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RPGaDay 11&12

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  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...
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RPGaDay 2026 9&10

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  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...
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Bronzewing Revisited

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  I really wish I knew what happened to the files mentioned in this blog post . It sounds like it could have been really useful for something I'm currently working on. The current project still uses the 102 level Bronzewing building, because I've found the three booklets that have the raw maps in them... I've printed put one of the booklet sets and have started handwriting in it. Interesting places, evocative names, no real stories unfolding in the tower at the moment, but some prompts that might initiate some ideas when play unfolds. To add to this, I've generated a couple of random tables...but I was wondering if there was anything useful from my past attempts to use the Bronzewing maps...and I saw that post. Anyway... the whole idea at the moment is to use it in a Cyberpunk 2020/Red campaign. That's left me with a bunch of tables where I roll 2d10 and add a fifth of the floor level to the result. This basically means certain types of place and encounter are more ...
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RPGaDay 2026 7&8

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  7. Mercy What does it mean to have mercy? The first idea that comes to mind here is to not be too harsh or too hard with punishment when mistakes happen. There are some game systems that have very little mercy, especially when it comes to combat situations. I particularly think of this when it comes to low fantasy "gritty" games. On the other hand, many "slice-of-life" and "cosy-fantasy" games are far more merciful and forgiving. Is one style of game better than the other, is it better for a system or a GM to be merciful with the players? I've always tried to be a fan of the idea that different types of games and different styles of play are a better fit for different groups of players. Having a degree of mercy in the game turns down the immediacy and the tension in a game, but some games do better when they have some breathing room. Personally I often try to begin my game with an exploration phase where the players have lower stakes and a higher deg...
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RPGaDay 2026 5&6

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Looking through some other people's RPGaDay posts and then looking more carefully at the image where the prompts are found, I can see that each of the weekly rows has a sub-prompt that seems to be based on a distinct characteristic. and each of the daily columns has a sub-prompt (which seems to be based on that old poem of "Monday's child beig full of woe..."), when combined with the daily prompts and the text at the bottom of the image, a few people have been making characters for various games by combining these elements. I might try that for a series of posts ext month, picking a game system where I think that kind of character might fit, then building the character...or just trying to build each character type in a single system to see how versatile it is...   For the moment. I'm just going to keep plunging ahead with the prompts in the same way I have so far.  5. Burden Naturally, I'm reading this two ways. The first being a psychological burden that a ch...
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RPGaDay 2026 3&4

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Alright, next two. (I also noticed that there's a range of weekly prompts on the side of the chart. I might do these next months once the daily prompts have been dealt with)   3. Poise Calm and balance, readiness to move. There's often something of escapism here, players like their characters to feel in control of the situation... or should I be saying that players like to feel that their characters are in control. There's a subtle but important difference here. Are the characters in control, or are the players in control? Is there a tension that makes them feel like they aren't completely in control but they have enough agency to make a difference in the world around them. Poise is the readiness to act, knowing that something unstable or unsettling is on its way. Not just react, but act with confidence and determination. It's an experience that most players just don't reallt have in the physical world, and it's something that the group agrees to as it explo...
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Images of the Three Way Tension (Part 2)

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Quite some time ago, I was writing about the Vector Theory (wow, that was 16 year ago), describing a perspective on how games are run. It used illustrations like these.                     I still think there's some value in these ideas, however my current thoughts are less about specific flowchart paths that a story MUST follow, and now my thoughts tend to flow more organically because we can't account for crazy choices that players might make, or every type of action that characters might choose to engage.   So everything basically collapses back to the "Simple Path" or "Path of Clouds" in the images above.   The point here is that the Three Way Tension doesn't always only to the GNS triangle, the actual essence of the model applies to the specifics of the GM, the Players and the Rules.       We can look at this a few ways when considering the dynamics at the table. With each player pulling on the di...
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