Observations of the Fox

    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.

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...