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The flavours of Tension in the 3-way model (Part 2)

The last post broke down the various stereotypical tensions between a GM/Narrator and their players. However, the players are not a monolithic block who all want the same thing from their session experience. There will often be tensions between players who have different requirements or who are aiming toward different session experiences. A session will often (but not always) work smoothly when the entire group is after the same type of thing.  If everyone has a Narrativist aim, they'll all be working toward producing a tale and exploring the unfolding story as they follow character goals as they work toward a logical and satisfying conclusion, or just generally meander with no particular goal or direction to see where things might head (working out a narratively satisfying tale from the events of the session later). The biggest tensions here will come from interpretations of how goals might come into conflict. If everyone has a Gamist aim, there will generally be a friendly (or no...
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The flavours of Tension in the 3-way model (Part 1)

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(If recent days are anything to go by, this post is going to be generally viewed by a few people, maybe discussed a bit...but lose traction pretty quickly.. then in 10 to 1t5 years, it'll suddenly be popular. Maybe the ideas in it will be announced by someone who happens to be the indie darlig of the scene in the mid to late 2030s, and I'll say things like "I was saying this years ago"... anyway, here goes.) If you're still with me in this description of how I see the mechanisms at play in a TTRPG session, you'll accept the ideas that there are three different forces at play, and there are three different types of session those forces will be looking for. Two of the forces are personified by the participants in the session, the GM/Narrator, and the Players, while the third force is embodied by the rules being used as a framework for the session. Each of these pulls on the others, and it's the interplay of the ways that they pull that makes (or breaks) a se...
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BYOM

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   8-bit gaming...actually, I think the colour range above is closer to 16-bit gaming. When I started working on this idea, it was called BYOM (Bring Your Own Miniatures), because I knew I wouldn't have the resources to release a range of miniatures to go with a wargame (or even a skirmish game), and because I've got heaps of minis from companies that have gone bust, or simply one-off minis from indepedent producers who never had their own rule set to work with. I wanted to make a fun set of rules that worked on a basic grid, where players could bring their minis from a variety of genres to explore a variety of settings and scenarios.  It's still a valid idea, but these days players could 3d-print their own minis and terrain, or still buy stuff from assorted vendors who are designing a wide array of interesting stuff. I've seen so many new terrain and miniature manufacturers in recent years that I've thought about revisiting this concept. I had been looking (a few y...
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Further Digging into the 3-way tension

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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...
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Terrain in progress

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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.  
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Digging into the Three-Way Tension

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      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...
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Primary and Secondary Agendas

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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...
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