Observations of the Fox

Influenza, bronchitis, man-flu, not sure what it is... but I'm off sick at the moment, so that gives me time to finish off the run. 29. Labour The first phrase to come to mind here is a "labour of love", and in 30 years of designing games that's what it's always been for me. The number of hours I've spent discussing game design, running games of differet types as research, sharing my games with the world, writing this blog, and organising my shopfronts on various game-trading websites over the years has easily been in the months if they were combined together (24hrs a day, 7 days a week, ≂4⅓ weeks per month... 728 hours for a solid month, so yeah, I've easily done this. It'd be fair to say that I've spent thousands of hours on the hobby.) In that time I've probably spent about $10,000-$12,000 on RPGs, and have probably earned $12,000-15,000 from the products I've sold. At worst, it's been a self-sustaining hobby, at best I've earned...

  27. Hunger The first thing to come to mind with this prompt is naturally the systems that have evolved in Vampire the Masquerade. The first version that continued from the first incarnations of the game through to the 20th Anniversary Edition (which I still think was the climax of the line) had a point pool system. You'd drink blood to fill up the pool, while waking up, healing and using certain powers would deplete the pool. It was a nice balancing mechanism that really fit well with the genre being emulated, but still had an easily understood way that it functioned in play. The newer incarnations of the system have a diue that is rolled instead of a pool that is gradually refilled and depleted. It makes things a bit more dramatic because you don't know if your character is going to become more ravenous when you use a power, or if they're going to remain stable at this stage. The downside here is that it strips a little more agency away from the player, they don't ha...

 ....some kind of viral infection has taken me down over the last couple of days, so this should have been posted 2 days ago. Sorry 25. Familiarity One of the things I love about being familiar with a bunch of different games is being able to bring across fun game mechanics from one system and use them to tailor the session experience in another. I also love it when different players in a group are familiar with different elements of play, and various members of the group can become the default experts for specific subsystems. This was really apparent in the old LARP campaigns I was a part of (and often ran). There was simply too mush happening for one person to handle, so sub-GMs became necessary, each being familiar with the stuff they knew best... one handled the gods, one handled trade, one handled the town guard, etc... I've seen a few smaller scale tabletop games split GM duties in similar ways, but I haven't necessarily experienced this done successfully in a more intima...

  23. Fortune Chance, randomness, the whims of things outside our control. One of the key elements in many TTRPGs is the way it brings random fortune into the game. There was a lot of talk about "fortune at the end" or "fortune in the middle" back at The Forge, I even remember some folks proposing an idea of "fortune at the beginning", but what does this all mean. Like a lot of my posts, I'm going to paraphrase based on memory as I describe this, and probably modify the original intentions to mesh with my current thoughts about game sessions.  "Fortune at the end" reflects a system where players state their intentions for the upcoming events, perhaps focusing on their characters actions or some other element of the narrative, then they declare everything that will modify the potential outcome in some way. Beneficial factors, problematic ones, positive outcomes, negative results, then the cards are drawn, dice are rolled, tea-leaves are read, ...

  21.Charity A loose definition here might be "giving to those in need", and in a TTRPG context it often means sharing the load of the storytelling, or sharing the limelight with someone who might not have been getting their share. I always try to offer these chances to less active players whether I'm the GM or a player. Similarly, where possible, I'll try to set up scenes and actions that not only give other players the opportunity to influence the session, but offer the ability to highlight aspects of their characters that may not have been revealed yet. I want to help facilitate their escapism, to make the game memorable and fun.  TTRPGs are not a zero-sum game. If every individual member of the group is having fun, then the group's overall fun increases too. I always want players to come back. 22. Grit The amount of grit in a TTRPG can really influence whether or not certain players will respond to the themes within. Gritty TTRPGs often focus on survival again...

(Let's hope we don't get jumbled up again... I must have been tired that day)   19. Desire Desires, goals, motives, needs, things that people want are one of their key defining factors... however, a lot of games ignore this vital part of character development. Perhaps it's left as an element of the fruitful void, which is that part of the game that rules circles around but which is ever addressed in the rules so the players can work it out for themselves at the table. As a bare minimum I give every named NPC a desire, when they need a bit more rounding out, I give them a positive desire (something they are trying to achieve) and a negative desire (something they are trying to avoid). Then I give them a strength and a weakness... most NPCs don't need more than this, but if they become key parts of the story, I might work them up with a full character sheet. At the basic level, the desires of NPCs pull on their narrative, and their web of needs impacts on the player chara...

After the stuff up a few days ago, I'm in the second day of re-aligning the RPGaDay posts. So that means we're getting back to where we should be... (but running a day late) 17. Endurance (which was actually the prompt from day 15) Endurance reminds me of an idea we had for conventions in the 1990s. Australian Freeforms have been mentioned a few times here on the blog. They're basically a style of gaming for 15+ players, sometimes reaching a hundred or more, with various roaming GMs and a co-ordinating GM. They're a very immersive style of play, and can e hard for tabletop gamers to grok. Typically the games start slow with everyone having their own agendas, but one-by-one those agendas become entangled and each players motives start pulling on groups of players, and decisions have to be made.  At those conventions in the 90s we would often hire a venue for an entire long weekend (Sat-Sun-Mon). Registration for games would occur on the Friday evening, sometimes with pr...

