Category: Who Dares Rolls Series
Tabletop Game Review – 6 Minutes of Power Remaining
This article was originally written for Who Dares Rolls (www.whodaresrolls.com) and is reproduced here with permission.
Note: This article also includes some references to personal experiences of death and loss, and discusses those themes.
6 Minutes of Power Remaining is by Kris Ruff
A lot of the games in the Emotional Mecha Jam focus on humanising the mech in these mecha stories – often through making it a role played by a player, whether or not it is actually a sentient AI. This opens the theming of the games up to wider questions touching on those explored by cyberpunk fiction; whether or not a meaningful bond can exist between a human and an inanimate, or non-sapient object. And, indeed, when one considers the relationships forged in war between human and AI, there is the question of whether something made as a weapon can feel friendship or love.
Tabletop Game Review – Death Sentence
This article was originally written for Who Dares Rolls (www.whodaresrolls.com) and is reproduced here with permission.
Note: This article also includes some references to personal experiences of death and loss, and discusses those themes in detail.
It took a lot longer than I initially assumed it would for me to find the right words to review Jeff Ellis’ (@manyeyedmonster’s) Death Sentence; I thought it would be a straightforward review, as I had very easily discussed the thematically similar 36 Minutes as an exploration of unglamorous death in military science-fiction. I think I needed time to unpack my thoughts, and perhaps the immediacy of my response to 36 Minutes was part of why I couldn’t launch straight into forming opinions on Death Sentence. Any game that goes into death beyond killing as a natural mechanic of conflict resolution is going to be personal, and potentially troubling, for the player. You could very well say that even in a game where the expectation is one will fight death should be personal and troubling.
Tabletop Game Review – 36 Minutes
This article was originally written for Who Dares Rolls (www.whodaresrolls.com) and is reproduced here with permission.
Note: This article also includes some references to experiences of death and loss, and discusses those themes in detail.
Christine Prevas’ (@cprevas) 36 Minutes is not an enjoyable game to play. It sits strangely within the genre it evokes because it plays out in real time a very particular sequence of suffering and death that absolutely would have a huge, unwelcome emotional impact on some players. You could roleplay it differently, and if anything make it more fitting within its genre, but I think doing so would require a significant distancing between player and character that the game does not necessarily encourage. Perhaps that is the intention; it certainly feels like something intended to take players out of the safely expected bravado of what is often a heroic, noble kind of war story. On the other hand, if you are trying to do something like that, something that wholly subverts the usual methods of a genre to question its implicit associations, that in turn is an act which needs interrogation.
Two Illustrative Playthroughs of “Alone in the Station Remnants”
This article was originally written for Who Dares Rolls (www.whodaresrolls.com) and is reproduced here with permission.
These two pieces of short fiction are my attempts to play the solitaire RPG Alone in the Station Remnants.
The most interesting thing I found about the experience was the challenge it presented in holding two registers or prose voices in mind and being able to switch between the two, presenting a narrative from two very different and incompatible approaches.
Tabletop Game Review – Alone in the Station Remnants
Note: This article was originally written for Who Dares Rolls (www.whodaresrolls.com) and is reproduced here with permission.
A screenshot from Ace Combat 7 (2019), illustrating perhaps the sort of derelict military spaces that AitSR is about exploring.
Alone in the Station Remnants by caro (@seaexcursion) is, a very interesting solitaire writing exercise/character piece; solitaire roleplaying games, in the form of journalling or letter-writing games, are fascinating to me as a writer and fan of fiction and I greatly enjoy trying them in their various forms. A modification of Takuma Okada’s Alone Among the Stars, a game of space exploration and painting expansive, dreamlike worlds, Alone in the Station Remnants brings the scale down to the intimate level, and adds an interesting parallel narrative aspect that absolutely sold it to me as good.
Ideas Without End 