Observations of the Fox

Day 27 - Marvelous Miniature Oooh...this is a tough one. I've got a few hundred miniatures (maybe a few thousand if you count the unpainted ones). Back in the day, I loved the miniatures produced by Rackham.  Even though they all had character and a distinctive look to them, this lady was one of my favourites. So annoyed they went bankrupt, but if you look hard enough you can still find some of them around . I'll need to dig through my boxes to see if I can find the copy of her that I painted. Day 28 - Great Gamer Gadget I love the idea of an initiative tower... I've been meaning to use one to see how good they are in practice. ...for games that use initiative that is.

Day 25 - Desirable Dice For a few years I had a thing for buying new dice sets for each game, and often new dice sets for specific characters. However, lately the clicky-clacky math-rocks haven't really done much for me. I think it was the moving house seven times in four years that did it.  Day 26 - Superb Screen I don't use screens. I prefer to keep my rolls in the open, and most of my working notes are in my head, because I tend to walk around the table and keep on my feet when I'm running a session. That said, I'm a woodwork teacher. A couple of years back I helped a student build a modular GM screen with a spot for dice, a clipped area to hold notes, and some small draws and storage areas for miniatures, pens, pencils, erasers, etc. Even helped him woodburn some designs on it. Here's the kind of thing we were going for... (from Elderwood Academy )

Day 23 - Peerless Player During the late 1990s, there were a particular group of players at game conventions in Sydney (and who regularly played at a variety of conventions across South Eastern Australia). I think I've mentioned them before on the blog, or at least alluded to them. They were generally known as "Big Name Gamers" (BNGs).  It seemed like everyone wanted to become a BNG, or at least get in the same social circles as the BNGs so that they could influence the local gaming scene, maybe work in one of the local gaming stores, maybe just set themselves up in the local network of favours and influence the led to work in the entertainment industry, theatre, or even political networks... there was a big black market in favours then, real world favours that were a deep iceberg, and the roleplaying community seemed to be one of the odd locations where the deep network protruded into the real world.  But were they actually good players? Not in my experience they weren...

A quick trip to hospital, and some extra paperwork and bureaucracy at work have prevented me from keeping up with the regular posts...but that's just life... let's get back to our regularly scheduled programming. Day 21 - Classic Campaign Even though I've previously stated that I don't often used pre-published materials, one of my formative gaming experiences back in the early 1990s was playing "The Enemy Within" campaign for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying. It was dark, broody, atmospheric. It told a story, and it was so different to the chaos of almost every D&D set of adventures I had encountered at the time. One day I've love to revisit it. Just to see if the nostalgia is playing a bigger role in my memory, or if the campaign really was that good.  Day 22 - Notable Non-Player Character For many years I had an npc who was an old artificer with no legs. He would appear in various games no matter what system we were playing, or what setting it was. He w...

Wow....just wow. Hopefully I'll get the time to elaborate soon.

Day 19 - Sensational Session In 30-odd years of tabletop gaming, I've had some phenomenal sessions, and some absolute horrors. Let's try to dig back a bit, to one of the first RPG conventions I attended. It was the Macquarie University RPG convention back in 1997, at least I think that's when it was. The 90s are a bit of a blur for me, but I do distinctly remember this session. It was a Shadowrun game, there was a massive map in the middle of the room, it was called "Does it hurt when I do this?"... so yeah, peak 90s. The idea behind the game was that we were playing a trauma team, moving across that giant map in the centre of the room. There were at least 2 GMs that we knew of. the game was in a lecture hall, and there ws an antechamber behind the room that we couldn't see into. The GM who was in our room wore a headset, and as the game moved on, they started communicating with someone else, who was that second GM in the antechamber... it was about halfway th...

Day 17 - An Engaging RPG Community Back in the day, "The Forge" had some great discussion and theorising, and that shifted across to "Story Games". However, those two forums had a lot of insularity, and very much an "in-crowd" mentality that included a bunch of inner-circle high profile designers, and a horde of outer designers who often felt like watchers while the cool kids did their thing. It was often a case that the hot new project might be the flavour of the month just released by one of those inner circle designers, who riddled their books with the favoured terminology, and regardless of how good their games actually were everyone praised them in the hope of getting the courtier's favour and becoming the next inner circle member... ...jaded, yes. But that's how I felt at the time, and after a while a lot of other folks started seeing it too. Now, in recent months, I have become an admin for the TTRPG Design Community on Facebook. As one of ...

Day 15 - Great Character Gear By my first method of doing these posts, I love the old Chromebooks for Cyberpunk 2020. the gear in them tells a story... the books work as diegetic/in-game artifacts of the setting. The cyberware and other items found in these supplements really help to flesh out the setting rather than just being modifiers to the various skills and abilities of the characters. By my second method of doing these posts, I've been struggling with the idea of what makes great character gear in my Walkabout project. I think that what I'm aiming for is very much the kind of thing that I've just mentioned about the Chromebooks ( here and here ). I think great character gear is stuff that helps to tell the story, it reveals things about the world and the characters, it makes sense in the setting and fills in gaps. In games like D&D, much of the equipment does the exact opposite of this, it creates loopholes in physics, it disrupts and circumvents story factors, ...

