

So I got the chance to play in a really fun game of Seco Creek last night, but one thing happened to me and another player. You know how normally in Google Hangouts the screen will switch back and forth between the loudest speaker? Well it would get stuck one one speaker after about the first hour. Now I know about how to lock and unlock the screen on to one particular member by clicking on their little image to lock and clicking it again to unlock it, and even when unlocked (that is not locked on any particular player) the screen was always stuck on one player the whole rest of the night.

Has anyone both experienced this and found a way to make it work correctly again? I did skim through google to see if there was an answer (very briefly) but all I got was the “just click the outlined member of the chat” which was not helpful in my case.

So this is just an observation I’m having as I’m doing my prep for my first Monster of the Week game… The majority of the PbtA games that I’ve read in the last three months are comprise a really amazing set of tools for teaching people how to be GOOD gamemasters (DMs, MCs, whatevers). At first I basically ignored the Monster Hearts MC prep work and just relied on my experience as a gamemaster. About halfway through I sat down and did the work. Yeah, I understood the basic concepts and how they worked in play from my own “rules soft” approach to gaming, but man I wish I’d had these back in the 90s! Plus, after doing the work I came away with a much more… I don’t know useable framework. Useable isn’t really the word, the idea I’m thinking of is something like portable. It helped me to get done only what I needed to get done, and in such a way so as to be able to keep the whole of the frame work of the rules and the fiction available to me as my group created the story.

Sitting here doing the work for tonight’s game I’m finding that, while I have a general idea of how to do things, there are some really good lessons implicit and explicit about how to “stay on target” during prep, including how to leave plenty of room for the unknown specifically useful for MotW sure, but having started to gnaw on them, I am definitely seeing how some of this game’s perspectives will help my D&D monthly game.

I have to say though, I owe a lot to using what I’ve heard in the various podcasts here from The Gauntlet crew, and I have blatantly stolen some of the tricks I’ve observed. So thanks for those 😀

Woohoo! Tonight I will be shlippings into my first ever gauntlet hangout! Here’s to hoping it goes well!

Okay so I have this idea, and I just wanted to see if other PbtA players had any thoughts. Remember that old game “killer” it was probably the first LARP I ever player, although I didn’t even know what a LARP was back then. In that game basically you stand in a circle and, if I remember correctly, you look at each other in the eye. If the killer winks at you, you die, but you can’t say anything. You just fall down. The goal is to call out the killer before you die.

Anyway… I was thinking that there has got to be a way to replicate this kind of mechanic. It may be because I’m binge watching Dexter, but I think with a mixture of the high octane emotional content of games like Monster Hearts or Malandros, there must be a way to pull this off. Of course there would be moves involved, not blinking.

I imagine that it would involve something like index cards, or random number generation or something, so that even the MC doesn’t know who the killer is.

I dunno it’s just a thought. Maybe someone else has already managed something like this.

I’m gonna work on it, but I was just wondering if anyone else might think this could be interesting.

It wouldn’t even have to be “killer” it could be any kind of “secret” like a spy game (a la Blindspot).

(and, again, if this isn’t the kind of thing that should be posted here, lemme know and I’ll remove it)

Is the Discord server for this community only available as a perk for $7 patrons like the Slack?

Is it assumed that games run in the community will use video and voice? Is it uncommon for people to just use voice?

So I don’t have anything profound to say, just hello and thank you for welcoming me to the group! I’ve been devouring all the play podcasts and some of the theory podcasts as well, and now I’m a patreon (thank you tax returns). I’m hoping to join one of the games (although it looks like they are all mostly full currently. Later, I hope to have earned enough cred to even gasp run a game or two.