Observations of the Fox

I was alerted to this post over on Wordpress through my socials (in this case it was BlueSky). It kind of touches on a lot of the stuff I've been thinking about in recent years, including the comments made by students in the TTRPG club I ran at school for a couple of years (before the troubles), my work to make game rules more "user-accessible", my studies in linguistics over the years, and my work in general as a teacher. There's generally been a lot of discussion about literacy as an issue in various fields lately. This is not just gaming related, but also touched on media literacy, social literacy, political literacy, and how the decline in each of these has had ramifications on the world around us. It's not just about whether someone can read the words, but also about whether they understand the meaning being conveyed. In the case of music, it might touch on the idea that conservatives are calling Rage Against the Machine or Bruce Springsteen woke, because it...

My last post indicated my new tinkering with 3D printing as a resource for tabletop gaming. Today I'm going to offer some links to sites where I've found a whole heap of free stuff that's pretty good. There are plenty of paid subscription services such as Loot Studios  or parts of My Mini Factory , but that's  not what I'm looking at today. Instead I'm looking at the low budget and no budget options. First up, Makerworld .    It was here that I first found the Open-Lock system, but one of the things that I do really like about this site is that you can follow specific creators, and some creators have developed a great range along specific thematic ideas. There's heaps of downloads available, and easily thousands  (if not tens of thousands) that could be utilized for gaming in some way.  Next, Printables .   This site has plenty of stuff on it, but probably not as many gaming related downloads. but it's good to have a few sources to search for things. I...

When I run games, I try to limit the potential for players to diverge in their understanding of the 3D space in their imagined versions o events. I like everyone to be on the same page, and to share a collective understanding of how things are unfolding, especially when a game starts getting tactical. A lot of this probably comes from playing with miniatures where the tactical play is literally laid out with physical pieces of terrain and small figurines that depict the characters. Don't get me wrong, a also like a good game where theatre of the mind has been executed well...but I've see so many arguments at tables of the years where one person has a distinct impression of how things are unfolding while another person is viewing things in a very different light. In such a case, both might be valid interpretations, but are often irreconcilable. The slowing down, and sometimes complete disruption, of the game is undesirable. It's probably one of the reasons I like a good LARP...

I had an idea...and I found evidence that it dates back to 2007, but probably goes back even further than that. It basically worked off the idea that each of the characters were some kind o ,magical effect that had achieved sentience. Characters were basically made by two pre-filled half character sheets that were combined to make a whole sheet, then a few additional elements were added to complete the character. I know that I've toyed with the idea of split character sheets a few times in the past, and it's an idea I'll probably revisit a few times in the future. In fact, the Familiar game kind of draws on this concept at some level, because some of the character's benefits come from the immortal Familiar spirit, and some of their benefits come from the mortal mystic who is bonded to them. I don't know whwre these sheets came from (there are six of them), because they certainly weren't in my notebooks when I did my series of "old  notebook" posts earl...

A lot of my thoughts about the SNAFU magic system can be traced back to the work I did back in NaGaDeMon 2019 when I worked on SNAFU and the Familiar games concepts initially. I can see posts that go back to the earlier versions of the word system , posts that already seem to address some of the conduit issues that I'm having , even the bit where I pulled Connection/Conduit/Capacity from the Ukiyo Zoshi work of the 1990s. I've been stomping in this space for a while, and I guess this is half the reason why I keep this blog going. Sure, I'm getting thousands of views every day, and I don't think all of them can be bots (even if I rarely get comments), but having an archive of twenty years of game design ideas, theories and observations I can look back on has been really useful at times.  My quick scans over these old posts (they don't feel old, but after 7 years they certainly don't count as recent posts any more) shows that I've had some changes in thought ...

I've been thinking about that last post.  What if a mystic had the words "destroy" and "light", and they accumulated enough energy to magnify their effect to cover the orbital distance to the moon (radius of effect - 10), plus the energy to get their effect centred on the sun (distance to centre of effect - 7), made it an effect that lasted centuries or longer (duration 6+), and applied a few levels of success to the number of penalty traits applied (let's say 4 or 5)? We know that this would be feasible for a mystic with a minimum capacity score of 3, because they could feasibly generate 36 energy over the course of 3 rounds, so 28 is certainly within the realms of possibility. But what would this look like? Would they extinguish the sun? Would they cause a collapse in the sun's energy output that would cause it to become a supernova? Would the darkness effect actually cause the sun to collapse into a black hole?  I think that one of the key things to c...