Observations of the Fox

One of the key things about playtesting is seeing people do things that you hadn't necessarily expected, and seeing how those actions might impact the systems that have been put in place. Over the last week, I've seen a few of these types of actions... One of the characters who was infected by the zombie toxin was killed. They started trying to spread the infection, but the first couple of bites infected the same people that the original zombie had already infected. It didn't really make a disruption to the systems in place, but it was something I hadn't necessarily accounted for in the timing of the game. I had just assumed that a second zombie would double the rate of infection, but this chance of re-infecting someone who was already infected actually means that the acceleration isn't quite that extreme. A few of the players still just don't get it. I've explained that all they really need to do to remain active in the game is to write a name on their turn...

The premise is simple... I have a group with a total of about 25 kids, 10 minutes a day, 5 days a week.  On any given day, most of them will be there and some of them won't. It can be pretty random which kids are there on each day, but there is almost never all of them present at the same time. Some of the kids don't want to play a game, and a couple may actively resent being forced to play (in the situation I've been working through, two students are actively trying the sabotage the game).  The game is played out over several days, weeks even. So rather than a 20-30 minute turnaround on each cycle, the game has a drawn out melodrama... which also means that it can feel particularly unfair for those players who get eliminated in the earliest rounds. So I need to accommodate for all these things... above and beyond the regular requirements of a social deduction game. I'm going with the basic framework of "Werewolf/Mafia". One quarter to a third of the players w...

I have a class of academically gifted young high school students. Here in Australia, they are year 7, which makes them on average around 13 years old. It would be fair to say that since these kids are targeted as "gifted and talented" many are socially awkward, and more than a few share traits that they're probably on the Autistic spectrum at some level. I've already posted a few times about the high school gaming club I ran a few years ago, and since I'm currently unable to run this (for ongoing reasons that have now been a concern for 2.5 years), I've decided to experiments with a social deduction game using this class of students. The reasons are basically two-fold... A lot of the kids are smart, they work things out really quickly, and understand how connected systems can impact on one another. There has been a lack of social cohesion among them and I've wanted to get a sense of fun and community back into the class as we wind down toward the end of th...

Getting inspiration from other RPG designers is one thing, but I like casting my net a bit wider. Articles, like this one , help to give me the feeling that I'm on the right track with my design theory.  I've mentuoned a few times that running games and workdbuilding are both like developing a recipe. A single ingredient is linear, monochromatic, even boring. A pair of ingredients adds interest, especislly if they vary in proportions through the dish. Three or fout msy add further imterest and depth... but when you add toi many, or add conflicting ingredients, the various dlavours start working against each other and you end up with a mess. This kind of idea is a decent chunk of the t3ason why the guide to my current game system us called the "SNAFU SRD and Cookbook". Knowing ehat goes together, how it goes together, and what can go wrong if the wrong things go together is the key to producing something classic snd memorable. This is not to say experimentation is bad....

    I've set up title cards for short videos before, and I've been enthusiastic for the before as well. It's probably the AuDHD/"Neurospiciness" that alwas gets in the way of me completing the project, but hopefully this time I stick the landing.

I like reading other people's posts about game philosophy and design. Like this one I've played most of the games listed here, and generally agree with the sentiment that people should be willing to try new games...even just as one shots. Knowing what I do about the games, it's an interesting progression. I like the way it builds with ideas, showing new elements of what game design can be. I think there are some lesser known indie games that could have really explored the concepts better, but for folks taking baby-steps away from the juggernaut that is D&D, there is often a need to go with something that has a name and a community associated with it.  Naturally, when I read posts like this, I want to scream about other Indie games...like I did for DURF a few weeks back, or like I've done for others over the years (or even just the game mechanisms they use).   image from here  which claims the source is actually here image from 

You know what?... it's probably not surprising, but I solved the issue I was having in the last post , and I actually had solved it months ago. The problem with my recent thoughts has been that I wanted a bit more grittiness and depth to the conflict resolution system. I had broken conflict down into a multipart die roll with successes on an initiative roll giving an action in the combat round for every degree of success obtained, then each successfully gained action would be rolled separately. That turned out to be pushing the system in directions it was never intended to go, so I've gone back to the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) methodology. I'm also utilising the basic fundamentals of the rules rather than adding new concepts with conflict working as an exception in a " design by exception " model. This game is meant to be about telling dramatic stories, the conflict system applies to physical violence, arguments, riddles, psychic showdowns, and anything else w...

