Observations of the Fox

  Vampire for 5.5e Why? Well, I can understand why... I saw a recent post on the TTRPG Designers group I moderate on Facebook. A designer shared their experience selling games on various platforms in recent years... here's a snippet The numbers — in broad strokes: DTRPG is my primary revenue engine. Since I went all-in on 5E-compatible content in mid-2024, my monthly revenue there is up roughly 10x from where it was before. Not 10% — 10 times. Launch months are spikes, but the floor has risen every quarter. - Malcolm Harris Between the article and the Facebook post, it's kind of sad. I get the feeling that if a designers wants to get games recognised and seen by a wider gaming community, they just gave to bite the bullet, sacrifice their integrity, compromise their art, and make a D&D supplement. It's been like this for years, certainly for as long as this blog has been running.  On the positive side, this weekend is Free-RPG Day... and I've thrown some stuff into b...

I really enjoy seeing how other people view tabletop role-playing games, and I'd love yo know more about the rationale behind his diagram that showed up in my feed. It was generated by John Errwin (@johnerrwin.bsky.social), and when I saw it on my bluesky feed I knew I had to critique it and try to intuit where it was going. I really like the notion that it's a cycle, and that various parts of that cycle influence sequential other parts of the cycle. From the perspective of my own "three-way tension" and "vector theory" about TTRPGs, this whole thing would fit into the "Rules" part of the structure. It's not a perfect fit, but it certainly gets me thinking about how the breakdown falls apart, whether that's my own theories breaking down, or the theories that seem to be alluded to in this diagram. I'll give a description of what I see, then delve deeper shortly.  Starting at the top of this diagram, we have "characters", who se...

    After a decade or so where my top 10 posts have all been mapping tutorials, a recent upswing in views has seen my introductory Mage: the Ascension post crack the list. Now I'm going to have to check if a new edition of the game has been released (or is about to be)... 

 It's always fun finding other people's blogs and doing a quick dig through their ponderings and writings. This also means it can be fun to see what things they consider worthy of writing about, and when one of my favourite games of all time is called out (and one that is based on one of my all-time favourite movies), I need to give it a mention.  Ghost Dog     I mentioned it back in my Top 10 games that influenced my game design back in 2018, and it's still a book that I flick through occasionally when I need an answer to a question that isn't quite working out for me. That is all. 

I just saw this, and it's really linked into a lot of the posts I've been making lately.   It seems to be an advertising point for D&D-adjacent products that you don't need literacy , and you can use tools to do the heavy lifting for you. I don't know if this is an AI product, but it does seem to be a package that combines the features of a virtual tabletop and a rapidly accessible database of the rules. It's a tool, it might be a good tool, it might not....but like every tool it probably needs a degree of expertise in it's use and in the environment where it's to be used. It could be right in certain circumstances, it could be wrong in others. A player wouldn't know unless they had read the rules. It's a shortcut that offloads the burden of literacy onto something else and then says "trust us".   I know I'm not the target audience for this, because I see TTRPGs as having the infinite scope of artistic potential, while this reduces ...

I'd heard about RPG Trader starting up a few months ago, and was definitely interested in getting on board.  Here's my profile page. I've just started to put a few products up. A pair so far, The Law and Sceletus, both have had decent downloads, one is old and one is new. I'll be putting a few more products up over the next week or two. We'll see how this platform goes.