My RPG work

My name is Gerrit and I'm a TTRPG and LAOG designer. Are you interested in the games I have designed? Have a look into this post. If you are interested in an exchange with me about your or my design? Join the Gauntlet community, engage with me on Twitter or join the Facebook group on Remote, Digital Larps and Live-Action Online Games. 

My RPG statistics for 2020 and 2021

 This is how my RPG and LAOG / larp life looked like in the last years - in numbers. Follow me on a statistical ride, based on the form I'm using to track information about the sessions I played. Since I missed posting about the stats for 2020, this is looking back at two years. More so, since I'm now doing stats since 2015, I have now 7 years I can compare with each other. Sounds like a decent time series, doesn't it? 

Surprise, surprise, my gaming moved online over the pandemic. Also, I played a lot less. From the all-time-high in 2017 with 370 hours of gaming, I'm down to 130 hours in 2021. That still sounds like enough to me. The stats nicely show that pandemic times weren't a drastic shift in gaming. Quite the opposite, my gaming has been mainly online since 2017 - when we had moved to Guatemala.  I'm a fan of playing online: the variety of people I can play with, the setup, the commitment to logistics. 

All the following figures are percentages in gaming hours - not counted in sessions. Which means that longer sessions have a higher weight. That seems to me to be the more useful stat as more time usually also means higher importance and hopefully more joy.  

Three Forms of LAOGs

In this article, I present a categorisation of LAOGs - depending on how they make use of the communication channels in place. I identify three different forms: The Diegetic Call, The Invisible Call and The Metaphorical Call. Let me take you on this journey of design exploration. Then make up your own mind how your experience fits or does not fit into this picture. 

An Overview of existing LAOGs - Live Action Online Games

Live action is for everybody. Larping online makes larping accesible to a completely new audience, makes it much easier for people with kids, financial,  mental or physical constraints and allows for a truly global audience at a minimum of environmental costs.

It's time to list all the existing games (of my knowledge) and where to find them. [EDIT: So many larps have been transitioned to be played online due to the Corono-crisis, I can't list them all but will focus on those with interesting design choices specifically for online play.]

My RPG year 2019 part 2: Statistics and insights I

Playing Makeup Moments in 2019

In the following I dive deep into the statistics I made around my gaming in 2019. That is much more than a count of sessions. I compare with the four previous years on what genres I played, with whom I played and many other sometimes surprisingly interesting insights I find in this data. Come with me, have a look at how I played and maybe reflect on your own patterns and how they might have changed over time.

My RPG year 2019 part 1: Looking back

It's 2020 and time to look back to my RPG life 2019. Again, I have done statistics and will publish them here in three successive articles. This first one will be about what generally has happened in my RPG life.

My RPG year 2018 Part 3: Characters of the Year Awards

Picture by Tina Cassati

This is about the characters I played. In Part 1 of my review of 2018 I talked about my RPG activities, in Part 2 about my gaming - but now we come to the core of it: the roles - as in role playing. This third and celebratory post is giving all the attention to our protagonists: the characters we played.  Let's give them all a big applause for the good time they gave us.

My RPG year 2018 Part 2: Statistics and insights

Statistics sound boring. But they don't need to be. I track my roleplaying activities to learn, to reflect and to make visible. I think there are some interesting points in here for others, too, hence the publication of the data and my accompanying thoughts.

This is the second part of me looking back into 2018 and what has happened in terms of roleplaying for me personally. Part 1 focused on my activities beside playing. This part is about playing. Part 3 will be the award ceremony for the characters I played.

My RPG year 2018 Part 1: Looking back

I'm carefully tracking my roleplaying activities for a couple of years now. 2018 was no exception. For the next three blog posts, I talk about what I have done and played with some deeper insights behind my personal statistics.

Sharing the cognitive load

This is a re-post of a blog article I wrote for The Gauntlet Blog.


It's an article for online game facilitators and how they can structure the social aspects of a game session: how to discuss the game, bring in safety tools and eventually how to share the roles which usually all seem to automatically fall into the facilitator's lap with other players. I provide a template I created for your convenience. The final paragraphs are dedicated to how to end a sessions, namely how to do a debrief - and finally why debriefing and feedback are so hard to separate from each but should be separate.

Designing and playing live action online games – laogs

This year I started a new project on the Gauntlet Hangouts calendar under the name: live action online games. It’s my attempt to bring some of my favourite moments I had in Nordic larps and American freeform into an online world. In a laog, you stay for the actual play time 100% in-character, often the nature of the video call is part of the game. There can be mechanics or meta-techniques but we don’t describe what our characters are doing, but what we do, we do.