Ludovic Chabant

“Metaplot” is often a dirty word around TTRPG players, and I just don’t understand this negative attitude. Here are some ways to deal with them (the metaplots, not the players with a negative attitude), all of which I’ve done to some degree or another except the last option. What’s a Metaplot First, I want to […]

Last year my Friday-evening group played a short campaign of Blades in the Dark (BitD), so I figured I’d share some notes about it — mostly the bits that we did wrong or that I didn’t like, with some actionable recommendations that will hopefully improve your experience should you play BitD yourself. We played weekly […]

There’s this preconception in roleplaying circles that game settings are easy to get into if they have a book or movie about them. Middle Earth is “easy to grasp”, people say, because you “just” need to read a couple of (overly long) books, or watch a couple of (overly long) movies. But I was watching […]

The last episode of Ken & Robin Talk About Stuff had a great little segment on crunch, and what it means especially when it is, in practice, vastly left unused. I didn’t really agree with Robin’s theory on self-identification as “someone who plays crunchy games”, but I was definitely behind Ken’s take about the option […]

IGN has a very nice article and video about Project Hot Tub, which I worked on a bit as a Frostbite engine developer. I was part of the Frostbite cinematics team but at the time I was mostly working on the camera system (which got used on a couple projects like Anthem and one of […]

I was recently listening to the Titterpigs episode on horror games, where Scott and Keith put out an open question to their audience: can you have a horror game that lets you retain agency throughout the whole adventure? I wrote up some long rant, recorded it, and sent it to them. I figured that, for […]

When Bud (of Bud’s RPG Review fame) did his RPG DNA on Twitter, it featured something not quite like a traditional RPG: Fighting Fantasy books. I remember going “huh” when he mentioned this in his “First, Last, and Everything” in the Grognard Files podcast #41, because Fighting Fantasy books were also a big part of […]