Observations of the Fox

Not long after my last post, I read this article called " The Coin Don't Have No Say ", there's some interesting stuff in the piece, even if if does take a while to get there. It kind of reflects a few of the ideas that we had a long time ago, but I'll get to that shortly. First a continuation of the Three-Way Tension.   I'm basically going to be reflecting and rationalising on my experiences of how the three agendas of the GNS structure are often employed by the three elements of the tension. The next post will delve into how these agendas flavour the tension, and how this make some tensions work with the flow of the session to add focus to what is being achieved, while other combinations of tension can potentially be disruptive. I can't really get to that side of things, until I explain the next layer of the framework.  The GM/Narrator The GM/Narrator facilitates the session. In traditional play, this participant chooses the scenario that the players w...

A few years ago, I was developing a concept called Voidstone Chronicles . There's a bit of work about it here on the blog. The general idea was to replicate some 8-bit gaming in a miniatures format. I was thinking " Golden Axe " or even advancing to the earliest incarnations of Diablo . Getting a decent process for my 3D printing at the moment has opened up some opportunities for revisiting that idea. Now I've just got to dig through some of my old posts and old files and sort through them to work out what is still viable and what can be resculpted into a game that fits the vision. I'll probably share a bit more of that stuff, and the terrain building process, and how I'll be preparing that for use on the table.  

      The above picture is from the SNAFU cookbook, which is full of symbols describing various parts of play and how they interact with one another to create the experience of a TTRPG session. The last post generated a bit os discussion on the socials (but not here, so I can't really archive what's been said without extensive cutting, pasting, and screenshots), so it's time to delve a bit deeper into the way I understand TTRPGs to work. Remember that this is my observations, archived and written down, your mileage may vary.  Crystallisation for Vcetor Theory and the 3-Way Tension model occurred during a BBQ I cooked for three Norwegians in my home at the time in southwestern Sydney. The meal I cooked was kangaroo and salad, the guests were  Matthijs Holter (designer of Archipelago , here's his  itch page ), Ole Peder Giæver (designer of Itras By ) and I want to say the last visitor was  Martin Bull Gudmundsen (co-designer of Itras By). I think it was...

It might be easy to say that Forge terminology has become muddied over the years, however as a linguistic descriptivist rather than a prescriptivist, I'll be vocal in saying that it was always muddy. Yes, there were prescriptivists who claimed that there was a correct and narrow definition of the terms, but there were always people using the words in their own interpretations. Sometimes there would be definitions of the words that reflected their usage in more common parlance, sometimes there would be some other contextual spin on the terms. The gatekeeping was problematic, especilly when two people would be talking across each other because they couldn't agree on the basic semantics of what each other were saying.This whole situation is a shame, because there were some really interesting ideas raised back then, especially on the "Forge adjacent" forums. Taken directly from the Provisional Glossary (which is now over 20 years old), three of the biggest takeaways from...

The last time I responded to someone's ideas about TTRPG theory, it got a bit of traction... if not here, then across several of the social media platforms I'm linked to.     This is a really interesting set of ideas, and it was relatively dismissed on the TTRPG Design Community forum where it was posted. At the time of my screenshot, the majority of the comments indicated something along the lines of "That's certainly an opinion" or "You seem to have a narrow understanding of specific TTRPGs", but comments like that are pretty dismissive. It's got some merits, and yes, while it is an opinion, and while it does reflect a specific style of game, there are some elements that can be delved into.   It's a complex take, and probably akin to the sorts of things I'm often writing here. People look at it ad they say "I agree with this bit, but I don't agree with that...however since the ideas I like and the ideas I don't like seem to be ...

Regular readers of the blog know that I've got a series of map drawing tutorials, have been commissioned to do cartography for a few companies over the years and have struggled away with creating a comic book and generating imagery for my own games. I've tried a few different styles over the years, using a variety of media, including pen-and-ink, paint, pencils and digital media. I started playing with Photoshop back in the 90s, and have been experimenting with using it as a part of my artistic process ever since.    I've played with algorithmic image generation as a tool, and have tried to push what it can do, but always seem to come back to hand drawn elements. I like the visceral feel of touching pigment to paper, the feel of not knowing how a technique is going to respond, and the idea of going with the flaw when something might not follow the expected path.   I've had artwork stolen, I've seen my own pieces earn other people money. I've collaged ogether ima...

  Vampire for 5.5e Why? Well, I can understand why... I saw a recent post on the TTRPG Designers group I moderate on Facebook. A designer shared their experience selling games on various platforms in recent years... here's a snippet The numbers — in broad strokes: DTRPG is my primary revenue engine. Since I went all-in on 5E-compatible content in mid-2024, my monthly revenue there is up roughly 10x from where it was before. Not 10% — 10 times. Launch months are spikes, but the floor has risen every quarter. - Malcolm Harris Between the article and the Facebook post, it's kind of sad. I get the feeling that if a designers wants to get games recognised and seen by a wider gaming community, they just gave to bite the bullet, sacrifice their integrity, compromise their art, and make a D&D supplement. It's been like this for years, certainly for as long as this blog has been running.  On the positive side, this weekend is Free-RPG Day... and I've thrown some stuff into b...

I really enjoy seeing how other people view tabletop role-playing games, and I'd love yo know more about the rationale behind his diagram that showed up in my feed. It was generated by John Errwin (@johnerrwin.bsky.social), and when I saw it on my bluesky feed I knew I had to critique it and try to intuit where it was going. I really like the notion that it's a cycle, and that various parts of that cycle influence sequential other parts of the cycle. From the perspective of my own "three-way tension" and "vector theory" about TTRPGs, this whole thing would fit into the "Rules" part of the structure. It's not a perfect fit, but it certainly gets me thinking about how the breakdown falls apart, whether that's my own theories breaking down, or the theories that seem to be alluded to in this diagram. I'll give a description of what I see, then delve deeper shortly.  Starting at the top of this diagram, we have "characters", who se...

    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 ...