Play Passionately

Play Passionately is the phrase I came up with to describe my personal role-playing philosophy. At the heart of play passionately is emotional trust, honesty and vulnerability. I believe that if we are interested in using role-playing as a process for story creation that we must be willing to risk failure and even emotional pain. In doing so we grow closer as friends and learn something about one another as fellow human beings. Furthermore, I believe that clear and well designed rule sets are essential for preventing such an endeavor from becoming an exercise in social or emotional bullying.

Articles

• Introduction
• “The Story”
• The Slippery Slope of Stakes
• Passionate Play #1: The Unwanted Pregnancy
• Character Advocacy: Part I
• Character Advocacy: Part II
• Passionate Play #2: It’s Worth Risking What You Want
• Encultured Systems
• Walk, Don’t Run To Conflict
• Passionate Play #3: Zombies Move Slowly
• Why I Hate Fun
• Overly Processing Play With The Rules
• Passionate Play #4: Epic Fail… Maybe Not So Epic
• Role-Playing And Narrative Structure
• Gamer Baggage
• Passionate Play #5: You Can’t Ruin The Story
• Passionate Play #6: Core Principles In Action
• Choices & Internal Conflicts
• The Culture of Outcome
• Why the GM is Not a Sadist
• Social Responsibility and Honest Adversity
• Play Passionately: State of the Union

Game Spotlights

• The Shab-al-Hiri Roach

The Design Sidebar

• The Object of the Game

Games of My Design

• Bloodthorn Press
• The Extraordinarily Horrible Children of Raven’s Hollow