Observations of the Fox

So, I'm running a series of games at the local gaming store. A string of mini-campaigns, each 5 sessions long. Each session 2 hours. Each string of games will be a different system and setting.  The first  mini-campaign was Cyberpunk 2020/Red, and the setting was the Bronzewing tower complex, just over 100 stories tall, 50000 people living in the tower.  This time I offered to run a Warhammer 40K experience, and told the players it would be an investigation by the Inquisition. I like running with systems that promote the type of story being told, and really thought something like Gumshoe (2009-2013) or Cthulhu Dark  (2023) would serve the purposes I needed...then I looked at the various games that were focused on the Warhammer 40k Inquisition. I generally hated them. For theae purposes anyway. Every system seems to be filled with fiddly details and multiple systems that worked to cross purposes, or which sruggled to maintain elements of the tabletop battlegame, but ...

 I always try to print out a physical copy of any new game as a round of editing. This way I can get a red oen and mark what needs changing where things just look wrong on a page... while the screen gives a different vibe.  This system reference document (SRD) shifted from 16 to 24, then 32 pages. The core mechanics of the game fit on a double sided A4 sheet of paper, everything else is character creation, the ways the basics can mutate to account for a fairly free-form magic system, and ways that the person co-ordinating a session can travel together a tale.  This SRD will be incorporated into the next phase of the project, a "cookbook" showing how to adapt the systems to account for different genres of storytelling and styles of play. It's been a long and winding path, but it's getting somewhere. The specific next stage is to make sure final edits are completed before Microsoft Publisher goes offline forever, and make sure everything is converted to PDF pages which ...

Kind of a follow-up to my last post. I can see why a lot of comedy games fall flat, in much the same way that I've seen a lot of horror games fall flat.   (no pun intended)  Every time I've seen an interpretation of Discworld for a tabletop RPG it has been a thin veneer of the people and places from the setting thrown over an existing rule set which has been designed for a very different style of storytelling. D&D is not a good fit for Discworld, the core mechanisms of play are too serious, too self important...I guess that makes it ripe for violation, but with the rules lawyers I've encountered over the years there's a really good chance that any violation won't be considered benign. Sure you could house rule ideas into the system and establish them as canon in a session zero, but that starts drifting away from the rules as written. It's not quite as bad as the " D&D/Green Lantern " post I made a few days ago, but the same kind of compromises ...

I first remember hearing this term a few years ago. Here's a link...   It was first proposed as a paradigm for comedy by A. Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren at the Humor Research Team / Humor Research Lab (HuRT / HuRL).   The topic was raised in the last couple of days, when she asked "Why is a fart funny?" and I tried to explain how a fart is generally unable to hurt you (it's generally benign), but is a violation of the senses. Some people don't find them funny, and that may be because their do not consider the gaseous aroma to be benign at all and this they are left with the violation which simply offends them...or they may not consider it a violation because they regularly encounter far worse assaults on their senses as a part of their daily lives, thus leaving them with the benign and something which really doesn't make much impact on them at all (farts are just a part of everyday life). We can similarly see how some people might perceive racist comments as ...

    It's an interesting theory, and I've certain seen players like this at a number of tables that Ive either been a part of, or have run, at various stages over the past few decades. In the last couple of posts I mentioned narcissistic players, and this is certainly in the same ballpark as that phenomenon (I can almost hear the player screaming "Fake News") . The screenshot post goes into a bit of depth, regarding the subcategories and it's nice to see a social media post that actually scratches a bit below the surface. I've heard players explicitly use each of the types of displacement mentioned, and in some cases I can think of players who've used multiple examples during my time gaming with them... however, when things go well, they love the GM, they love the rule systems, they love the unfolding story, (they typically see everyone else in the group as supporting characters to their success, and don't often think about them) . If this type of play...

I've been collecting posts from online to respond to... some giving me positive reactions...and some... ...seriously, for fuck's sake!!! Let's deconstruct it a bit... bearing in mind that I don't have a lot more context,and I'll be inferring a lot of details based on patterns I've established over the years in context with my assortment of recent posts.  I've just finished Lanterns as well, and it was a great show. I can see how someone would want to tell stories in that universe, or stories of that nature. But...   Any one or two of these c ould be modified to bring D&D closer into alignment with what we see in Lanterns, but we either start drifting from the core concepts of Lanterns, or we start drifting away from the core concepts of D&D. We have a tension between the diegetic source (Lanterns) and the non-diegetoic rule systems (D&D). If I had players who were hell bet on playing D&D, but who wanted the Lanterns style of storyline, there...