Observations of the Fox

Wow... I've got a bit of a following of folks on social media who regularly respond to the memes and assorted links I post. Among them are current colleagues, former colleagues, friends and gamers I've met over the years and family... I guess we've all got a social media community like that, especially once we get to a certain age. As an English speaker, it's probably not surprising that many of the contacts I've made in gaming circles have been US citizens. Some of them I've met personally at conventions over the years, many more are friends of friends, people I've connected with by mutual reputations, or folks who I feel like I vibe with.  With things happening in the US at the moment, where we are watching a real-time attempt to dismantle democracy by oligarchs... where we are watching the most mundane elements of cyberpunk dystopia coming to fruition, without the fun elements. I'm a little scared for a lot of the people living in the US at the moment...

Sometimes the best resource a DM has at their disposal is the ability to cut their losses and move to a better game system that facilitates the style of play they want, rather than struggling with trying to modify a massive ludonarrative dissonance. (I posted this on a Facebook group, but figured I needed to include it as a permanent part of the blog).

Over a decade ago I posted about "exceoton based design" ( here and here ). Quick tl:dr... I didn' like it the and I still don't like it. I've thought about it plenty of times in the time since then, but the big games in the hobby (Dungeons and Dragons, and Pathfinder) still base themselves on it. Oe of the key differences between minimaliust game designs and maximalist game designs seems to be the idea of wther a general game rule can be applied to everything, or whether you need specific rules to cover specific situations. There's definitely a continuum between the extremes... do you write a one page system like " Honey Heist " or " Lasers and Feelings ", where a single mechanism of play defines all actions regardless of how well those actions might fit the mechanisms?...do you write a sequence of books each with a few hundred pages in them (There's a few of these, and entre business models based on the " supplement treadmill ...

School has started back for the year, and tha invariably means that my number of posts starts to slow down. It also doesn't really help that my wife has moved for work to a town that's an hour drive away. So a lot of the time that I might be oorganising and writing blog posts I'm now spending travelling in a car across the rural outback. This is getting me in the mood to complete the Walkabout game, but I've dedicated my immediate future to finalising the Familiar project. It's kind of a tricky choice. One's a game about surviving the post-apocalypse by working together and overcoming many of the issues that brought about societal collapse (without falling into worse situations against monstrous creatures that are the embodiment of hubris and corruption)... the other is a game about restoring magic to a world where it has been captured and crushed by an oligarchy over the course of centuries, and enjoying the little things in a society caught between oppression ...

The fruitful void (which might also be called the creative void) is a gap in the rules where players have to make decisions for themselves. None of the rules in the game specifically address the elements inherent within the void, but it's intrinsically a part of the story developed during the course of the session.   This ideas was developed by Vincent Baker ( back in 2005 ), and filtered back through various folks across the design community (note the pages here and here ). It came into vogue back at The Forge in the early parts of the decade, so naturally that meant there were numerous interpretations of the idea, and a bunch of people claiming that their version was the "true" version. Personally, I thought it was lazy game design for a long time. However, I've kind of come around to understanding how it's a useful concept. I want to do something like this for the way magical energy flows in the Familiar game. However, I think there needs to be some kind of an...

I'm going to pivot back away from the coding side of things for the moment, and back to game development concepts, and narrative elements. In a "normal" fantasy roleplaying game, the magic-user is the centre of attention and their familiar is some kind of pet who shares a mystical bond with them. Perhaps the familiar helps channel magical energy a little better, perhaps it provides a benefit to casting die rolls, perhaps (as in Mage: the Ascension) the familiar eats aways the penalty effects that come with existing as a quasi-force of nature in a world of mundane masses. In a game called "Familiar", the concept is naturally going to be flipped. The familiar is the main character, they have agendas of their own, and the magic-user/mystic is their conduit to the world and a source of both stability and narrative potential within the world. The familiar is effectively immortal, but their vessel may change every couple of years (if they're lucky, a mystic may la...

 OK...so I never really explained much about the coding part in the last post.  I know that Ren'Py can handle arrays. If you don't know what an array is, it's basically a list of information components identified as a coherent cluster. A program can withdraw specific elements of data from the array... so it might have 5 elements of data, and you can print out the second one, you can rearrange them by shuffling the data elements, or add another one to the end and turn it into 6 elements of information. There's all sorts of ways that you can modify an array. I'll run the arrays a bit like a relational database that can be modified on the fly, but will always start with a static framework and data. (If anyone out there is reading this and knows about databases, python scripting, or Ren'Py specifically, and if they have any better ways to address these ideas, please let me know.)   The first and most obvious array would be called "deck" (or something simil...