Observations of the Fox

  In a roleplaying context, an ally is usually a supporting character who helps the main characters in the story with certain tasks they aren’t fully capable of handling on their own. In a context outside the game, I figure that an ally is much the same. An ally is basically a person who is able to help people complete tasks that might struggle with on their own, it might be navigating bureaucracy, helping with chores, creating a welcoming social environment, or even just surviving. An ally just makes it easier. It’s not a perfect description, nothing in the world is perfect…but like when it comes to being an ally, I figure the aim is to try. I’ve been trying to experiment with the idea of allies in games based on my experiences with allies in the real world. One of my issues working through this concept at the moment is the fact that in the real word everyone is a person, everyone is a protagonist with agency in their own story, while they exists as supporting roles in other...

  Half the reason I play tabletop RPGs is for the unexpected. That unexpected might come in the form of my opportunities to add something unexpected as a player, or as the person running the game, However I’m just as much here for the unexpected elements that other players might bring to the communal storytelling experience. I could write a novel… I could tell a story entirely in my head, but the narrative would probably end up fairly predictable and follow the same types of storylines that I’ve used a hundred times before. Diversity and the unexpected might not bring me to the exact ending I had in mind, but I’ve often found that the contributions of more people lead to a richer and more robust story. It also adds to the challenge of the roleplaying experience. It links to the Czege principle that I’ve mentioned a couple of times in the past. The principle basically states that a player will have trouble resolving a conflict that they themselves have introduced into the story....

Traditionally, when the characters enter a dungeon they cross over from the real to the surreal, they move into a liminal space where anything can happen. This reflects the overall ritual of a roleplaying game where everyone sits down at a table and enters a safe space where an imagined world is shared by the players and the GM/Narrator/DM/ (or whatever the system designates the person running the game) .   We’ve looked at the journey a few times during the questions this month, but the journey needs to start somewhere, it needs to be begun. A lot of the standard mythology around roleplaying games can be linked back to the ideas of the hero’s journey. A lot of games have deviated from this since the 90s, but the core of the hobby is still about that heroic escapism…or at least it claims to be. The crossing of the threshold is an important part of that. The ritual space of the storytelling medium, whether it’s a single raconteur or a communal storytelling project, also uses that r...

I'm not just doing RPGaDay posts at the moment, I'm still working on the SNAFU SRD and Cookbook in the background. Here's a couple of new pages layouts...    

Destiny plays a major role in popular culture stories, regardless of when they might be set, in ancient eras, medieval fantasy, modern urban fantasy, sci-fi…and since it’s such a common part of pop-culture, it’s naturally a part of roleplaying games. I’ve got a mixed opinion of the idea of destiny, especially because I like the idea of sandbox games. Destiny feels like railroading, it feels like forcing the story along preconceived notions and plotlines. However it can be played with like a stereotype or trope (because after all, it is one), a destiny doesn’t need to be specific and I actually find it can be better if it’s vague. Maybe the destiny links to a specific place but doesn’t specify the time, or vice versa, either way makes the destiny more flexible and adaptable for the story. The important thing about a destiny is that something is going to dramatically change the world and this change has been foretold. It might be accurate, it might be misunderstood, it might be mistr...

I guess it may be the fact that I’m both qualified as an art teacher, and a university trained linguist, but the first idea that comes to mind when I see the word sign is the concept of the signified and the signifier. The sign is a method of conveying information from one person to another through a generally non-verbal form. It may be done in a pictorial manner, often in a stylised image form that taps into the cultural conscious…stick figures, icons, colour choices. A sign is a quick way to get information transmitted, and it’s actually something I’ve tried to explore in my game design. I think that a lot of games have relied too heavily on the concept of conveying their ideas in text, and perhaps in some illustrations, but there are a lot of other ways that information can be conveyed. Providing multiple ways of conveying that information makes a piece of communication more approachable because different people assimilate information in different ways, and it only takes one of ...