When I was 13 or 14 years old, I joined my very first tabletop gaming group. Competitive gaming: The Day of the Kentucky-Fried Aarakocra Progression: Moving toward rewards and the completion of ingame goals. Grind: Doing something repeatedly to get a specific reward. Roll: Always in the sense of dice rather than wheels. The MUD’s code numbers each room, assigns monsters to them, and keeps track of which players are in and around them. A room can be an actual room in a building, yes, but it can also be the northwest end of a grassy field area, an undersea courtyard in an underwater city area, or even one particular hamster cage in a pet shop area. Individual self-contained adventure modules in MUDs are called areas, while the components of the area are called rooms.

Sort of like World of Warcraft, but it only uses text and typed commands. (The books might be PDFs and a phone app might substitute for the dice, but it still involves real people sitting together to play.) Tabletop (TT): Game played on an actual flat surface in the real world, with dice, pens/pencils, and resource books at the ready. An NPC, or non-player character, is controlled by the GM or by computer code. PC: Player character, a character in a game that is controlled by a human. Also sometimes called Dungeon Master (DM) or many other similar terms. GM: Gamemaster, the person running the game for the players. But I want to talk about the more traditional tabletop and video games in which players contend against the gamemaster, and both sides of the GM’s screen have an important role to play. One kind of competitive gaming has players competing against each other-your Call of Duty or Overwatch, for example. In roleplaying games, players can either cooperate with their gamemaster (GM) to tell a story, or the GM can do their best to stymie or even kill the players’ characters. When I first got involved in tabletop gaming and video games, I found my bliss in competitive gaming, working against a game’s creator. I’m all about creating and telling a great story nowadays.īut there’s a lid for every pot, and long ago my pot was shaped differently.

If you’ve read me for a while, it’s not hard to figure out where I stand when it comes to cooperative vs. Here's how this play style works, when to use it, and how to learn to administer it.

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