What to do about occasional players

When in the past players have been unable to show up for one or more sessions, the characters have by default been played by the other players by committee, and somewhat in the background. In some genres (cyberpunk, superhero) it is easier to agree that the character is doing his/her day-job or similar schtick and can't respond to “Avengers Assemble” or whatever.

How have you used game mechanics to explore religion in your games

I never did much with this. RQ cults were the best mechanism I've given any time to — they did give a notion of concepts like “holy” that an entirely barren (i.e. state education requirement for religious instruction) Church of England background had only rendered meaningless.

When is breaking character the right thing to do

I think one needs to take a utilitarian approach — what will bring the greater good for the greater number of those assembled to play. This covers the jerk chaot and narcissistic thespian cases nicely with reasons for breaking (or retiring) the character. It also stands against the breaking character just to follow along with what the GM alone wants.

For me, keeping character usually led to PCs leaving the story to do their own thing off-stage, while ciphers prospered.

What makes for Bad experiences

Well as I note elsewhere, they have all been about alienation from the hobby (not alienation as a tool within it), when I could no longer say why I was doing this thing. Encounters with dorks get forgotten, or maybe turned into war stories.

What's good or bad about Convention games

I had a brush with tournament style rules (a choose-your-stats D&D where CHA was made useful by controlling how many times the player could speak during the game) at the first Dragonmeet I went to (c1980); and didn't stop to play. I've only actually played or run “delegate organised” games, haphazard pick-ups that were at worst forgettable.

What makes for a Sense of wonder moment?

Thinking hard on this one, I think I can honestly say that the only gaming related sense-of-wonder experiences I can recall have been while reading the books, or maybe a decade ago (c.1991), trying to infer Glorantha trivia with a similarly minded friend. GMing is always looking at the scenery from the wrong side; and as player, the charge I used to get was adrenalin highs from chancy combat.

One how not to do it with a really nifty setting is to play tour guide. Taking one example from experience, visiting Tada's High Tumulus in game is likely to concern itself more with logistics than any “gosh wow” one might derive from taking the old RQ2 Prax map and talking out the consequences of assuming that it depicts the tumulus to scale, never mind whether the other players are or are not Glorantha groupies at the time.

(How) do you limit the spectrum of choice of PCs

My first reaction was: Doesn't everyone, at least when it comes to “genre appropriate”? But then I remembered the Arduin Techno character class. The real limitations I'd impose along with genre are “able to get along with all the others” and “plausibly sane” which are both fairly vague; and usually unspoken or implicitly expected of players. I have done “no non-humans” as an explicit limitation in D&D games, but that has been a part of the setting — I've deleted the damned clichés and added in different races without the usual baggage of preconceptions.

I don't really recall any significant player reaction; the general principles are part of the cooperative playing style that evolved fairly naturally; a style that led to “Does not compute!” reactions when later once faced with Paranoia.

There are a couple of instances where I should have limited but didn't — vetting character secret agendas up-front for the Vampire game (rather than having it explode into five separate solo stories), or helping a player doing a one-off appearance in out mid-80s Champions game who had no experience of the superhero genre to build a superhero rather than a fantasy character.