{"id":923,"date":"2024-07-15T08:17:15","date_gmt":"2024-07-15T13:17:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/?p=923"},"modified":"2025-09-11T07:09:20","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T12:09:20","slug":"mad-libs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/?p=923","title":{"rendered":"Mad Libs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I just got back from CharCon, an excellent little pocket gaming convention in Charleston, WV. I’ll probably post a more thorough con review later, but the post that’s been stuck in my head for the last couple of days is a con GMing tactic that I encountered on Friday night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friday night’s Fallout<\/em> session, like all good convention games, used pre-generated player characters. What made these different was the GM’s insertion of a Mad Libs-style fill-in-your-own-characterization block in the lower left corner of the sheet:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It’s ridiculously simple, but it made a noticeable difference around the table in terms of player investment in the PCs they’d just received.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Apocalypse World <\/em>and its Powered by the Apocalypse<\/em> derivatives all have something similar in their playbooks, of course, but it’s a pre-defined list of choices – and I’d never made the connection between that concept and the need to provide some sort of player input on con one-shot pre-gens. I’ll definitely be stealing this for future demo games I run.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just got back from CharCon, an excellent little pocket gaming convention in Charleston, WV. I’ll probably post a more thorough con review later, but the post that’s been stuck in my head for the last couple of days is a con GMing tactic that I encountered on Friday night. Friday night’s Fallout session, like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[106,112],"tags":[73,51,72,74,66],"class_list":["post-923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-characters","category-mechanics","tag-apocalypse-world","tag-conventions","tag-fallout","tag-pbta","tag-the-dark-arts-of-gming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=923"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":925,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923\/revisions\/925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}