Observations of the Fox

 My two flagship games for the SNAFU system are Walkabout (a game about post-apocalyptic investigators and troubleshooters trying to bring balance back to a world that has been devastated by the return of Spirits of the Dreaming who've had enough of humanity's disrespect for the planet) and Familiar (a game about magical spirits who take the form of animals, who empower the dispossessed and disenfranchised to become heroes in a world of stagnation and corruption). Both games overlap their themes in a lot of ways, both are more about the relationships people have to each other and the world around them, rather than fighting and conquest. It was the fighting and conquest that led to the problems in each of the settings.  Both games have characters made in very different ways, but both character generation systems make roughly equivalent starting characters through a blend of randomness and choice, with characters gaining agency in their worlds as their stories are told. Looking ...

    A few weeks ago, it might even be months now, I was looking at a range of SRDs with Erin. We've both been trying to see what else is out there in the way of gaming, what ways people might be innovating, what patterns might be common in the current gaming scene. It's led to some interesting discussions. She's been participating in Game Jams over on Itch , and I've been watching the stuff that she's been producing and occasionally giving a little advice here and there. She's been making a few different games based on those SRDs when she gets inspired, and I've thought about doing the same because it feels like a good way to expand design skills by refining the output to something that works within someone else's framework. A game jam for the little game DURF has arisen, and we've decided to collaborate on an idea that's been percolating for a while. The entries for the jam won't be posted until October, so that gives a fortnight to conside...

 I saw an interesting post on one of the many RPG related Facebook groups I'm a part of...   ...it really made me think about the three-way tension that forms the basis of my understanding of the hobby.  It basically states that this sort of things is full of red flags and there IS going to be tension forming as a result of the choices made before the game even begins.  For those who aren't familiar with the concept, it basically works like this.   The session, in the middle, has three types of tension on it. The GM/Narrator influences the session, so do the players, and so do the rules. As soon as one of these sides exerts too much influence on the flow at the heart of the session, there is the potential for things to go awry. (A couple of fairly comprehensive posts on the concept can be found here and here ) Where do I see the red flags... The homebrew....  ...no.  The high fantasy...  ...that says heartbreaker to me in combination with homebr...

  So the last post discussed the idea of diegetic things existing within the story, this post looks at the other side of the equation.  The clearest and easiest option I can think of as I start this post is the idea of "Classes" and "Levels". These are explicitly a shorthand to get a character's progress understood by the players as they try to visualise the imagined diegetic space in which the characters exist.  Johan the Swift is a level 6 rogue.  Mariana Vorlani is a level 4 sorceror (sorceress?). Kalani Soulseeker is a level 10 paladin. We instantly get an idea of what these characters might be capable of (and what their stereotypical weaknesses or quirks might be) with a pair of broad brushstrokes. Then, as they ascend ranks and gain levels, we get an idea of what specific powers they might have acquire along the way, because we might have read the rulebook. It's part of the reason why I didn't like the "streamlining" (A.K.A. dumbing down)...

  Diegetic is a term that I first found out about when I did cinema studies at university. It generally means something that the characters within a story are capable of interacting with. When you watch a character turn on a radio and listen to a song, and then maybe make a comment about how the song means something to them, it is clear in a few ways that they are able to hear the song and interact with it. On the other hand, if you watch a character walks into a room and a song starts playing that fits the intended mood of the scene...but there's no obvious indicator that there are speakers playing music within the scene, and it feel like the music is purely there to help the viewers establish a vibe... that's non-diegetic.  Characters talking to one another... diegetic. A narrator adding details to the imagery depicted on the screen, or a character's internal monologue that no one else in the scene can hear... non-diegetic. If we pull the ideas but to a TTRPG perspective,...

There's a recent discussion on the TTRPG Design Community on Facebook that I've posted on (circa 7th Sept 2025). As per the nature of Facebook discussions, it's gone round in circles with people wanting to define the terms, then define how the definitions of those terms work, and shoot off in tangents before some says, but "that's not what the OP is saying" and the cycle starts anew. (There's actually plenty of discussions like that, and it's pretty endemic across game design and many other niche hobbies... but there's one particular example I'm thinking of here.) The discussion is about diegetic and non-diegetic advancement in an RPG. The original author has had a few attempts at his stance, and I think refining an idea with extra input is great. However, I'd like to explore the idea further without derailing his discussion further, so I've brought it here to the blog.  I hope Benjamin Lloyd doesn't mind, but I'm going to cut a...

I don't know if it was the RPGaDay posts, or something else entirely, but last month was the best one ever here at the blog....and now this month is rapidly approaching those numbers and has the second highest number of monthly views ever and it's less that a quarter of the way through.      I've shared a couple of posts like this in the past, and sometimes they keep momentum going in case it's bots, while sometimes they drive people away...it's a bit of a quantum uncertainty...it'll collapse one way or another. I don't know where. Regardless, I haven't had a lot of chance to work on game related stuff because school has been busy. Most of my game related activity over the past month was just writing posts here.    

Erin has just released a game called Heresy of the Obsidian Orchid . It's a bit weird, a bit experimental, and definitely not quite what I was expecting when she said she was working on a monster hunting game.    Basically, the character's are cyborgs, or more accurately robotic bodies with human consciousness uploaded into them. They have memories of their former lives, and emotional moralities that keep them basically "human" within their robot shells. It's an interesting idea, and I might throw together some things for characters to hunt in the game. Reading through what she's offered, it could easily work with the "Beneath the Glass and Steel" 'zine series I ran a few years ago, I've even been partly inspired to maybe add a few more 'zines to that collection. Maybe adding some interesting new ideas to the sequence.      Much of the concept is pretty open, and it leaves a lot to the players and GM to describe, but as I'm reading it...

  Again, we can look at this diegetically (considering the rewards that characters get in the game), or non-diegetically (the rewards that players get outside the game). Rewards are something that is often expected, it’s just a part of the concept going back to the earliest days of TTRPGs, sure there are plenty pof games in the past 20 years that have deviated from this pattern, but it’s still fairly common across the spectrum, especially among trad games. I’ve tried to play with the way rewards are offered in game, starting early on with the idea of levels (because I didn’t know better)…moving to point buy systems where you had to earn experience relating to a specific aspect of your character, then only improve that aspect when you got enough…and to general systems where you earned points for playing with fidelity to your character, the story, or the genre tropes, then allowing those points to improve anything with a bit of justification. I’ve toyed with systems where you ask...

Experience points, development of characters… or the experience we get from playing a great session of a game. I remember my first few TTRPG sessions, I don’t know if it was the people running the game, or the systems we used (old school D&D Rules Cyclopedia), or maybe the mismatch of what I expected from the game compared to the other players in the group. I just didn’t get the imagined experience I was hoping for. I played games with a few people, and I caught a glimpse of what could be. Moments where I caught the dragon, and moments that I looked for again, hoping to string them into full sessions. Wanting something more, and chasing the dragon like a junkie chasing the amphetamine high. It was a moment of enlightenment, satori, where a bond with others led to something more. It was how I tried to run my games, trying to make sure everyone got a taste of what had addicted me. I became a dealer of the TTRPG narcotic, and became a “forever DM” as a result. I don’t know tha...