Observations of the Fox

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...

So here's how it works. A mystic decides that the want to transform the world in a predetermined way.  To do this, they instinctively follow a procedure that involves a few steps. They decide what changes they are aiming for. They invoke the energy that will manifest changes in the world. They filter the gathered energy through their intentions. The world changes in some way. The first and last steps are fairly narrative in nature, while the middle steps are where the mechanisms of play manipulate the flow of events.  They decide what changes they are aiming for. The effect is described in the terms of a simple sentence with one or more metaphysical terms thrown into it. The simplest form of the magical sentence is a metaphysical verb combined with a metaphysical noun. The verb is what you're doing, and the noun is what you're doing it to. "[Create] [Fire]", "[Purify] [Water]", "[Grow] [Plants]", "[Corrupt] [Data]"...the words can be ...

I did a bit of a binge of the recent Predator Movies... Prey, Predator: Killer of Killers, and Predator:  Badlands... over the weekend.  I have to say, that each of these movies is fun, and there's some awesome worldbuilding in them. What makes them greater than the sum of their parts is the way they are interconnected. And on top of that, the way they establish a wider context of worldbuilding across the other movies in the franchise. We get the flintlock pistol from Predator 2 appearing in various movies, we get the post credits scenes in "Killer of Killers" with throwbacks to old characters, yet each movie works well as a standalone. The same can generally be said of the other movies in the franchise, but some of them have been a bit hit-and-miss in their execution.    I love that each of the movies is different and has a different feel, orbiting around the combinations of ideas where sci-fi, action, and horror overlap. I love that the diversity of the main charac...