Observations of the Fox

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.

Wow, I probably shouldn't have started digging down the literacy rabbit hole... As someone who is currently teaching Mathematics (among other things), I'm seeing stuff like this.   Now this isn't a post about mathematical skill, but the responses to this image are fascinating. Some people are working out the part inside the brackets and the part outside the brackets separately then multiplying them together due to the brackets. 800 ÷ 4 = 200, 5 x 10 = 50... 200 x 50 = 10000 (This is wrong) Some are simply working left to right. 800 ÷ 4 = 200, 200 x 5 = 1000, 1000 x 10 = 10000  (Another way to get the wrong answer)  Some are simply working right to left. 5 x 10 = 50, 4 x 50 = 200, 800 ÷ 200 = 4. (Which gets us to the right answer but using the wrong logic)  Some are doing the work inside the brackets (5 x 10 = 50), followed by the part immediately outside the brackets (4 x 50 = 200), then the operator by itself on the side (800 ÷ 200 = 4). (Co...

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...