(I thought I'd posted this pair a few days ago... then life got in the way again. I guess I'll need to do a few posts in quick succession to catch up.) Day 13 - Evocative Environments I can't go past Planescape for this one. The writing, the imagery, the first time perusing the books of the setting when it was first released in the 1990s still stick with me. The artwork was so different to other products available at the time... ...but it was more than that. It was written with lots of fragments, an abundance of places to visit, but every one of those places felt different. It wasn't just a string of medieval cookie cutter towns with the same mysterious hills behind them, and similar dungeons. Day 14 - Compelling Characters Here's the bit where I think my method of answering questions by giving games has basically reached it's end. I've been wondering whether I should approach this question from the perspective of which game system creates the most compellin...

Day 11 - RPG with well supported one-shots I really don't want to say D&D for either of the questions on today's post. However, honestly D&D has such a massive fan base and a huge range of players, dungeon masters, homebrewers, and modders that it's pretty ludicrous to completely ignore what's happening in that part of gaming. I'm generally a bigger fan of indie games, and in a lot of cases games like that are the passion project of a single designer or a small group, and there often isn't enough energy to keep supporting games like that after they've been released. If I pick a mid level game, I love some of the stuff that has been produced for Call of Cthulhu over the years. Again, it's the kind of game that has a massive heritage with decades of play behind it, so it's an easy pick to say there are good support systems for it's play.  I've done a few one-shots with it over the years, but have never managed to get a campaign going wi...

Day 9 - An accessory you'd like to see In the last few years there have been so many good gaming accessories that I haven't really been able to keep up with them. So there are probably a whole heap of options that I'd like to see, which already exist. I've seen dice apps for various games, I've seen dice trays, customisable figures with magnetic limbs that can mix-and-match they appearances and equipment. I've seen character diaries and journals to immerse yourself in the world of the game, sound mixing programs that add background noises to an adventure session, I've seen props of significant items from D&D appear in my local gaming and pop-culture stores (a replica "Hand of Vecna" for example). The accessories I'd like to see are the kinds of things that have been bombarding us from Hasbro as advertisements for D&D, but shifted to the indie games.   But generally, this whole hobby is a combination of improv, theatre of the mind, and c...

Day 7 - RPG with "Good Form" What constitutes an RPG with good form? This is probably something everyone is struggling with. Different people will have their own definitions for this.   My definition of this is basically a game that does what it says on the cover, and it does that thing well. It's not the kind of game where you ignore half of the rules, or a game where you have to make up a bunch of your own rules to make it playable. For the epic feel of sci-fi war against overwhelming odds, with a political backstory explaining why the homeworld uses and abuses you (in the vein of "Aliens" or "Starship Troopers") I love 3:16. It doesn't do much, but what it does is done well. It's simple, strips back all the stuff that these stories don't really touch on, and if focuses on killing things...lots of things. As long as I've had players in the right frame of mind, I've never had a bad game with this.  Day 8 - An accessory you apprecia...

Day 5 - RPG with great writing I remember first being blown away by the writing of Castle Falkenstein . The idea of a game as an in setting artifact describing the world was really cool. However, as I'm writing this, the first time I remember encountering this sort of thing was in the supplements for the game Chill .   Chronica Feudalis was one of the games that really took this to a new level. I'm not sure I've seen a game do this idea better since. Day 6 - RPG that is easy to use One of the easiest games I've ever used was Peril Planet's Freeform Universal , and it's little wonder the game has such a fanatical following. Boiling everything down to a simply positive or negative modifier makes the game streamlined and intuitive. It also means that the game can have complexity added to it once players are used to how the system works. I've done a couple of games over the years which are basically hacks of this system, and they've all run pretty smoothly....

The complete list of daily questions can be found in the first post of this series. Day 3 - Most often played RPG I'd probably have to go with Vampire the Masquerade on this one. I've had a few campaigns of this over the years, both as intimate sessions with a few players, though to mutli-form extravaganzas with over a hundred players in them.  On the whole though, I tend to try as many different games as I can. A few sessions here and there, with the intention to identify what makes them tick, where their strengths and weakness lie, and what I can forage from them to put into my own designs. Honourable mentions for most played games would probably have to go to Legend of the Five Rings, and inevitably D&D (because sometimes that's the only game in town.   Day 4 - RPG with Great Art HoL This was the first "hand written" RPG I encountered. The whole book is a piece of art, though it can be argued whether it counts as a roleplaying game, or just a parody of role...

 I'm going to take a break from posting about Walkabout for this month... there's a bunch of boring development and page layout stuff happening in that regard, and hopefully there will be some more interesting things to post about it once I've given the project some space to breath. ...another way to look at it is that a watched pot never boils... so let's looks at some other things for a few weeks. I haven't done an RPGaDay for a few years. I found that for a while they started getting a bit monotonous and repetitive. But let's try it again this years and see what the questions are... I'll probably run them in batches of 2 or 3 rather than daily responses because I often struggle to get enough time for regular daily posting of images on Instagram, let alone detailed paragraphs of text. Day 1 - First RPG bought this year I think the only RPG I've bought this year is Mothership . However, I'm generally non-plussed on it, and haven't had the chance...

While I've been redeveloping the character generation system for Walkabout, I did some research through the old posts here on the blog... Birth Circumstances Infancy Childhood Adolescence Maturity Joining the Wayfarers ...looking through those old posts, I've noticed what looks to be fragments of a fun system for creating characters in the 2019 development run of the game. However, even though a lot of the ideas look like they're still compatible with the concepts currently underlying the system, I've decided this time round that developing a character should generally follow the game system that is used during play. It should generally be an introduction to how the game systems work. That's basically the bit that I'm struggling with.  I could scrap everything I'm currently working on, and go back to the system from those days (but I'll need to find the old computer files that I alluded to. I could ignore everything from back then, even though it looked ...