Author: dicemistress

One Word: Drills

September 24, 2019
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| Knighthood, Musings of the Mistress

If I had to sum up this week’s class in one word that word would be ‘drills.’ We went through two drills that we need to all do regularly, as in daily, to help us commit to muscle memory the different attacks and defenses that we learned the week before AND with that to improve and work on our footwork. When you watch the Knights perform, carefully watch their movement and you’ll see that it’s a dance of steel and sweat. Feet and weapon move in tandem. What may seem like chaos, isn’t. They know how to read their…

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The Journey Begins

September 19, 2019
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| Knighthood, Musings of the Mistress

Class started on the evening of Monday, Sept. 16. Out of the nearly dozen who’d signed up/expressed an interest in joining the class there were only six of us who showed up, and the majority of us are women! Two others who have been through this before are also auditing the class. It’s rather cool for the class to be majority women (who says we don’t like to play with swords). We were given plastic wasters (training swords) to use for our 100 level class, which will last for the next two-and-a-half months or so. We won’t start using…

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Journey to Knighthood: It All Starts Soon

September 13, 2019
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| Knighthood, Musings of the Mistress

In late July 2019 I was reviewing the LARP List here on my site and one of the entries caught my attention. The entry was for the Seattle Knights and I remember years ago when I knew someone who had gone through their Academy and had been a Knight for a while. I remember thinking how cool that was and that I wanted that experience, but back then I didn’t have the time or money to do it. Fast forward until now and when I saw that entry the thoughts of that the question came back into my mind:…

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In Memoriam: PAX West and I

September 4, 2019
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| Musings of the Mistress

It’s just after Labor Day, the last day of PAX West, and for me PAX is now over for 2019 and to some extent I think for good. For years I’ve either done the 4-Day pass or gotten passes for each day if I wasn’t a panelist and ended up with a speaker/special guest badge and gone out for each day. This year has been different. This year things have changed on both my side and PAX’s side, and they’re neither good nor bad, but just are, and yet I’m no longer as fond of PAX as I once…

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Artistic Realizations

March 22, 2019
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| Musings of the Mistress

I’ve been working on a project that deals with creating particular experiences (the details of the project I’m not yet ready to share), and as I was working on some of the documentation needed for it I had one of those epiphany moments; those kind where you realize something key about yourself or something that’s had an effect in your life. This particular realization has to do with GMing and role-playing and it’s that while I can GM and I am a decent GM, GMing for traditional table-top games (if table-top RPGs could even be called ‘traditional’) isn’t where…

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My Gamer Type: Immersed Storywriter

November 21, 2018
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| Musings of the Mistress

One of the first things I did when I started at my current company was take an assessment that helped me understand my gaming style or type. I realized that I never really shared this out, and I find it very telling about myself and my RP/game style and key motivations. I’m an Immersed Storywriter: I like to hold my character’s actions and fate in my hands, allowing me to feel completely engrossed in the role-play experience. I like feeling a sense of control and freedom as well as an emotional connection to my characters. For me playing a…

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The GM-PC Conundrum

November 18, 2018
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| Musings of the Mistress

It’s amazing what playing in a game can do to spurn thoughts, and this one is something that I’ve seen done well, but also seen done disastrously: GMs/STs who also have PCs in the game. Much like the recent posts this one was inspired by a conversation I had where mentioned that “I feel as an ST/GM that you need to look at your game first, not your PCs.” I am very much an advocate of if you’re running a game, find a game to play in, with one major caveat: it should not be your own game. Find…

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Game Boundaries, Expectations, and Letting Players Go

November 16, 2018
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| Musings of the Mistress

I was chatting with one of my STs/GMs the other night after I’d decided to retire my character from play. My reasons for doing so aren’t important here, but over the course of the conversation surrounding the character’s retirement I also learned more about the nature of the game that was being run and the system that was being used (I was new to this edition of the game system) and realized that it wasn’t one that fit with what I was looking for in a game. Despite myself pointing out several times that “this system just isn’t my…

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On Players, Characters, and PC ties

November 16, 2018
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| Musings of the Mistress

PC to PC ties can be a great way to help web and network a new character into a game, but that only works if the characters that a PC is tied to are around, active, and able to be engaged with for that tie to be meaningful. Otherwise it just becomes a background point that fades into history. I see two types of ties: the ‘handwave tie’ and the ‘deep tie.’ The handwave tie is a tie that is very background and really won’t come into play in any significant way, and when it does come into play…

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What to do with a website?

May 6, 2017
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| Musings of the Mistress

In early 2004 I purchased a domain name and a little bit of space on a server and set up mortalisrpg.com. Initially it was for a table-top RPG project, but that quickly morphed into a live-action RPG (LARP) project within a year. The project itself never saw full completion (at least as I would define it) but did give me space to write about LARPing and so I did for several years. Time passes, people change, and by around 2010 I no longer was regularly LARPing and a few years later I had stopped altogether. For the past several…

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