Observations of the Fox

Just when I thought I was getting momentum, life gets in the way again. I've spent most of the last few days in hospital with my wife, or taking her to medical appointments.   I've had some ideas in recent months about the way lower classes are forced to struggle so they don't have time to tell their stories, and how it's only the elite who have the privilege of time to share their narrative, and the social capital to spread that narrative to reinforce the cultural norms, even though the wider experience of life doesn't necessary reflect the stories that are constantly pumped out. It's something that fits into Familiar, and ironically it's the very lack of time to work on Familiar, and the lack of social capital to get it noticed that has kept the stories within it from being completed. It's a game about social systems and rebelling against them, while those very social systems are keeping it down, and it's going to take an act of rebellion to get it...

As I sat in a hospital last week, intravenous drip in my arm, I had a whole heap of revelations and moments of satori. Now that I'm in a state to write about them, do you think I can remember them? I remember that there was stuff about the direction I wanted to take the "SNAFU SRD and Cookbook", including the idea of writing up a basic 'zine that covered the core rules and only the core rules. That's basically what most SRDs are anyway, and I've started thinking about the layout on that part of the project. The aim this time is to include avoid forgetting any of the important bits, while making sure I trim away anything superfluous. That's tough. At this stage I've tried to trim it down to 16 pages, but it's more realistically looking like 20. There's also some vague recollections about those augmented reality games like Pokemon Go, and a few others that I've played over the years. I was imagining these from the perspective of a modern urba...

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 ...

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 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...

Looking back through the blog, I played with Ren'Py and Twine as visual novel generation tools . I also know that I was playing with them about 3 years ago to generate the first interation of the Familiar character generation tool. I've been looking on old hard drives for the working files to see how I built them from the ground up, and what I could do different this time. I'm not sure where those working files are, but have found compiled complete versions of the software, which are glitchy. They definitely need rebuilding. In the time since then, Ren'Py has also seen a number of updates.  The core idea for Familiar is that characters are made using a five card tarot spread Each card provides an attribute bonus, and a range of 3 potential abilities. If a character has the same ability on two cards, it stops being a potential ability, and becomes an actual ability. If they gain the same ability three or four times, they don't get improved versions of the ability but...

I've finally reached a point where I'm basically happy with the new character sheet for the updated Walkabout. I'm just going to post it as a link to my google drive here on the blog, becuase that way I can see how many people are looking at this page, and get a rough guide about how many people might have clicked through to actually look at the sheet. The basic idea is that it get printed onto an A4 (or equivalent) sheet, and both sides are folded into the middle using a gate fold. The front of the resulting folded card has the surface elements of the character, what other people see, with room to draw a picture. The inside of the card contains all the various elements that a character uses to perform actions within the game, all the numbers and details. The back of the card is a basic rundown of the game rules for performing actions in the game. I've always been a fan of the idea where the core rules are immediately available to the players, and the complicated rule v...

One of the biggest issues I regularly face with game design is the idea of keeping people interested in what I've been doing, even though the design process is slow and interspersed between the regular activities of daily life. I've been working on the idea of refining the life path system, since I wrote about it in mid-June ... on and off, an hour or so here and there every day or two...so maybe a dozen hours in total. Developing a structure, coming up with ideas to populate the tables, crowdsourcing ideas on various social media platforms, getting frustrated when only a couple of people respond, redeveloping structures based on new ideas... then looking back at that post from June and seeing that the structure has basically moved full circle, but maybe been refined a bit. Still not happy to publicly show what that bit of the game is like, but we're moving closer? Still, in the purposes of showing where things seem to be heading at this time, he's a list of the general...