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Diegetic and Non-Diegetic

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I've raised this idea a few times, but this seemed a really succinct description and something I can work with. I've played both Ars Magica and Amber, and I love both the games. They can both generate really immersive experiences but they both do so in very different ways.  From this perspective, Ars Magica is very non-diegetic in way it describes the world. It functions in the traditional style of a series of procedural manuals and pseudo-historical textbooks. It gives an idea of what happened in the past and what can happen in your games, but not necessarily how to make if feel. Arguably, this is very "facts over feelings"... there are a whole lot of regimented ways that things work, and this fits the rigour and research of the magi at the heart of the game, while providing a lot of ideas about how things can be expanded to include the other characters who live their lives around the magi. Amber on the other hand could be described as a lot more diegetic. By reading...
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Variant RPGaDay2026 - Day 13, 14, and 15

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A lot of the games I tend to play avoid the whole notion of character classes, instead working off point buy systems or open concepts where the players are able to develop their own ideas.  I don't have a whole lot of "OSR-type" games which would probably work for it... so, I'm picking through the options that I've got to make this sequence of posts work.   Today's batch... one of the PbtA games that I've tolerated enough to run a couple of times... Monsterhearts. Batch 5 (Monsterhearts) With today's prompts including a lot of the term "Associates", it felt appropriate to pick a game about social interaction and how that plays out in tense situations. One of the problems here is that the interesting characters are expected to be the player characters, and it gets tricky to have the antagonists and support characters picking "player character moves". Perhaps the fact that I'm leaving these NPC write-ups fairly vague and am  I...
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Variant RPGaDay2026 - Day 10, 11, and 12

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I'm trying to make sure each of my batches of characters for this sequence are using different games, and while I'm running a couple of days late for this particular post, I really wanted to make sure I delved into the past of my gaming life for today's entry. It just took me a couple of days to find my "Heroes Unlimited" 2nd Edition book from the 1990s.   Batch 4 (Heroes Unlimited) The range of character types in this game aren't necessarily "classes" but more the origins of the characters and the types of powers they have access to. Note also, that unlike a lot of games I'm referencing here, I love the idea of characters having weaknesses (Superman with his kryptonite, Batman with his code of honour), but Heroes Unlimited really never did that, so I'm going to be adding something interesting that I feel reflects the character and adds depth to them here. Intellect – Secret – Far to Go (Alien) The idea of an alien who is hiding among the c...
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Modifying one variable

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Simon Burley (@squadronuk.bsky.social) has been posing some really interesting questions on BlueSky. Erin alerted me to this one...          ...naturally this one really got my interest because it plays into the 3-way tension model, because it's keeping certain elements of the game fixed, while playing with variables in other parts of the session's ecosystem. We're basically looking at a situation where the diegetic information and elements of the scenario/system, and the GM/Narrator remain constant. While the players change and the non-diegetic elements of the system are replaced. It really wouldn't be possible to change this tohave a new system and the same players, because even with the same players we'd have a circumstance where the first time the players proceeded through the scenario they'd have little prior knowledge of how the game was meant to unfold, and a second time where they'd have meta-knowledge about the scenario and could easily be expected...
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Cycles of old and new

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About 14 years ago, I wrote a post about rule bloat . It was when I was starting to develop on of the early incarnations of Walkabout, and when I was developing a bunch of Pocketmod games . Looking back at those ideas, I can now frame them in the concept of the 3-way tension , and how that applies to game sessions.    A big and complex game has a strong pre-defined inertia, especially if the group is playing in a "Rules as Written" style. The more rules there are (whether "mechanical" non-diegetic rules controlling the flow of activities from outside the imagined space of the session, or "fluff" diegetic rules controlling the activities from within the imagined space), the more the system impacts on the flow of the session. A pocketmod or trifold game will have less pull on the session than a multi-volume collection of hardback tomes.  If we're moving to more of a "rulings over rules" style of play, the influence of the system decreases and t...
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