The Weekly Assembly: The Memorable Improv GM-mas Eve Eve Edition

At Home

Articles posted here on The Gamer Assembly.

• December’s theme at The Gamer Assembly is Favorite Gaming Memories. We’ve got a few this week.

• My Act of Wizardly Cowardice by paulbaalham shows us a favorite gaming memory illustrating the importance of communication and keeping the party together.

• The start of a long road of gaming… by Daniel O’Crowe brings us back to an 11-year-old’s first exposure to RPGs.

• Swords to Ploughshares, Part III by Chris Jackson continues his series on avoiding bloodshed in 4e, this time involving an abolethic cult and a crazed, evil cleric.

• Gaming Memories: No Limits and Spectacular Failure uses PAX East‘s Learn To Play sessions to illustrate why tabletop RPGs will always be cooler than video games in Brian Liberge‘s mind.

• On Stack Exchange and Scholarly RPG Papers exposes a couple of treatises on RPGs. One dissects character creation, and the other uses the four basic D&D classes as archetypical approaches to interpreting RPG rules.

Away

Content from people involved with The Gamer Assembly posted elsewhere across the Internet.

• Got Loot – The Festive Blogfest starts Saturday 24 December 2011! Come join the community to blog about loot during the last week of the year! Open to all, with guest blogger space still available!

• Brent Newhall at The RPG Doctor has One Little Tweak for the free OD&D system Searchers of the Unknown to balance different weapon types.

• On Gaming Daughters and Life-Knitting by T.W.Wombat at Wombat’s Gaming Den of Iniquity explores the essence of what gaming means to me.

• “Why” And How It Can Improve Your Game by WolfSamurai at RPG Musings talks about how asking “why” can improve games.

• Alternate Tech Trees by T.W.Wombat at Wombat’s Gaming Den of Iniquity asks which societal issues you’d like to change the answers to when worldbuilding and how those changes cascade into daily life thousands of years later.

• Meanwhile, Brent Newhall insists that Castles Were Decoration, explaining the historical realities of castles, and what that means for role-playing campaigns (hint: they’re much more interesting).

• Brent Newhall writes about his experiences running Everyone Is John, a rules-light story-driven game where each player is a voice inside the head of a totally insane man named John from Minneapolis.

• Brent Newhall also played a game of Dungeon World on a Google+ Hangout. A video recording is available.

Notes From Abroad

All other interesting articles and cool links.

• Fantasy Armor and Lady Bits gives us an armorer’s perspective on balancing utility and femininity to avoid the fantasy trap of pointless armor for women. Cheesecake Armor Bonus, beware; your days are numbered.

• Ryan Macklin called for articles describing ways to hack Don’t Rest Your Head in a post on his blog entitled Don’t Hack This Game! Get your hacker hats on and submit an article.

• Newbie DM opened a discussion on the changing role of the DM. Take a look at the great discussion in the comments.

• Also in the Role of the GM vein, The Id DM published some thoughts on how a GM’s role is to entertain the players in I Am The Entertainer, And I Know Just Where I Stand.

• The Mandragora gives us a few techniques and some basic ideas for improvisational GMing in The Art of “Winging it”.

• Fears for Tiers (Come On, I’m Talking to You) from Jared von Hindman takes a look at how the various D&D tiers impact character development and introduces the idea of XP as narrative energy. Your PCs can’t go home again, but they’ll have a heck of story when they’re done.

• I keep thinking about running a Lexicon game, so this week I looked up some variations on the standard letter-a-day format.

• And since it’s December Twenty-Third, I’d like to wish everyone a happy Christmas Eve Eve (YouTube Link). The song is also available free from the creators right through here, complete with bonus creepy cat. Thanks to Paul & Storm for plagiarizing this song from writing this song in the style of They Might Be Giants.

MetaRoundup

A roundup of roundups featuring links of interest to the tabletop RPG community.
Please let us know about other weekly roundups in the comments!

• Game Knight Reviews comes out with News From Around the Net articles on Fridays. This week’s roundup includes a link to the Weekly Assembly and a list of other RPG news sites. Thanks for the link!

• Roving Band of Misfits publishes their Weekly Roundup column every Sunday. This week’s Dungeonmorph Dice Have Arrived Edition features a video of the Dungeonmorph Dice.