Observations of the Fox

    After a decade or so where my top 10 posts have all been mapping tutorials, a recent upswing in views has seen my introductory Mage: the Ascension post crack the list. Now I'm going to have to check if a new edition of the game has been released (or is about to be)... 

 It's always fun finding other people's blogs and doing a quick dig through their ponderings and writings. This also means it can be fun to see what things they consider worthy of writing about, and when one of my favourite games of all time is called out (and one that is based on one of my all-time favourite movies), I need to give it a mention.  Ghost Dog     I mentioned it back in my Top 10 games that influenced my game design back in 2018, and it's still a book that I flick through occasionally when I need an answer to a question that isn't quite working out for me. That is all. 

I just saw this, and it's really linked into a lot of the posts I've been making lately.   It seems to be an advertising point for D&D-adjacent products that you don't need literacy , and you can use tools to do the heavy lifting for you. I don't know if this is an AI product, but it does seem to be a package that combines the features of a virtual tabletop and a rapidly accessible database of the rules. It's a tool, it might be a good tool, it might not....but like every tool it probably needs a degree of expertise in it's use and in the environment where it's to be used. It could be right in certain circumstances, it could be wrong in others. A player wouldn't know unless they had read the rules. It's a shortcut that offloads the burden of literacy onto something else and then says "trust us".   I know I'm not the target audience for this, because I see TTRPGs as having the infinite scope of artistic potential, while this reduces ...

I'd heard about RPG Trader starting up a few months ago, and was definitely interested in getting on board.  Here's my profile page. I've just started to put a few products up. A pair so far, The Law and Sceletus, both have had decent downloads, one is old and one is new. I'll be putting a few more products up over the next week or two. We'll see how this platform goes.

Wow, I probably shouldn't have started digging down the literacy rabbit hole... As someone who is currently teaching Mathematics (among other things), I'm seeing stuff like this.   Now this isn't a post about mathematical skill, but the responses to this image are fascinating. Some people are working out the part inside the brackets and the part outside the brackets separately then multiplying them together due to the brackets. 800 ÷ 4 = 200, 5 x 10 = 50... 200 x 50 = 10000 (This is wrong) Some are simply working left to right. 800 ÷ 4 = 200, 200 x 5 = 1000, 1000 x 10 = 10000  (Another way to get the wrong answer)  Some are simply working right to left. 5 x 10 = 50, 4 x 50 = 200, 800 ÷ 200 = 4. (Which gets us to the right answer but using the wrong logic)  Some are doing the work inside the brackets (5 x 10 = 50), followed by the part immediately outside the brackets (4 x 50 = 200), then the operator by itself on the side (800 ÷ 200 = 4). (Co...

I was alerted to this post over on Wordpress through my socials (in this case it was BlueSky). It kind of touches on a lot of the stuff I've been thinking about in recent years, including the comments made by students in the TTRPG club I ran at school for a couple of years (before the troubles), my work to make game rules more "user-accessible", my studies in linguistics over the years, and my work in general as a teacher. There's generally been a lot of discussion about literacy as an issue in various fields lately. This is not just gaming related, but also touched on media literacy, social literacy, political literacy, and how the decline in each of these has had ramifications on the world around us. It's not just about whether someone can read the words, but also about whether they understand the meaning being conveyed. In the case of music, it might touch on the idea that conservatives are calling Rage Against the Machine or Bruce Springsteen woke, because it...

My last post indicated my new tinkering with 3D printing as a resource for tabletop gaming. Today I'm going to offer some links to sites where I've found a whole heap of free stuff that's pretty good. There are plenty of paid subscription services such as Loot Studios  or parts of My Mini Factory , but that's  not what I'm looking at today. Instead I'm looking at the low budget and no budget options. First up, Makerworld .    It was here that I first found the Open-Lock system, but one of the things that I do really like about this site is that you can follow specific creators, and some creators have developed a great range along specific thematic ideas. There's heaps of downloads available, and easily thousands  (if not tens of thousands) that could be utilized for gaming in some way.  Next, Printables .   This site has plenty of stuff on it, but probably not as many gaming related downloads. but it's good to have a few sources to search for things. I...

When I run games, I try to limit the potential for players to diverge in their understanding of the 3D space in their imagined versions o events. I like everyone to be on the same page, and to share a collective understanding of how things are unfolding, especially when a game starts getting tactical. A lot of this probably comes from playing with miniatures where the tactical play is literally laid out with physical pieces of terrain and small figurines that depict the characters. Don't get me wrong, a also like a good game where theatre of the mind has been executed well...but I've see so many arguments at tables of the years where one person has a distinct impression of how things are unfolding while another person is viewing things in a very different light. In such a case, both might be valid interpretations, but are often irreconcilable. The slowing down, and sometimes complete disruption, of the game is undesirable. It's probably one of the reasons I like a good LARP...

I had an idea...and I found evidence that it dates back to 2007, but probably goes back even further than that. It basically worked off the idea that each of the characters were some kind o ,magical effect that had achieved sentience. Characters were basically made by two pre-filled half character sheets that were combined to make a whole sheet, then a few additional elements were added to complete the character. I know that I've toyed with the idea of split character sheets a few times in the past, and it's an idea I'll probably revisit a few times in the future. In fact, the Familiar game kind of draws on this concept at some level, because some of the character's benefits come from the immortal Familiar spirit, and some of their benefits come from the mortal mystic who is bonded to them. I don't know whwre these sheets came from (there are six of them), because they certainly weren't in my notebooks when I did my series of "old  notebook" posts earl...

