Observations of the Fox

    A few weeks ago, it might even be months now, I was looking at a range of SRDs with Erin. We've both been trying to see what else is out there in the way of gaming, what ways people might be innovating, what patterns might be common in the current gaming scene. It's led to some interesting discussions. She's been participating in Game Jams over on Itch , and I've been watching the stuff that she's been producing and occasionally giving a little advice here and there. She's been making a few different games based on those SRDs when she gets inspired, and I've thought about doing the same because it feels like a good way to expand design skills by refining the output to something that works within someone else's framework. A game jam for the little game DURF has arisen, and we've decided to collaborate on an idea that's been percolating for a while. The entries for the jam won't be posted until October, so that gives a fortnight to conside...

Looks like the idea of a Code of Ethics has some traction. Here is a sample of where it seems to be heading . At the moment, a Code of Ethics on its own is a vague an nebulous thing. It doesn't need a regulatory body if everyone agrees to it, but the reason something like this tends to be put in place is because people aren't acting ethically and a community benchmark needs to be set. The closest analogue I can see here is the founding of the Comics Code Authority in the US, back in the 60s. The way I understand it, it wasn't really a watchdog, but more a show of solidarity and wholesomeness in the face of groups who wanted to shut them down. Arguably, something like this might have been useful in the moral panic of "D&D = satanism" back in the 80s. Maybe it will be useful if that sort of thing raises it's head further in the new right wing conservative political climate. Maybe. The catch I see is that the whole thing needs a critical mass of people ...

This article on Medium has been doing the rounds on Facebook. It feels like only a year ago that people were still defending him and fawning over him... actually, I think that was only a year ago. From what I've heard through numerous sources, this couldn't have happened to a more appropriate guy.

"Hey look at me! I'm edgy and causing controversy!" ... "Oh, oops, I went too far? Who would have thought that being controversial might lead to trouble...people are saying bad things about me... no, no, I didn't mean it... yes I like that guy you think is an arse, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't like me." Yep. I called it. I don't necessarily like calling it, but I feel it's a moral obligation to call out people who are causing problems. Some folks are leaving the LotFP banner. ...and the fearless leader really isn't apologising over it, he's just sorry that his creative partners are leaving. Quite a few of us have been pointing out for a long time that the shock-and-awe model of publicity really wasn't doing much to endear that pillar of the OSR community to the wider gaming world, but it's a bittersweet situation to see things unfold the way they have. I'm hoping this will be the end of it, that pe...

In case I needed further proof that Lamentations of the Flame Princess is a confused beast, and those behind it are attention starved controversy hounds who promote right wing agendas, this just falls into my lap. I'm sure the same people (predominantly white, cis, male) will tell me that it doesn't mean anything, yet again. But the dog whistles are dropping in frequency, and coming more often. Don't get me wrong, it's not just LotFP where this sort of regressive gaming and attention whoring lingers. It takes me back to my earlier post entitled " Old School Regressive? ", which generated quite a bit of conversation. In that, I was remarking on the tendency of OSR games to be regressive in their attitudes to race, and I had a diverse group of people adding their support, or privately messaging thanks to me for voicing the opinion, and a fairly narrow (white, cis, male) demographic telling me that I was reading too much into it. Between that post and ...

I've posted in a few locations about the concept that the "Old School" in the OSR is actually a dog whistle for conservative and regressive gamers to rally under. There are a lot of reasons for this, and it seems to be gaining traction in a few different parts of the web, but one of the biggest problems here is the definition of the OSR. Different parts of the community have different definitions for it, and whenever there is an element that is problematic, other parts of the group say "oh no, that's them... we're the good part" , it's the 'Not All Men' argument all over again. Or it could even be likened to the symbolism of the White Supremacists... Is it or isn't it? When I think of some of the big name games in OSR, I think of Labyrinth Lord , OSRIC , and Lamentations of the Flame Princess ( Wikipedia tends to agree with me on this ). One of the common ideas across the communal identifier is that people will know it when they...

