Posts

Design by Exception (or not)

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Over a decade ago I posted about "exceoton based design" ( here and here ). Quick tl:dr... I didn' like it the and I still don't like it. I've thought about it plenty of times in the time since then, but the big games in the hobby (Dungeons and Dragons, and Pathfinder) still base themselves on it. Oe of the key differences between minimaliust game designs and maximalist game designs seems to be the idea of wther a general game rule can be applied to everything, or whether you need specific rules to cover specific situations. There's definitely a continuum between the extremes... do you write a one page system like " Honey Heist " or " Lasers and Feelings ", where a single mechanism of play defines all actions regardless of how well those actions might fit the mechanisms?...do you write a sequence of books each with a few hundred pages in them (There's a few of these, and entre business models based on the " supplement treadmill ...

The Inevitable Slowdown

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School has started back for the year, and tha invariably means that my number of posts starts to slow down. It also doesn't really help that my wife has moved for work to a town that's an hour drive away. So a lot of the time that I might be oorganising and writing blog posts I'm now spending travelling in a car across the rural outback. This is getting me in the mood to complete the Walkabout game, but I've dedicated my immediate future to finalising the Familiar project. It's kind of a tricky choice. One's a game about surviving the post-apocalypse by working together and overcoming many of the issues that brought about societal collapse (without falling into worse situations against monstrous creatures that are the embodiment of hubris and corruption)... the other is a game about restoring magic to a world where it has been captured and crushed by an oligarchy over the course of centuries, and enjoying the little things in a society caught between oppression ...

The Power

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The fruitful void (which might also be called the creative void) is a gap in the rules where players have to make decisions for themselves. None of the rules in the game specifically address the elements inherent within the void, but it's intrinsically a part of the story developed during the course of the session.   This ideas was developed by Vincent Baker ( back in 2005 ), and filtered back through various folks across the design community (note the pages here and here ). It came into vogue back at The Forge in the early parts of the decade, so naturally that meant there were numerous interpretations of the idea, and a bunch of people claiming that their version was the "true" version. Personally, I thought it was lazy game design for a long time. However, I've kind of come around to understanding how it's a useful concept. I want to do something like this for the way magical energy flows in the Familiar game. However, I think there needs to be some kind of an...

Familiars and Mystics

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I'm going to pivot back away from the coding side of things for the moment, and back to game development concepts, and narrative elements. In a "normal" fantasy roleplaying game, the magic-user is the centre of attention and their familiar is some kind of pet who shares a mystical bond with them. Perhaps the familiar helps channel magical energy a little better, perhaps it provides a benefit to casting die rolls, perhaps (as in Mage: the Ascension) the familiar eats aways the penalty effects that come with existing as a quasi-force of nature in a world of mundane masses. In a game called "Familiar", the concept is naturally going to be flipped. The familiar is the main character, they have agendas of their own, and the magic-user/mystic is their conduit to the world and a source of both stability and narrative potential within the world. The familiar is effectively immortal, but their vessel may change every couple of years (if they're lucky, a mystic may la...

Codifying the Basics (Part 2)

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 OK...so I never really explained much about the coding part in the last post.  I know that Ren'Py can handle arrays. If you don't know what an array is, it's basically a list of information components identified as a coherent cluster. A program can withdraw specific elements of data from the array... so it might have 5 elements of data, and you can print out the second one, you can rearrange them by shuffling the data elements, or add another one to the end and turn it into 6 elements of information. There's all sorts of ways that you can modify an array. I'll run the arrays a bit like a relational database that can be modified on the fly, but will always start with a static framework and data. (If anyone out there is reading this and knows about databases, python scripting, or Ren'Py specifically, and if they have any better ways to address these ideas, please let me know.)   The first and most obvious array would be called "deck" (or something simil...

Codifying the Basics

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So many games use shorthand and assumption to get their points across. The idea generally seems to be that gamers know certain things intuitively, so they don't need to be clarified in detail. Even when you read through a "What is an RPG?" section in various games there are elements of the experience that are glossed over or left out completely. This is further complicated by the notion that an actual play session of the game may look quite different to the examples written, because the GM/Narrator and the Players are pulling against the intended rules to play a game quite different to the designers intentions. When it comes to writing rules, I'm not immune to this. However, when writing for a computer program, certain elements need to be explicit, and if there are elements of "the fruitful void" existing between rules, then you just have to accept that these elements can't be quantified in the code.  That means I need to be really pedantic about certai...

Thoughts

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  I don't write this blog to get hits, or to be a "TTRPG Influencer". If I did, I'd be disappointed that over the last few months I haven't received a single meaningful comment... well actually that does nag me at the back of my mind... bit the point is that I'd just wrote posts for the views, or change my method of writing to focus on D&D or whatever the "flavour of the month indie darling" is. It's always nice, and a bit confusing, when there is a spike of readers, such as the few days in the middle of the month when I was getting thousands of views rather than the usual hundreds. I usually just write these posts to work through ideas I've been having, or so some might eventually click a link from a search engine years after I written something and it might help with a concept they've been struggling with. I'd much rather actually design, rather than write about the process of design, but sometimes it helps to get things out the...