Observations of the Fox

It's always interesting when I see something that generally seems to support the ideas I've been working with... The key takeaway here for the three-way tension is the sentence "Table culture determines lethality more than system or campaign length", and that's a distinct part of the theory. The GM/Narrator is pulling toward a level of lethality in the session, The players are pulling toward a level of lethality in the session (and these two forces may be working together against the system, or may be working against one another with the system as an arbitrator). The system has an intended level of lethality as suggested by the designer... it's the balance of these three distinct forces that creates the flavour of the game with regard to the lethality (and any other "measurable" feature).  X

  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...

 It's always fun finding other people's blogs and doing a quick dig through their ponderings and writings. This also means it can be fun to see what things they consider worthy of writing about, and when one of my favourite games of all time is called out (and one that is based on one of my all-time favourite movies), I need to give it a mention.  Ghost Dog     I mentioned it back in my Top 10 games that influenced my game design back in 2018, and it's still a book that I flick through occasionally when I need an answer to a question that isn't quite working out for me. That is all. 

I was alerted to this post over on Wordpress through my socials (in this case it was BlueSky). It kind of touches on a lot of the stuff I've been thinking about in recent years, including the comments made by students in the TTRPG club I ran at school for a couple of years (before the troubles), my work to make game rules more "user-accessible", my studies in linguistics over the years, and my work in general as a teacher. There's generally been a lot of discussion about literacy as an issue in various fields lately. This is not just gaming related, but also touched on media literacy, social literacy, political literacy, and how the decline in each of these has had ramifications on the world around us. It's not just about whether someone can read the words, but also about whether they understand the meaning being conveyed. In the case of music, it might touch on the idea that conservatives are calling Rage Against the Machine or Bruce Springsteen woke, because it...

 It's always interesting to read other people's perspectives. Here's a review of GNS theory after a generation of games have been and gone, and have been influenced by it in different ways. I generally agree with a lot of what the post is saying. A lot of the premise with GNS indicated that the three styles of gaming were mutually incompatible, and any any to reconcile two of them (or heaven forbid all three) was incoherent, and implicitly doomed to failure. However this article recognises that there is overlap between the concepts, and having two goals doesn't necessarily make for a diluted session experience, but just combines flavours for a different experience.  I've posted a few times about the theory (I think most of those posts have " The Forge " as a tag), and have designed with it in mind for decades now, trying my hand at different focal objectives (to varying degrees of success). It's interesting how influential it's been in the hobby, ...

 I love a good list of resource links, and this list from ThoughtPunks certainly fits that criteria. Open Source TTRPG Resources  (I'd recommend a few of the other posts in the series too) I've been meaning to do something like this for a while, but when someone else puts in the legwork, I'm more than happy to direct folks to something that looks good. Here we've got a range of license types, SRDs, open source games, ranges of images and sound archives, pretty much everything. It's certainly not an exhaustive list, I've read through quite a few SRDs that aren't included here, but it's a great start and there's plenty of stuff in these lists that I haven't seen and will need to go digging through myself.  Anyway, enough from me, go over and take a look.  

I like reading other people's posts about game philosophy and design. Like this one I've played most of the games listed here, and generally agree with the sentiment that people should be willing to try new games...even just as one shots. Knowing what I do about the games, it's an interesting progression. I like the way it builds with ideas, showing new elements of what game design can be. I think there are some lesser known indie games that could have really explored the concepts better, but for folks taking baby-steps away from the juggernaut that is D&D, there is often a need to go with something that has a name and a community associated with it.  Naturally, when I read posts like this, I want to scream about other Indie games...like I did for DURF a few weeks back, or like I've done for others over the years (or even just the game mechanisms they use).   image from here  which claims the source is actually here image from 

  https://200proof.games/manifesto/ This is gold.  I'm not just saying this because it echoes the kind of advice I've been saying for years, or the types if words I try to tell my students in design classes... well actually, that's certainly a part of it. However, there's more to it. This idea echoes back to the gaming ashcan releases in the early 2000s, the 'zine games that have been floating around for decades...and it goes directly against a lot of the gatekeeping I've been seeing in the hobby since I started writing and designing over 30 years ago. So much more I could possibly write here, but perfect is the enemy of good, so I'll just post what I've got now. I might revisit it later. 

It might be the fact that my blog is currently on a similar topic, but Google has started sending me links about things that people can do to improve their TTRPG experience... like this one . Let's consider the points it raises in the context I've described so far. 10. Run a session zero: the right way I've already indicated that communication between the players and the narrator is a key to success in any RPG session or campaign. For a single session game, this usually comes in the form of letting players know what they're in for as a part of the one-shot, but for campaigns (the typical mode of play for D&D) then a session zero is something that's a relatively recent phenomenon. This can really make or break a game.   If we consider the three way tension between narrator, players and rules, a session zero gets everyone on board with how the rules will pull on the story, this happens through the narrator explaining the system or any house rules they might have m...

