Observations of the Fox

April 2008... seventeen years ago. That's where it all began . 2500 posts ago. I never intended for this blog to become an exploration of two decades in my hobbies of roleplaying and wargaming...or for it to be an archive of my general musings over that time. It's basically been a third of my life, and in that time I've had a few jobs, completed two university degrees, moved house nine times (spending 8 years at one house, two years at a house I know pay a mortgage on, and a succession of other rental properties as my life shifted dramatically a couple of times). I've been bankrupt in that time, have scraped by (often needing two choose whether food, rent, electricity , or medicine were the priority from week to week...knowing I could afford one, maybe a second, while the other two would have to wait), and have occasionally had times when the only methods for survival were the kindness of charity groups, or the turnover of sales on my online gaming shopfront . I've ...

I'm trying out a new social network by the creator of Wikipedia, it's called WT:Social and it's seems to already seem positive. A few local game designers are hoping to push is forward as the replacement G+ that many of us have been looking for over the past few months, and with that in mind a number of gaming groups have already started to become established on the network. If I've done this correctly, my link on WT:Social is here. If you read this blog, it'd be nice to see you there.

Something I've often found in the games that I've run is a need to balance rigidity and flexibility. Order and chaos. If I'm going to run a game in a clearly defined and highly detailed world, I'll prefer to give the players free rein in that world, letting them set their own goals and agendas while exploring and revealing the unknown. If I'm going to run a game with distinct scenes and elements that follow a specific narrative to their conclusion, I'll tend to give the players more room to describe the setting and the world leading up to that conclusion. A defined world with a defined narrative feels too "railroady", unless the players have some other outlet to express their creativity. Perhaps the setting and the over-riding narrative arc are just a framework for play, while the dramatic tension and creative outlet come from the interactions and relationships between characters. Such statically framed relationship games have been a fertile ground f...

One of the projects I want to develop this month for NaGaDeMon was a variant on the parlour game known under various incarnations as "Werewolf", "Mafia", or one of many other names. I've been familiar with the game idea for a while, but only had the chance to play it and dissect its mechanisms in the wild a few weeks ago. This was done with a group of pre-service teachers on a field trip to the outback, using a variant of the game that had been home-brewed. This version of the game had a colonial Australian feel to it, and it was referred to as "Bunyip". Roughly a third of the players were "Bunyips", who took the typical Werewolf/Mafia role of awakening each night and choosing a victim to kill. Having looked through the Icebreaker Article about the game, many of the variant character types had been included under various names. I played the role designated in that article as "The Peeping Tom" during my first game. Other c...

I haven't posted much here. But that doesn't mean I haven't been doing anything...on the contrary, I've been more busy this month than I have in a long time. I've been... on two field trips learning about Australian Indigenous culture within an educational context... travelled over 3000km via various modes of transport, without leaving my state (50km south to Kangaroo Valley, 850km up north and back down the coastline one night to drop some ferrets to Taree, over 700km each way to the outback town of Moree...then the regular 1500km or so that I drive each day)... Taught four different art classes during a six week practical session as a part of my university studies. I've also been working on the images for Inktober, but haven't had the chance to scan them in yet. Maybe in the next few days...it still xounts as a win if I manage to get all 31 images completed and posted by the end of the month doesn't it. I've finally recieved the various p...

What are your essential tools for gaming? If this question is asking what minimum equipment have I found it necessary to have available in order to run an enjoyable and successful game, then the answer is short and simple. At least one other imaginative player. That's it. I've run successful games for a single player. I've run successful games purely freeform, ad libbed, at conventions for paying players who wanted to come back and play again. I will admit that the first games (with a single player) did feature a lot of props, miniatures and the whole RPG experience, but I really think I could play a successful and fun game with no props, no system, no preconceived story and only a single player. If the question is asking what I usually carry in my roleplaying kit as my typical gaming gear, then there's a bit more to add. A couple of imaginative players Some pencils and notepads Then, slightly less essential... Character details (whether on ...

One of the younger players in my LARP has decided that he wants a gaming experience that is deeper than what we've been able to provide with the 10 players that regular show u to our live events. His mother has bought him a copy of D&D, and has invited a few members of the LARP to run his first tabletop game for him. I've been volunteered to run the game. I would have suggested a simpler game like Dungeon World, or even one of my own game designs; but she's bought him D&D, so that's what we'll be running with. I guess it is the biggest roleplaying game, and was probably the only RPG available in the local bookstore (or local toy store, or local pop culture store...or wherever it was purchased). I asked what version of D&D it was, and the response was simply "the easy one"..."the one kids can play". Given that is was purchased in the last couple of weeks I can only assume that 5th edition was acquired. Now I just need to work out a...

