Author Archives: Tim Hall

You want bizarre conspiracy theories? Which encompass Middle Earth and Celene Dion? Try this one on Dreamscribe, written by Neil Marsden.

This week’s WISH from Turn of a Friendly Die.

Sometimes in my games, I try to set a mood, only to have a joke or out-of-character chatter/commentary ruin it by going off on a tangent or breaking everyone into laughter, occasionally including me. I have pretty much given up on trying to get my players to be serious all the time – after all, when I’m on the other side of the screen, I’m not always serious either. Plus the game is a social, fun event, and people should not feel forced to be serious or in character all the time. (I’ll save that for LARPers)

That said, how do you keep the mood? And once lost, how do you try to bring everyone back? Can you? Is it even possible?

And what do you do with that one player who is always the first one to crack a joke and break up the tension you’ve built to so carefully, no matter how many times you’ve asked/warned him/her not to do that?

A difficult one. I’ve GMed a game where the out-of-game chatter took up more time than the actual game, which was very frustrating, to say the least. The last time I played with that group we got the OOC chatter out of the way first, only trouble was that took up two entire days before we started gaming! Not ideal.

The games I’ve GMed have tended not to be highly mood-intensive anyway, perhaps that’s my problem. A lot of the gaming I play is weekend-long sessions with people I only meet two or three times a year, where the purpose is as much social as gaming. And many games are ffairly light-hearted, comedy-style games in the first place.

One thing I have considered, though, is a pun box. Like a swearbox, but for puns. I hate bad puns.

Have you ever seen or met someone — in person, on TV, in a movie, or whatever — who made you think “Oh my goodness, that’s my character!” Who was it (if you know), and what were the similarities?

In a word, no. I don’t know whether that means I don’t watch enough TV and movies, or my characters aren’t well enough defined.

However, there is one player (who shall be nameless) in my Dreamlyrics message board game for whom all her characters remind me of Dr. Who’s assistant, Leela. “Can I kill him now, doctor?”.

According to this news.com article, the Greek government has banned all electronic and computer gaming of any kind, ostensibly as part of a law to outlaw gambing machines.

Not only does this mean that tourists risk heavy fines and even imprisonment for playing something as innocuous as a gameboy, presumably this makes it illegal to play in any PBeMs or message games from Greece.

I don’t know the background to this law, or much about Greek politics, but it seems to me that any politicians who could pass a law like this without any kind of public consultation is either too stupid or too evil to be allowed to remain in public office. Was this law passed as a result of some hysterical moral panic led by the Greek equivalent of the Daily Mail?

It may be that this law will eventually be struck down by the European Court of Human rights.