Observations of the Fox

Since I've now got a post-doctorate degree in education, and I'm working as a teacher, I've been exposed to a lot of ideas about how we learn and how our brains work. A lot of these ideas conflict with each other, and they also conflict with the way roleplaying games handle experience and character development.   There are probably ways that these various ideas can be fused together, but there are numerous ways to link these ideas together, and many textbooks discredit certain ideas while promoting the concept that match the agenda they're trying to push. It basically reminds me of the way roleplaying games handle firearms... as soon as you start trying to push for realism you'll get different "experts" who claim that different elements of the play mechanisms are accurate, and other parts aren't, and you'll find that few of these "experts" agree with one another. Similarly, by the time you start to incorporate enough elements to make a...

One of the members of the board of directors for the Aboriginal Education Consultancy Group recently told me...(and I'm paraphrasing here). It really doesn't matter whether we wanted our stories connected to those of the white mob who came here. Now those stories are tangled in ways that can never be untangled. The Dreaming still goes on, it always has, it always will. Like it or not, animals introduced to our lands like dogs, cats,rabbits, foxes, they're all a part of the Australian Dreaming now. Like it or not, if you set foot in our land, you become a part of our dreaming too. Whether you consider them symbolic of mystic insight, or whether you think the dreaming is simply the interconnectedness of personal stories and the relationships between them, those were powerful words. It's not like when you meet a Christian for the first time, and they say "You aren't a Christian, therefore you're going to hell... Here let me help you see the light...

I was about to revise my game "Tales", but I realised that I had done this last year. The post for the revision can be found here. My intention was to bring the Tales idea into line with what I've been working on for " The Law ", perhaps shifting the Tales brand to encompass each of the subsettings that I'm hoping to in orporate into the Urban Megalopolis/Sprawl (I can't flat out call the setting "The Sprawl" be ause there's another game already doing well under that name...despite the number of people who tread on my toes by calling their games "FUBAR"...but that's another rant entirely). I guess the whole point of this post is that I'm considering a simple, open source system reference document for The Law and it's associated game lines. This means I've been pulling apart the elements of the game based on the play sessions I've run and the feedback I've received from other people. This system refere...

Over the years I've had a few fragmentary game ideas that never really went anywhere. Sometimes I come back to them and polish them up enough to present to the outside world. Here's one of those ideas. It's a game called Tales. It's pretty open in this incarnation, designed for a group to collaboratively tell stories together, and when you put it that way it sounds like standard RPG fare. The point of difference here is that instead of an arbitrary randomiser to determine whether a character succeeds in their action, or a direct comparison of skills levels to difficulty degree, a players companions determine whether a character succeeds by playing a card from a hand that is replenished randomly through the course of play. So a player is prompted to create dramatic moments and appeal to the players around them for the chance to gain maximum success potential (of course there's always the chance that those other players won't be able to provide a successful ...

After a few days break, working on other projects, I looked back at "Tales" and realised that there was something that simply felt like it was a odd duplication within the rules. Two of the mechanisms seemed to be doing much the same thing, and one of the incarnations of the mechanism didn't seem to be addressed very well at all in the rules. Needless to say this had to be attended to... ...and I've stripped out impairments completely. Generally the idea behind the impairment system was a series of predefined traits that would aply penalties in a variety of situations. Such impairments would include such concepts as being "tired", "hungry", "injured", "scared", "cursed" and similar effects. If you suffered an impairment, it would temporarily make things harder for you, but this basically works the same as temporary disadvantages. There were a few badly worded and vague ideas about rendering these impairments i...

( This post discusses the game design released in alpha format in my last post ) In Tales, and in "The Eighth Sea", I made a deliberate design decision to involve other players in the process of judging whether actions succeed or fail. I warn you, there will be some Forge terminology in this post. As a linguist, and more specifically a sociolinguist, I'm at odds with certain elements of Forge terminology, but then again I'm at odds with a lot of the terminology across sociological fields and academia where a specific term is given a specific definition in a specific context, then other people use the same term in a slightly different context only to find that the meaning doesn't quite hold the same definitive meaning when used elsewhere. It's always been one of the thorns in the side of Forge theory, and one of those places where other people seem to hate it because the terminology is used in different ways by different people. Where I'm using those te...

Here's what I've been playing with over the past couple of days... Tales Version 2.0 It still needs a bit of work, and I haven't written up any scenario or setting booklets for it yet, but I think there's enough here to start some discussion about the mechanisms of the game. Once a bit more refinement has been done, I'll add some proper page layout as well.