I still have my love hate relationship with the OSR, so today's " controversy " doesn't surprise me. My Facebook feed today has been scattered with people proudly proclaiming to have joined the club of gamers who've been blocked by Zak S. My G+ feed has been scattered with people saying "not all OSR", and providing rationales about how it's only a few bad eggs.  Honestly, I don't know if his whole incident is related to the new podcast involving RPGPundit, and Venger Satanis... who are curiously a pair gamers who court controversy purely because it gets people talking about their nom-de-plumes...  [STOP TO DO SOME RESEARCH] [RESUME] No, actually they look unrelated, there's just a whole heap of OSR related victimhood, and anti-progressive shit going down. It's curious that the OSR has a stance against progress in gaming (tending toward conservative, if not regressive, models of play), and these prominent figures in it...

I don't know if there are any other games that do this, it feels like something that should be a part of an OSR game because it uses a lot of the tropes from that field of gaming. Maybe there is, maybe it's new. Here's the idea. One of the issues I have with hit points in most D&D and OSR games is the idea that every level, hit points go up, and up and up. You start gritty and fragile, one or two strikes can take you down. Eventually you get to that level 4-7 sweet spot where combats take a little longer, where special powers become available, and where characters start to feel like they can make a difference in the world. Then you transcend this point, combats become a boring slog, roll after roll to whittle away one another's pool of hit points, weapons still do the same damage on a strike but it takes so many more of those strikes to inflict significant impact. I'm looking to remedy this a bit. There's a school of thought which states that hit poi...

I'm coming to this one a bit late after having the flu for a few days. Reading through a lot of people's responses, there are the same regular names that keep popping up. A lot of those names have influenced me too, probably mostly because they won the fame lottery and happened to be in the right place at the right time. Whether they're actually better designers than others who are struggling away at the hobby, that's a matter of much debate. Whether they deserve to be as renowned as they are... well seriously, do the Kardashian's deserve to be famous? What do they actually do for society? I'm going to try and keep the cult of personality out of this response, instead focusing on games, mechanisms or movements in the hobby. Also, most of the influences I've seen have been positive things to aspire to... there are also negative influences which indicate things to be avoided. Early Influences Positive: TMNT I played a few games before this, but TMNT wa...

This is the 10th anniversary of the blog. I wouldn't have even noticed that I'd started the blog on the 3rd of April 2008, and that exactly a decade has elapsed except for the fact that I was digging back thrpugh some archives, trying to work out how my current thoughts on game design have changed since I started this whole thing. It looks like I started the blog as a means to vent frustrations over work, I had left a toxic workplace amd had started studying web design at TAFE (A government operated vocational college, for those who aren't in Australia). I guess I was either bored in the class, or we were doing a unit of work about blogs and online journals. Statistics show that the first few years didn't see a lot of action. That's probably due to the meandering subjects, the lack of focus, and the fact I didn't have the blog linked to any particular social media... numbersicked up for a while when there was a Facebook app directly feeding my posts he...

Yesterday's post  got a bit of feedback, and that's great. It's also interesting to see parallel discussions emerging on various Facebook groups today. I don't know whether it's my superpower of "Tapping the Zeitgeist" at work again, or if those people starting the discussions were prompted by reading my blog. Either way, there's some good thoughts out there and I'd love to engage the area more deeply. One of the great points raised, came from Joseph Teller... " The questions in design you need to ask yourself is, does Age=Experience or does Activity=Experience? " It's an awesome question that isn't really addressed in a lot of games. I'll address it with some instances I've seen over the years. It was probably about four years ago when I joined up with the fledgling Clans of Elgardt LARP. During tbe first couple of months there were teething problems, including a "gold = XP" system akin to the early d...

You walk into your friendly local gaming store (FLGS) and look at the new expansion book(s) for your game of choice... or maybe you're a story gamer and you heard great things about this new game, that does "this awesome thing"... or maybe you're an OSR type and you decide to look at a product that does one thong a bit differently to everything else, or introduces a new character type... ...but then you look at your book of choice, and the bit that interests you is a single page, maybe two or three...half a dozen if you're lucky. In standard publishing, the book has a page count with a multiple of 16 pages, so your typical story-game or OSR supplement might be 32, 64, or 96 pages, and your typical mainstream supplement might be 160 or 240 pages. In some instances there might be an additional rule idea hidden in the pages that proves valuable, and maybe a decent chunk of the book is dedicated to a scenario that you might play once, only to find that your players ...

