Reactions to posts I've seen

 I seem to have found myself in some good places on various social media platforms. I'm seeing lots of folks promoting innovation in game design, and plenty of thought provoking questions being raised.

I've developed a range of games in different sizes over the years. From games on business cards or single sheets of paper, through to books with a hundred or more pages. or even collections of booklets with hundreds of pages between them. The "What is a TTRPG?" section has almost always been the first section to go when I'vr needed to reduce the page count or make room for other parts of the game. Typically when I have decided to keep this section intact, it's not been because I have assumed that my game will be a player's first exposure to the hobby of TTRPGs, after all most of my games are sold through online marketplaces amidst thousands of similar games, instead I include it to show a point of difference between the way my games might operate, and other similar games...which then leads into the rules being presented.

My current experiment is to pull all that stuff off to one side. I'm still kind of doing the "what is an RPG?" thing, but it's more of a "what is this book?", "how do you play this thing?", "why did we design it this way?", and "how can you modify it to better fit the way you do things?"

So we start with the SNAFU SRD, which is the general rules. Then the SNAFU Cookbook, which provides context, shows how to modify the game, and suggests how things could change for the better or worse when such modifications are made. Finally, we move to the actual games, which take the SRD, apply it to a specific setting through additions and modifications, and bring out specific themes and concepts to be addressed in play. A whole bunch if this will hopefully be cross-referenced to video clips (and hopefully some forums) to provide a more holistic method of presenting the game and build a community around it. Because one of the essences of gaming for me is the community... that's where the knowledge lies.

It's all an experiment at this stage. 

 On a related note, there was this one too...

 

SNAFU follows the PbtA model. It has a core mechanism of play, everything else is a derivative of that to tailor that mechanism to different types of scene and storytelling convention. rather than rule by exception, or applying ad-hoc rulings, it serves as a toolkit with familiar parts to be mixed and matched in a wide variety of forms. I'm hoping the multimedia format of the book, videos and self-contained forums will serve as a central holistic repository of knowledge for running the game.


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