OK, so somehow I used the wrong prompts on the last post. I ended up using the prompts for days 16 (Composure) and 17 (Intensity), instead of the ones for 13 and 14. Today I'll go back to those last ones and play catch up. So that brings us to... 15 (for which I'm using the prompt from day 13) . Strain I could tie this back to DURF and its encumbrance system, and that was actually the first way I thought of taking this particular prompt, however I'm going to go in a different direction to link things with my three-way tension and vector theory models of TTRPGs. For this purpose I'll go with the definition of strain as a physical, mental, or emotional pressure. From an engineering perspective, strain is the result of stress, and this basically applies to narrative as well. It is under moments of strain that new properties are revealed in a material, and it's similar to the prompt pair I mentioned in the last post . Strain opposes stress, up to a point. Once stress ex...

Almost halfway through the month, and most of my posts that have been due every second day have generally been on time. Let's keep going...   13. Composure The state of being calm, self-contained and in control of your feelings, especially during stressful, difficult or unexpected situations . I like maintaining a facade of composure when running games, I also like seeing the breaking point when composure starts to crumble in the situations where the players find their characters. When the players and characters find themselves at the point where they can't maintain composure, we start to see their true motives and agendas revealed. When the GM starts to lose composure, the game has a tendency to lose focus (which can make for positive or negative experiences, depending on numerous other factors). When characters too composed, we see the way they want to present themselves to the world, and when they aren't composed at all they don't have a chance to control their own n...

  11. Tact My first thoughts here relate to the high school gaming club that I ran for a few years. Tact is one of the most important lessons that we were teaching our students through the club, especially with regard to respecting each others communication with the group, allowing people the chance to say their words, and trying to push the story forward in ways that will not cause problems for the other players (even though the ramifications of those words might cause problems for the characters within the liminal space of the game). A lot of the students who were drawn to the club were often lacking in tact, and my decades of experience running games at conventions and in various home groups tend to suggest that this can be a widespread issue across the hobby. Is this simply because TTRPGs tend to attract neurodivergent folk? This is probably a stereotype...but stereotypes exist for a reason. I'm trying to be tactful in what I'm typing here... 12. Loss Tragic backstories are...

  9. Privilege Since I'm getting into a  bit of a groove of responding to these prompts in the context of the three-way tension model, let's consider the idea of "privilege" from that perspective. What is a privilege in a TTRPG, and how might it impact of the dynamics of the session? My first thoughts here linger on the notion of "niche protection". A player who is portraying a cleric or healer has a privilege on their actions when it comes to removing wounds from other characters. This privilege might be diegetic or non-diegetic. Now I'm trying to work out which of these options is more diegetic, and which is more non-diegetic....but here's where my current thought patterns lie. Non-Diegetic (existing outside the narrative): The player who has a privilege with regard to this sort of action is the one who has a bonus on their skill rolls (or whatever mechanisms is used for randomising an action result). It is also known among players that this person...

  I really wish I knew what happened to the files mentioned in this blog post . It sounds like it could have been really useful for something I'm currently working on. The current project still uses the 102 level Bronzewing building, because I've found the three booklets that have the raw maps in them... I've printed put one of the booklet sets and have started handwriting in it. Interesting places, evocative names, no real stories unfolding in the tower at the moment, but some prompts that might initiate some ideas when play unfolds. To add to this, I've generated a couple of random tables...but I was wondering if there was anything useful from my past attempts to use the Bronzewing maps...and I saw that post. Anyway... the whole idea at the moment is to use it in a Cyberpunk 2020/Red campaign. That's left me with a bunch of tables where I roll 2d10 and add a fifth of the floor level to the result. This basically means certain types of place and encounter are more ...

  7. Mercy What does it mean to have mercy? The first idea that comes to mind here is to not be too harsh or too hard with punishment when mistakes happen. There are some game systems that have very little mercy, especially when it comes to combat situations. I particularly think of this when it comes to low fantasy "gritty" games. On the other hand, many "slice-of-life" and "cosy-fantasy" games are far more merciful and forgiving. Is one style of game better than the other, is it better for a system or a GM to be merciful with the players? I've always tried to be a fan of the idea that different types of games and different styles of play are a better fit for different groups of players. Having a degree of mercy in the game turns down the immediacy and the tension in a game, but some games do better when they have some breathing room. Personally I often try to begin my game with an exploration phase where the players have lower stakes and a higher deg...

Looking through some other people's RPGaDay posts and then looking more carefully at the image where the prompts are found, I can see that each of the weekly rows has a sub-prompt that seems to be based on a distinct characteristic. and each of the daily columns has a sub-prompt (which seems to be based on that old poem of "Monday's child beig full of woe..."), when combined with the daily prompts and the text at the bottom of the image, a few people have been making characters for various games by combining these elements. I might try that for a series of posts ext month, picking a game system where I think that kind of character might fit, then building the character...or just trying to build each character type in a single system to see how versatile it is...   For the moment. I'm just going to keep plunging ahead with the prompts in the same way I have so far.  5. Burden Naturally, I'm reading this two ways. The first being a psychological burden that a ch...