Observations of the Fox

(Let's hope we don't get jumbled up again... I must have been tired that day)   19. Desire Desires, goals, motives, needs, things that people want are one of their key defining factors... however, a lot of games ignore this vital part of character development. Perhaps it's left as an element of the fruitful void, which is that part of the game that rules circles around but which is ever addressed in the rules so the players can work it out for themselves at the table. As a bare minimum I give every named NPC a desire, when they need a bit more rounding out, I give them a positive desire (something they are trying to achieve) and a negative desire (something they are trying to avoid). Then I give them a strength and a weakness... most NPCs don't need more than this, but if they become key parts of the story, I might work them up with a full character sheet. At the basic level, the desires of NPCs pull on their narrative, and their web of needs impacts on the player chara...

After the stuff up a few days ago, I'm in the second day of re-aligning the RPGaDay posts. So that means we're getting back to where we should be... (but running a day late) 17. Endurance (which was actually the prompt from day 15) Endurance reminds me of an idea we had for conventions in the 1990s. Australian Freeforms have been mentioned a few times here on the blog. They're basically a style of gaming for 15+ players, sometimes reaching a hundred or more, with various roaming GMs and a co-ordinating GM. They're a very immersive style of play, and can e hard for tabletop gamers to grok. Typically the games start slow with everyone having their own agendas, but one-by-one those agendas become entangled and each players motives start pulling on groups of players, and decisions have to be made.  At those conventions in the 90s we would often hire a venue for an entire long weekend (Sat-Sun-Mon). Registration for games would occur on the Friday evening, sometimes with pr...

OK, so somehow I used the wrong prompts on the last post. I ended up using the prompts for days 16 (Composure) and 17 (Intensity), instead of the ones for 13 and 14. Today I'll go back to those last ones and play catch up. So that brings us to... 15 (for which I'm using the prompt from day 13) . Strain I could tie this back to DURF and its encumbrance system, and that was actually the first way I thought of taking this particular prompt, however I'm going to go in a different direction to link things with my three-way tension and vector theory models of TTRPGs. For this purpose I'll go with the definition of strain as a physical, mental, or emotional pressure. From an engineering perspective, strain is the result of stress, and this basically applies to narrative as well. It is under moments of strain that new properties are revealed in a material, and it's similar to the prompt pair I mentioned in the last post . Strain opposes stress, up to a point. Once stress ex...

Almost halfway through the month, and most of my posts that have been due every second day have generally been on time. Let's keep going...   13. Composure The state of being calm, self-contained and in control of your feelings, especially during stressful, difficult or unexpected situations . I like maintaining a facade of composure when running games, I also like seeing the breaking point when composure starts to crumble in the situations where the players find their characters. When the players and characters find themselves at the point where they can't maintain composure, we start to see their true motives and agendas revealed. When the GM starts to lose composure, the game has a tendency to lose focus (which can make for positive or negative experiences, depending on numerous other factors). When characters too composed, we see the way they want to present themselves to the world, and when they aren't composed at all they don't have a chance to control their own n...

  11. Tact My first thoughts here relate to the high school gaming club that I ran for a few years. Tact is one of the most important lessons that we were teaching our students through the club, especially with regard to respecting each others communication with the group, allowing people the chance to say their words, and trying to push the story forward in ways that will not cause problems for the other players (even though the ramifications of those words might cause problems for the characters within the liminal space of the game). A lot of the students who were drawn to the club were often lacking in tact, and my decades of experience running games at conventions and in various home groups tend to suggest that this can be a widespread issue across the hobby. Is this simply because TTRPGs tend to attract neurodivergent folk? This is probably a stereotype...but stereotypes exist for a reason. I'm trying to be tactful in what I'm typing here... 12. Loss Tragic backstories are...

  9. Privilege Since I'm getting into a  bit of a groove of responding to these prompts in the context of the three-way tension model, let's consider the idea of "privilege" from that perspective. What is a privilege in a TTRPG, and how might it impact of the dynamics of the session? My first thoughts here linger on the notion of "niche protection". A player who is portraying a cleric or healer has a privilege on their actions when it comes to removing wounds from other characters. This privilege might be diegetic or non-diegetic. Now I'm trying to work out which of these options is more diegetic, and which is more non-diegetic....but here's where my current thought patterns lie. Non-Diegetic (existing outside the narrative): The player who has a privilege with regard to this sort of action is the one who has a bonus on their skill rolls (or whatever mechanisms is used for randomising an action result). It is also known among players that this person...