20. Describe a mechanic you would put into your Science Fiction Heartbreaker.  Kaylee. Oh, maybe you mean a game mechanism... There are a lot of ideas that have already been incorporated into science fiction games over the years. But most of them are generally ignored during the course of play...so I guess the question is what I'd make sure appeared in a heartbreaker, and what the definition of a heartbreaker is. One of the many definitions of a heartbreaker is the kind of game that basically replicates an existing game, but renames a variety of elements and adds one or two specific twists to the game mechanisms to claim the game as "original". The whole of the OSR is basically heartbreakers. What are we trying to emulate with this game? What type of science fiction? If we have multiple races, I'd want to make sure they were alien and exotic to each other. Roleplaying to me is about getting into alternate thought patterns to explore ideas outside your re...

+Paul Stefko  has put together a series of blog posts describing his reflections on reading the original Vampire the Masquerade book, now over 25 years old. The first post can be found here . At this time of writing this blog entry, he is up to the fourth installment and has basically finished the core text, with a promised post to reflect on the whole book, and where it basically went after that point. It's one of those things I've tried to do a couple of times here, I can't remember if I actually completed it in any depth, but I know I've done a few cross comparisons of how different games are laid out. It's interesting to see so eone else's take on the subject matter.  I never managed to get a copy of the first edition Vampire book, I have copies from second edition onward, and most of the other Storyteller Core Books from first edition. There was something fun about those early editions, where there was more scope for changing the game to sui...

I had an idea while I was driving today, and I decided that I needed to write it down as soon as I got home. It's based generally on the Old School notion of rolling 3d6 in order for attributes, but pushes things even further. We all know that it's typically better to roll an 18 for strength than a 3. A high strength means more damage dealt in combat, it means better modifiers when trying to do things where having innate physical force is advantageous. The same generally applies to most other stats too. A high roll means a greater capacity to influence the outcome of events when the appropriate attribute is brought to bear on the situation. Over the course of six rolls for the attribute array, the law of averages said you're likely to get a couple of higher rolls and a couple of lower rolls. This isn't always the case, you might be unlucky and get all low rolls, on the other hand you might be lucky and get all high rolls. Typically, unless you're allowed to al...

I'm starting to womder if I should just write a setting, or a hack that can be used with 5e, or with one of the many flavours of OSR, or one of the other syste,s that has some kind of open license. Personally, I've always thought that this was a cop out... like sticking a new coat of paint over something that everyone else has already got. I wouldn't buy a product that was in this vein, but it looks like there are a lot of folks out there who would. My artistic integrity says "no", my contemplation of monetary issues says "yes". Artistic integrity is winning out at the moment.

There are certain things that nostalgia chooses not to remember. Every time I play and "Old School" game, I fear that things might end up the way they did in this  article. Heaven knows, the "Pathfinder" game I was a part of last year veered dangerously close to this territory. Things totally out of your control as a player, people hating each other because rules were followed to the letter rather than to the spirit... ...maybe I'm being a bit harsh. But I think it's that final comment that's the clincher here, the spirit of the rules versus the letter of the rules.

Lots of conversation about the OSR today. There are the inevitable discussions about what it is, and what it isn't... and I've never seen debates like this get resolved successfully. Nebulous entities don't work like that, much like the "Powered by the Apocalypse" discussions a few weeks ago. There have been some very vocal discussions about whether the OSR actually has innovation, or if innovation exists in certain products in spite of the OSR. There have been a lot of points I agree with, about there being numerous flavours of gaming, and how you are hamstringing yourself if you choose to focus exclusively on recapturing nostalgia. There have been comments I've laughed at, such as the comment that the OSR is basically the "Scientology of gaming". I'm sure thee will be more discussion regarding this over the next few days, weeks, months, years... until the next buzzword of gaming comes along, and then everyone can start debating that o...