Samantha Patri's Blog

Superheroes We're a big fan of the superhero genre - the telling of stories not too dissimilar to the myths of the past. The idea of characters, larger than life, performing great deeds of heroism and villainy, of human pathos and hubris. Not so big a fan of the 'perpetually bound to the same, unchanging characters, for generations' thing -- a big part of this would be to allow the characters to age, hand off to the next generation, and keep going, but that's more an 'us problem'. Also not a fan of the 'no hero is allowed to be happy' thing that keeps going on, and the big glowing 'reset everything to zero' button. Anyway. The one thing we do find difficult is trying to find a good tabletop roleplaying game for playing heroes. The first one we ever encountered was the Classic Marvel Super Heroes RPG (or what we like to call the FASERIP system after the attributes for the game). The game is a relic of its times - everything is charts, and random d...

At the tables we run, we've got a diverse crowd. We've people with autism, PTSD, dyscalculia, ADHD, DID, and many other issues that they need to deal with. We've had players like this for most of our life; enough so that we've picked up a number of skills to help keep the games going. Not always, not always well , but we've got a lot more successes than failures under our belt. Running tables for those with special needs is a bit more work than normal, but we also feel it's a lot more rewarding -- gaming should be for everyone, and we make it a point to try to keep our tables open for everyone , including those players who would be seen as 'problem players' because people don't know how to deal with, say, an autistic player.   Don't Lie The unfortunate thing is some players on the autism spectrum just don't take lying well -- like us, for instance. It causes stress, frustration, and anger if we feel we've been lied to -- even if the lie w...