Take Frequent Sabbaticals

Written by Tyson J. Hayes on 2010/02/10 – 00:00 -

Bill Watterson is often referenced for taking frequent sabbaticals from Calvin and Hobbes. He’s cited for taking some long breaks during his cartooning years to rest and gather his creativity. Currently Apathy Games is on a one week hiatus from game development to unwind from an intense run of developing and it got me thinking about Sabbaticals.

I take sabbaticals from gaming. I love playing in games and running them but occasionally I need a break. I take a month or two off from gaming and come back ready to go at it again. For me it’s been quite a while since I took a sabbatical and since starting the blog gaming has been on my mind all day every day. While I’m passionate about my hobby and love talking about it I need to be careful not to burn myself out. Weariness is why we have multiple authors and only post four times a week (Savage Mondays writes itself, let’s be honest). Most weeks are split between Jeff and I, with the occasional post from Paul. Hillary will eventually break her vow of silence and pull herself away from her sketch pad long enough to dictate a post then disappear into the ether. We pass the podium around so none of us get weary. If you’re getting weary from GMing try a different game, pass the GM duties off to another person to run the game for a bit, or take a sabbatical. Games are supposed to be fun, right?

While I’ve been talking about endings and sabbaticals please rest assured that Apathy Games is not going anywhere. We’ll be running a guest post from Dave Martin from Tabletop Armory tomorrow but rest assured we’ll be back on Friday. We’ll have a fist of beer in one hand and dice in the other giving the one, two punch of apathetic goodness.


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Zero Compromise Beer

Written by Paul von Meerschedit on 2010/01/14 – 00:08 -

Zero Compromise Roleplaying requires a Zero Compromise beer.

We here at Apathy Games find that there is only one beer that truly satisfies our requirements, and that beer is Arrogant Bastard Ale . A beer designed to offend and insult, it comes with a rambling tirade against the evils of wimpy yellow beer across the entire back of its 22.5 oz bottle, and a cap which proudly proclaims “You’re not worthy”; this is truly “one lacerative mother of a beer”.

Carrying a healthy 7.2% alcohol by volume and a rating on the International Bitterness scale so high it is classified, Arrogant Bastard Ale is truly the beer for people who know what they want, and will accept nothing less. For those of us at Apathy Games, this is a perfect match. Other beers flirt with our attentions, and may captivate our interest for short periods of time, but inevitably have words such as “blend”, “compromise”, or “balance” on their label. These terms indicate that the brewers were unwilling to really put themselves or their product out there. They were  willing to settle for second best.

The people at Stone Brewing are unwilling to make similar compromises, and so are we.


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Don’t Sweat the Rules

Written by Paul von Meerschedit on 2009/11/20 – 08:00 -

Earlier this week when we gave you confessions from a rules lawyer, we posed the question, “What advice would you give a novice GM?” Apathy Games editor, Paul von Meerschedit, had this to say.

First rule: Don’t sweat the rules. Ever.

Especially in your first couple sessions. The rules are there for a reason, yes.  Eventually they will be both your crutch and your damnation, but until then they are a stumbling block to running a satisfying game, for either you or your players.

Rules are important in two situations:

1) Roleplay: Your players are trying to do something that you won’t just let them do, and they need to back it up with dice.

2) Combat: A numbers based abstraction of actions and maneuvers characters might use in a fight, used to delineate winners and losers.

Thus, the rules exist as an aid to enforce fairness (if all the players follow the same rules, favoritism is significantly more difficult) and provide stat based challenges to your players. With this in mind, consider the following: When a player asks to do something and you do not know if a specific rule for that action exists, does it matter? As long as the player is given some numerical way to attempt the challenge, the exact rule is irrelevant.

When I first run a game using a new system, I read the rules before play begins. I attempt to get a general idea of what a standard challenge is, and the way roleplaying and combat are adjudicated. Then I run the game. For any given situation, be it combat or roleplay, I will only look up one rule. The rest will either be adjudicated to the best of MY understanding, according to rules I have already learned, or with a simple test defined on the spot. After the situation has ended, I will look up the correct way to run that rule.

As a new GM, what do you do to avoid getting hung up?


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