A lot of my thoughts about the SNAFU magic system can be traced back to the work I did back in NaGaDeMon 2019 when I worked on SNAFU and the Familiar games concepts initially. I can see posts that go back to the earlier versions of the word system , posts that already seem to address some of the conduit issues that I'm having , even the bit where I pulled Connection/Conduit/Capacity from the Ukiyo Zoshi work of the 1990s. I've been stomping in this space for a while, and I guess this is half the reason why I keep this blog going. Sure, I'm getting thousands of views every day, and I don't think all of them can be bots (even if I rarely get comments), but having an archive of twenty years of game design ideas, theories and observations I can look back on has been really useful at times.  My quick scans over these old posts (they don't feel old, but after 7 years they certainly don't count as recent posts any more) shows that I've had some changes in thought ...

I've been thinking about that last post.  What if a mystic had the words "destroy" and "light", and they accumulated enough energy to magnify their effect to cover the orbital distance to the moon (radius of effect - 10), plus the energy to get their effect centred on the sun (distance to centre of effect - 7), made it an effect that lasted centuries or longer (duration 6+), and applied a few levels of success to the number of penalty traits applied (let's say 4 or 5)? We know that this would be feasible for a mystic with a minimum capacity score of 3, because they could feasibly generate 36 energy over the course of 3 rounds, so 28 is certainly within the realms of possibility. But what would this look like? Would they extinguish the sun? Would they cause a collapse in the sun's energy output that would cause it to become a supernova? Would the darkness effect actually cause the sun to collapse into a black hole?  I think that one of the key things to c...

So here's how it works. A mystic decides that the want to transform the world in a predetermined way.  To do this, they instinctively follow a procedure that involves a few steps. They decide what changes they are aiming for. They invoke the energy that will manifest changes in the world. They filter the gathered energy through their intentions. The world changes in some way. The first and last steps are fairly narrative in nature, while the middle steps are where the mechanisms of play manipulate the flow of events.  They decide what changes they are aiming for. The effect is described in the terms of a simple sentence with one or more metaphysical terms thrown into it. The simplest form of the magical sentence is a metaphysical verb combined with a metaphysical noun. The verb is what you're doing, and the noun is what you're doing it to. "[Create] [Fire]", "[Purify] [Water]", "[Grow] [Plants]", "[Corrupt] [Data]"...the words can be ...

I did a bit of a binge of the recent Predator Movies... Prey, Predator: Killer of Killers, and Predator:  Badlands... over the weekend.  I have to say, that each of these movies is fun, and there's some awesome worldbuilding in them. What makes them greater than the sum of their parts is the way they are interconnected. And on top of that, the way they establish a wider context of worldbuilding across the other movies in the franchise. We get the flintlock pistol from Predator 2 appearing in various movies, we get the post credits scenes in "Killer of Killers" with throwbacks to old characters, yet each movie works well as a standalone. The same can generally be said of the other movies in the franchise, but some of them have been a bit hit-and-miss in their execution.    I love that each of the movies is different and has a different feel, orbiting around the combinations of ideas where sci-fi, action, and horror overlap. I love that the diversity of the main charac...

 It's always interesting to read other people's perspectives. Here's a review of GNS theory after a generation of games have been and gone, and have been influenced by it in different ways. I generally agree with a lot of what the post is saying. A lot of the premise with GNS indicated that the three styles of gaming were mutually incompatible, and any any to reconcile two of them (or heaven forbid all three) was incoherent, and implicitly doomed to failure. However this article recognises that there is overlap between the concepts, and having two goals doesn't necessarily make for a diluted session experience, but just combines flavours for a different experience.  I've posted a few times about the theory (I think most of those posts have " The Forge " as a tag), and have designed with it in mind for decades now, trying my hand at different focal objectives (to varying degrees of success). It's interesting how influential it's been in the hobby, ...

The last post covered the predominantly random part of the character generation system. This post works on completing the characters with a phase that allows a lot more agency from the players.  The previous step got us to... Six total attribute points (we need two more) Four total ability points (we need eight more) One advantage (we need one more) We don't have any aegises, relationships or equipment (but they can come). I'm thinking that we'll be looking at a range of templates that function like apprenticeships what will push characters in certain directions. A template for each bloodline, a template for each culture, and a few generic templates that anyone can choose (rural community, street rat, sailor, trader, crafter, heavy).    Each of these templates will boost a pair of attributes associated with the types of task that this group is known for. It will also grant four automatic abilities, an extra advantage, a pair of relationships, and a pair of basic equipment...

Just when I thought I was getting momentum, life gets in the way again. I've spent most of the last few days in hospital with my wife, or taking her to medical appointments.   I've had some ideas in recent months about the way lower classes are forced to struggle so they don't have time to tell their stories, and how it's only the elite who have the privilege of time to share their narrative, and the social capital to spread that narrative to reinforce the cultural norms, even though the wider experience of life doesn't necessary reflect the stories that are constantly pumped out. It's something that fits into Familiar, and ironically it's the very lack of time to work on Familiar, and the lack of social capital to get it noticed that has kept the stories within it from being completed. It's a game about social systems and rebelling against them, while those very social systems are keeping it down, and it's going to take an act of rebellion to get it...