The Myth of the Solitary Villain

The more sophisticated and powerful a technology, the more people are needed to weaponize it. And the more people needed to weaponize it, the more societal controls work to defuse, or soften, or prevent harm from happening. I add one additional thought. Even if you had a budget to hire a team of scientists whose job it was to develop a species-extinguishing bio weapon, or to take down the internet to zero, you probably still couldn’t do it. That’s because hundreds of thousands of man-year...

 RPG as Cooperative Storytelling

An RPG is a process of cooperative storytelling: the Gamemaster lays out a situation or scenario for the players, such as, “You hear an alarm coming from the First National Bank!” The players then choose how their characters react (“We rush to the bank to see what’s going on!”). Things proceed in a back-and-forth manner, with the GM explaining the unfolding story (how a super-villain is robbing the bank and trying to escape with his ill-gotten gains, etc.) and the players decidingvw...

 RPG as Cooperative Storytelling

An RPG is a process of cooperative storytelling: the Gamemaster lays out a situation or scenario for the players, such as “you hear an alarm coming from the First National Bank!” The players then choose how their characters react (“We rush to the bank to see what’s going on!”). Things proceed in a back-and-forth manner, with the GM explaining the unfolding story (how a supervillain is robbing the bank and trying to escape with his ill-gotten gains, etc.) and the players deciding wha...