Theory review #24

• Story Improvisation in Tabletop Roleplaying Games: Towards a Computational Assistant for Game Masters by Devi Acharya, Michael Mateas and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, https://ieee-cog.org/2021/assets/papers/paper_164.pdf , presents an interview of several game masters for a future attempt to create a digital GM assistant. The game masters clearly have different approaches to player input, either genuinely giving players power or dodging around it, but the authors do not take this into account. A game master assistant without acknowledgement of such different ways of running games can hardly be very useful.
• To crawl or not to crawl mostly by Ron Edwards, http://adeptplay.com/consulting/crawl-or-not-crawl, discusses the concept of the crawl, a class of gaming where characters go into a dangerous situation, lose resources and earn something before returning to safety, and all of this with a real risk.
• Hvordan lede rollespill, https://poddtoppen.se/podcast/1536830416/rollespillprat/episode-02-hvordan-lede-rollespill, is a discussion about how to run roleplaying games. It does acknowledge different ways of doing so and there is even some discussion of actual player agency.