One of the things I've struggled with in the SNAFU system has been the balance... This might be a balance between restricting character choices along specific narrative or mechanical paths (much like " Powered by the Apocalypse " games do), or offering complete freedom of choice to players (like " Freeform Universal " games do). It might be a balance between complex rules (like " Rolemaster "), or simple ones (like " Honey Heist "). Knowing a variety of games and how they handle things can be a mixed blessing. It's really good to see how different designers have handled situation that they see their players getting involved in... it's just as important to see the gaps they've left and whether these gaps are deliberate elements of " fruitful void " or whether they just haven't been noticed because they didn't consider that players might be doing these within within narratives driven by their systems.   Within this...

As I sat in a hospital last week, intravenous drip in my arm, I had a whole heap of revelations and moments of satori. Now that I'm in a state to write about them, do you think I can remember them? I remember that there was stuff about the direction I wanted to take the "SNAFU SRD and Cookbook", including the idea of writing up a basic 'zine that covered the core rules and only the core rules. That's basically what most SRDs are anyway, and I've started thinking about the layout on that part of the project. The aim this time is to include avoid forgetting any of the important bits, while making sure I trim away anything superfluous. That's tough. At this stage I've tried to trim it down to 16 pages, but it's more realistically looking like 20. There's also some vague recollections about those augmented reality games like Pokemon Go, and a few others that I've played over the years. I was imagining these from the perspective of a modern urba...

I've been trying to tell people for decades that D&D hasn't been good for the wider community of independent RPGs, and RPG designers. However it's really felt like a lot of people couldn't understand this... so it's interesting to see when other people have the same ideas, especially when those ideas seem to come from different perspectives. I'd generally considered the problems of D&D to come from it's ludo-narrative dissonance (the way the game claims to be about one thing, while its systems of play don't support, and actually hinder, the kinds of experience it claims to offer) . I hadn't considered these ideas...     ... I hadn't considered the "trickle-down economics" factor (or lack thereof), but it makes a lot of sense based on what I've been seeing over the years. The whole thing has been really stifling as a designer. I don't know if I want to write any more at the moment, but I wanted to get this thread saved fo...

Sceletus has had its soft release. There's still things that need to be changed about it. Included in that are needing to add in a few more images and finish off the book about the political groups that exist in the setting and how they can be used to manipulate stories in the game. Here's the page for the Game Jam that it's been submitted to. and Here's the page for the game itself. I'll probably put it up on DrivethruRPG soon as a paid version, so get the free edition while you can.  

Halloween is almost here. The game about skeletons that I've been working with Erin on is almost done. I'm going to have the make sure enough of it is finished for a soft release.             There's another book in the starting sequence, but that's not going to be ready by Friday. Hopefully the next post will tell you that the game is now available. 

I've never been a fan of throwing in too many ingredients, because it just muddies the output. But a single ingredient just isn't enough to get interesting flavour profiles happening. A single season gives a strong vibe, but interesting twists can happen when the seasons are mixed.I touched on this a few times in the last couple of posts, such a Judge Anderson's spring story versus a summer for for Judge Dredd in the Movie Dredd (2012). The aim is to contrast one season versus another, whether that's a characters story in the larger world, or two characters' stories playing off against one another.   Remembering that different characters can be at different stages of their life journey, within the same communal story and setting, these narratives don't have to apply to every character. Contrasting narratives between two different characters can be awesome to highlight different parts of the story, as well as the different attitudes and motives of the characters...