One of the things I find about convoluted rule sets is the idea that there needs to be a mechanisms to cover every contingency, whether or not that contingency comes into play. Just in case the characters are disarmed, and fighting over who gets better hold of the jade statue, let's include grapping rules. On the off chance that characters moght need to sneak in somewhere, avoiding the attention of guards, let's include some dramatic stealth rules... ...all these rules need to go into the main book... ...oops, we've blown our page count. Let's keep the common rules, then throw the uncommon rules into a "player's guide", and the rare rules into a "GM/DM/Referee's guide". We've all seen systems like that. It's common in "traditional" games. I know that my description is fairly glib, and designs teams are probably more likely to think that their rule systems are becoming more versatile, and thus more likely to be used ...

Yarrr...it be the 19th o' Septemb-arrr, so it be time to be talkin' like a Pirate. The buxom swashbuckler who be spendin' the last 13 years as me helmsman made a wise decision to get married on the 20th o' Septemb-arr, else that weddin' might a been quite a confusin' day indeed. T' be honest, today snuck up on me like a monkey with a musket. -0- Enough pirate talk, it's taking too long to work out what I want to say in scurvy slang.  Even though I didn't realise it was coming up, I've been working on a project that's related to my first published game..."The Eighth Sea". That game was based on a earlier unfinished work named "Tales", which designed to be a generic system but was probably more of a convoluted mess. "The Eighth Sea" had elements of the original game stripped out, and a few other elements added in. It probably had a lot of loose unconnected bits, because at that stage I hadn'...

The Seven Ages of Magic just came to my attention, and it really fits well with a lot of things I've been recently thinking about. I love the idea that magic flows through a world in cycles, my wife has been trying to get me to read the Wheel of Time books for over 13 years now (and I had friends who were fanatical about the series before that), I've never actually read them but I get the feeling that this is a common theme through the books. One thing that I really like about the cosmology of this cycle is the way different forms of magic might be waxing or waning at different points of the cycle within the same world. I look specifically at the World of Darkness examples that are indicated (Wraith, Vampire, Mage, Changeling, Werewolf) , each e ists at a different point because that's what those games are about. But when you look at them as a whole, magic isn't necessarily dying, its just in a state of transformation. If I look at the landscape series I...

I'm hastily trying to get a decent revision of my current Quincunx thoughts together for Go Play Brisbane. There have been some significant changes since Gencon Oz 2009. I know that the core of the system works, because I've used it successfully for two dozen games of Guerrilla Television, and for almost a dozen games of Quincunx. But if the core of the system is a skeleton, I'm having trouble attaching the meat and the organs. Guerrilla Television is designed to be a fun and light-hearted look at extravagant violence in the vein of Battle Royale , Gamer , The Running Man , and even real world concepts like Survivor or Big Brother. If you understand the tropes, you understand the game. There is little story, there is just carnage until one person is left standing...some people might try to escape, but it's so hard to do this that most would-be escapees die in the process. It's just a cathartic excuse to let out some narrative angst with a board and dice. I've wa...

I'm taking a slight detour in my blogs about game mechanics, I had intended to be detailing aspects of what I think make a good combat system (and how I followed those ideas to generate the system used in Tales). ...instead I'll look a bit deeper at aspects of character generation. I've already mentioned a strong favour toward perceived mid-points. Two of the scales I've heavily considered are... Systems with lots of random value generation versus systems that place the focus of thought back into the hands of the players. and Systems where the the characters are incredibly detailed with skills, combat abilities and special powers defined to the nth degree versus systems that are almost freeform with arbitrary principles based on vague notions of common sense. I've always felt that a good game can be judged by it's character generation system, and for an instinctive gut reaction, the generation system can be seen through the character sheet and the sheer size of ...

There are a few schools of thought about characters in roleplaying games. Some believe that characters should be fully detailed in what they can do and where there limitations might lie. Others believe that a general notion of the character will suffice, and common sense should be allowed to fill in the blanks. Both concepts are valid under different styles of play. Spread across this split, you have people who believe characters should be primarily defined by what they were born with, versus what they've learned...that whole "nature vs nurture" debate. Here's where attributes and skills come in. While these two concepts have been a staple in most roleplayinggames for years, many independent games are moving away from the notion of attributes and skills. These recent games return to a simpler concept of simply assigning a character roles, then follow by allowing certain roles to complete certain tasks with ease. A combatant can physically fight but they may be no good...

I've decided to document some of the game mechanics that I come up with periodically. I've developed systems based on dice rolls, cards, counters and hand gestures, and each of these has applications to different styles of game. The problem with these conceptual ideas is that I can never decide on the type of game best suited to the mechanic. A poker based mechanic may lend itself well to a wild west game, a tarot mechanic may be good for a game about occultism or mysticism, but where do you place a complex die mechanic? I've looked at plenty of games over the years and have seen many that have focused on a gimmicky mechanic. Roll 3 dice, ignore the highest and lowest results and keep the middle die. Then compare this to a difficulty value that's generated by rolling a second die and cross referencing this to a table. [The result of the die might produce a nice bell-curve, and the cross referencing effect might ground it well in the reality of the game world, but the co...