The best posts in the advice category of this year.
What are the Bloggies?
The Bloggies are back. A yearly celebration of blogging in tabletop roleplaying games. It’s one-part award show and one-part battle royale. It’s silly. It’s intense. It’s an opportunity to read great posts from across the blogosphere.
What is this about then?
I love RPG blogs, but my friends don’t. They’re not going to read the 80+ blog posts that make up the entire Bloggies competition. But maybe they’ll read the best ones if I give some solid recommendations. If you’re someone who already plans to read all (or most) of the Bloggies, this isn’t for you. This short series will offer a few recommendations for the five Bloggie categories this year: advice, critique, gameable, theory, and meta.
Advice for Casuals
This category includes advice for play, prep, publishing, and more. Here are the five posts with the most practical advice/guidance, but several of them may not apply to what you create or play. However, Ten Intangible Tips… is incredibly useful for anyone writing RPG materials they think anyone else might read at some point.
Got no game: Should your module be system agnostic?
A useful, reflective text for anyone who has written or aims to write system agnostic modules. I wish Idle Cartulary made some stronger judgments about how the system-agnostic nature of some of the examples enhances or detracts from the module, but you’ll have to read her Bathtub Reviews to find that info.
Ten Intangible Tips for Development Editing Your RPG Manuscript
Even though I don’t agree with each tip, this post outlines invaluable arguments. Sorensen is maybe the best out there right now when it comes to advice for RPG editing, a topic few visit beyond blasé questions like “should you capitalize game mechanics in your zine?”
How to Replicate Over/Under
A great post that explains what live text roleplay is and how to run a LTRP game for you and your friends. I do think something like “Live Text Roleplay: A Guide” would be a better title to a casual RPGer who frankly has no idea what Over/Under is.
How I Do Play by Post
Similar to How to Replicate Over/Under, this post is a great guide for setting up a play-by-post RPG with Discord. If you don’t think you’ll run one, you can pass on it though.
Treat Illusions As You Would Any Other Lie: No Rolls
Not only does all of this advice support my preferred playstyle, it also covers some of the trickiest magical trappings that GMs and players encounter. Many 5e tables might never have had issues with “Charm Person” spells if they had just read this post.
And that’s it. I’m going to try to publish the rest of these ASAP so that readers who are interested may vote in the upcoming Bloggies, but I won’t be surprised if I also fall short of reading 80+ posts and writing up recommendation lists like this one.
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