  The stories of winter can be some of the hardest to achieve. With a focus on gloom, despair and ennui, they're basically like playing out a waiting game. Winter comes after the fall of autumn and before the rise of spring. In autumn there is still the struggle to maintain relevance  The only game I can think to have achieved this adequately is " Polaris ", where politics plays out in a cold dark wasteland at the edge of time and space. This happens as immortal elves from a fallen age live in a frozen wasteland of night, awaiting a new dawn that has not come for years/decades/centuries, in the shadows demonic entities threaten the elves, and risk the final fall before a new spring can rejuvenate the land. It's a dark and slow game, highly ritualised. It needs the right group of players to pull off successfully (I've tried it, and even though I thought it had potential, it could have gone better and felt like there were some missteps along the way). The thing abou...

  If a spring story shows a rise, and a summer story shows a time of strength, then an autumn story explores a downfall. A downfall may be a slow drawn out affair, or it may be fairly abrupt and dramatic. The only thing clear about an autumn story is that the glory days of spring and summer have passed, and now it's the time for the inevitable decline before something fresh can take over. In the various games I've been exposed to, I've found the idea of autumn stories best represented in assorted "story games" rather than traditional tabletop forms or OSR products. The traditional and OSR games might have autumnal settings, with dying empires and crumbling decadence, but the stories in them still strive to be heroic. Story games have a tendency to be more atmospheric and less competitive, and therefore more capable of telling stories that are both introspective and atmospheric. This is often a complaint launched at this genre of game, suggesting that they afren...

  Stories of summer are harder to portray than those of spring. This is generally because the period of  rapid growth has reached it's conclusion and now the stories are about the consolidation of power, and the strategic maneuvers that shift power from aggressive and offensive patterns into passive and defensive ones. For this sort of game, I'd probably look toward the ancillae level for Vampire: the Masquerade. The young neonates are going through their spring phase, trying to become accustomed to their new powers and the political machinations around them. The summer stories kick in once the vampire has made a name for themselves (typically after a couple of decades...because earlier than that, and most of the young fresh-blood neonates will probably die before they've got the chance to influence wider vampiric society). These are the stories where the characters start to have children of their own to take on the risky jobs, and where they start to take a step back from ...

  I've mentioned several times here and elsewhere that there are a lot of things D&D doesn't do well. It struggles with character agency, the swingy die results mean that characters are rarely the heroic individuals that players have in their mind's eyes. Recent versions have really dulled the edge, with characters often surviving situations that should seriously leave them dead. There's not a whole lot in the mechanisms of play that that add mood or drama to the session, and that's left firmly in the hands of the Dungeon Master and players. However, credit where it's due... the overall game framework tells a decent spring story. The idea of having limited agency in the world, then working through a chronicle, accumulating experience, new skills and abilities, useful toys, and establishing a reputation. All of that works really well for the characters in D&D, especially low to mid level characters (let's say progressing from levels 2-3 through to lev...

The last post looked at the different parts of the seasonal narrative from the framework of the four European seasons...spring, summer, autumn, winter. However, that's not necessarily the only way to look at it, and by considering a trinity of seasonal energies it might help to add some perspective into what I'm aiming for.  Mage: the Ascension (and closely related for these purposes, Werewolf: the Apocalypse) has a trinity of energies that form a similar cycle to the seasons, and since I'm a big fan of these games I'm naturally going to be influenced by the way they handle things. The general idea of the cycle begins with chaos and raw unbridled potential (wyld), moves to order and unwavering stasis (weaver), and finishes with entropy and decayed corruption (wyrm).    In this image, we might move clockwise around the circle starting at the left side with spring. Where the bottom left corner roughly aligns with the raw unbridled chaotic potential of "the wyld"...

 I helped found a ferret rescue group a few years ago, and recent chats about that group and the way it has developed over the years have fed my thought patterns regarding the rise and fall of organisations and how this can fit into different types of storytelling. Other things that have been building up the structure of those thoughts are a binge watch of the current three seasons of the " Foundation " TV series, my regular readings of the book " Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ", the recent electoral landslide against the conservative party in Australia (also see here ), an outsiders perspective of what is happening in the USA at the moment ( here , here and here )... the Portland frog might have something to do with it too. (I know that with the ever changing political landscape and the constant rotations of the news cycle, a lot of these links may no longer be valid in a few weeks/months/years, but that's happened many times over the years here ...