I'm not going to mention names. I've seen the patterns repeated many times over the years, but a particular instance reminded me of it again this morning. We've seen it across the world in many guises...anti-vaxxers using claims from celebrities derived from unsubstantiated data (or even data that has been deliberately debunked)...climate change denialists who point to one cold day as an argument against global warming...politics in the USA... Someone will typically derive their opinion from their experiences, and when their experiences don't adequately match the situation they'll draw on the claimed experiences of someone they look up to. Opinions are like gut feelings, they don't have substantiated facts associated with them, they just resonate with a person and subversively ingratiate themselves into the psyche. Once embedded, they're hard to get rid of. The specific instance I noted this morning involves people's experiences with games. Particu...

Last month was pretty hectic with my teaching practical lessons taking up my time for most of the day (and many of my nights), leaving the weekends to do house work and not leaving much time at all for blogging, illustration, or game design. Things should balance out again over the next few weeks in the lead-up to  +Ettin Con , where I'll be engaged in collaborative worldbuilding, and hopefully running a beta playtest of "The Law". Regardless, there might be a few more mapping tutorials on their way, and some other bits and pieces that I've been holding out on.

It's that time of year... I have to write roughly 30,000 words worth of university assignments...and 200 words worth of RPG. If you're not sure what I'm talking about...visit this link. I've completely one of the 3 uni assignment and a single 200 word RPG entry. Now it's just another 18,000 words worth of university assignments to go before Thursday. I can't remember if I'm allowed to post the game design idea somewhere else before I enter it in the contest, otherwise I'd include it below.

They say things are worth what people are willing to pay for them. Sometimes I wonder about that. I've got stuff that has a big sentimental attachment for me. A massive miniatures collection that I've spent thousands of dollars on over the course of two decades, including a few painted pieces that have won awards at various conventions and tournaments over the years. But at least half of the figures are for games that are no longer in print. When times have been tough, I've been told by a few people that I should just sell them, but I haven't because In specific cases I remember painting each one (or, for the rest, at least vaguely remember painting each batch). For me the hobby is about the play, and the painting, and the imagination. The collectability of the metal (or resin or plastic) is just an aside. I could probably sell the figures for a few hundred dollars in batches (sold by game, sold by faction), I'd still have quite a few odd pieces left over. I s...

So, I bookmarked this video to watch, and just sat through it. I'm not going to say that I disagree completely, because I can see some of the points that he is trying to get at...but it's like listening to a fish tell me how to climb trees. Twenty years ago I might have considered a lot of these points revolutionary (and the fact that the games used as examples are all more than twenty years old reflectsthis to some degree), but so much theory has been generated and so many new systems have developed since the mid-90s that a lot of these points seem obsolete. Changing die rolling mechanisms or existing on a spectrum between simplistic and byzantine are just methods of manipulating a single part of the game. If I was to go back to my own Vector Theory thoughts, these changes manipulate the way nodes are addressed in the story, but there is far more to gaming than those mechanisms. The example of shifting a flat progression to a bell curve really does nothing but manipul...

Yes, it's a bit of a "click-baity" title, but it's something I've been thinking about lately, and this whole " White Male Gamers as Terrorists " thing has fed into that (The article and the issues around it have been addressed by Wyrd ). The problem is that I've seen a lot of people point the blame at Wyrd, but have seen far worse offences and atrocities commited by Games Workshop. I'm not saying that the volunteer representatives  of Wyrd (or employees, depending on whom you ask) get a free pass because Games Workshop does it worse. As a graduate of Social and Cultural analysis with a minor in sociolingustics, I know that communications can be important, and that messagess can vary depending on the context of the speaker, and the implied context of the listener. I've tried to make a neutral comment regarding the experiences of my wife and I in regard to similar issues, and people latch onto the neutrally-intended "female" which I...

The topic of women in "geek culture" has been rattling around in my brain for a couple of weeks...whether gaming, cinema, comics, toys, or anything else. I'll offer a few specific examples across a variety of elements from "geek culture". - The "Wonder Woman" TV pilot episode which never made it past the producers, because it basically turned the Wonder Woman story into every other genre-formula adolescent drama story...and the sheer number of times we've heard about a Wonder Woman movie in the works, only to hear that it has suffered some kind of set back.   - The outrage that many fans had about the reboot of the DC universe...with female characters reduced to sex objects (Catwoman) or having their costumes stripped back to skimpy strips of fabric (just about everyone else). This could be attributed to the general lack of female within the staff of DC, but that's probably just another symptom of the deeper problem. - Recent outrage a...