Every now and then I'll see an article like this one of these articles explaining what someone needs to become a great Game Master (or Dungeon Master) . Sometimes I read them and think "Hey, I do all that stuff already".  I keep thinking I should write an article like this (or even a series of them), but a nagging voice in my head keeps saying, everyone knows all this stuff. Today as I read the article it was different. There are a lot of new gamers out there, folks who weren't even alive when The Forge was trying to establish a standard lexicon of roleplaying theory, folks whose only exposure to games beyond their home table is watching some pre-scripted voice actors being railroaded through a couple of murderhobo scenes. Maybe it is time to develop a good series about new tools for inexperienced GMs/DMs to add to their toolkits.

It's always nice to see when someone is doing something in a similar stomping ground to one of my projects...something I can get a bit of inspiration from. Naturally, this post at The Amateur Dungeoneer , drew my attention. This interpretation of pre-Adamite inhabitants of the earth as fey, or intermediary beings between spirits and mortals, could easily work in tandem with the ideas I've been developing for Familiar.

I was amused to see this when I checked the sales of "Beneath the Glass and Steel". I'm amused to see stuff like this from people who once worked closely with the people they are now publicly distancing themselves from. I was just going to leave it as simple amusement until someone referred me to this insightful blog entry . Reading through it raised this scenario to a new level. I won't write more, the linked blog entry says more than enough. In case you're interested, the 'zine has now sold 10 copies.

Here's what I've been working on as images for the for the new 'zine. I'll probably throw together half a dozen in this style for every issue because it only takes half an hour or so to generate each one, and for the most part they're derived from freely accessive creative commons sources. In much the same way that I'll be calling on other authors to help flesh out the 'zine, I'll probably be drawing on a few other illustrators for the project too. One of those illustrators will probably be Chris Tamm, who runs the blog Elfmaids and Octopi , and who I've mentioned previously for his Planet Psychon stuff. He does some great lo-fi stuff that really fits the aesthetic I'm going for here. Besides, he's been ding it tough for a while, and I just want to throw some money his way to help him out.

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.

I love  this party crasher post . It's the kind of style I'd love to see a whole game written in. Whenever I suggest this, or try to present something this way, I invariably get a bunch of people telling me how hard it is to read the text, how bad it is for cognition, and how generally unprofessional it looks. I certainly pushed in this direction for The Law, and might go further in the sourcebooks for that game... but we'll see how things go.

Apparently, this was a thing . By the time I found out about it, it was gone. It seems to be related to one of the many toxic individuals who have been recently exposed in our hobby. Whether it's related to "Yourdungeonissuck"  , I don't know. Perhaps it was made by the same person, perhaps it was made as a response... either way, these are the kinds of sites that drive toxicity and trolling behaviours. There are plenty of other blogs that do similar things, by attacking the productivity of designers they don't like, I know I'm not immune to it. I've attacked a few games and related products over the years, but where possible I've tried to explain my reasoning. More often I've just tried to keep a low profile and work on my own stuff. I'll hopefully start posting more of that stuff I've been working on soon... but this year has been pretty chaotic.

Thankyou Yu. Sergeeva for your translation of one of my blog articles into Russian. It's always great to know that my thoughts and writings are being read by people in various parts of the world and that my small contributions might be influencing other parts of the design community. I probably wouldn't have even noticed this ping on my radar except for the experiment I did last month where I didn't make any posts at all on the blog and simply looked at the traffic every couple of days to see what happened. Strangely there was s little bump of traffic from a Russian site, and it didn't look like a porn site so I investigated... it looks like I'm even a hashtag over there , with my entire ' Worldbuilding 101 ' series translated to Russian. This was a little series I'm pretty proud of, so I consider this a great piece of flattery and praise. It makes the whole effort feel worthwhile.

All designers have an idea about how they envision their games being played. I know that I run games in a specific way, I know that different designers have their own play styles in mind when they write their games. So it's always interesting to read something written by someone to highlight how they perceive a particular game to be different to others. Symbaroum is one of those games that has been on the periphery of my notice for a while. When I saw that Paul Baldowski had written a blog post  about how he saw the game behaving differently to others in the market, I naturally had to read through it. There's a lot of good points in the article, and it's always fascinating to see how someone perceives a work to be read and utilised. Reading through the post, I'm now more interested in giving Symbaroum a more careful read. I'll have to download the OneBookShelf app that organises all the purchases made from that site, because I might have already purchased it,...

I need to start following  Chris Tamm's Blog . He's a local (or at least another Aussie... he seems to alternate between Sydney and Adelaide), and he's doing the kind of stuff that I actually appreciate in the OSR. Here's a link to a project he's been working on, in collaboration with a range of other folks. It is Planet Psychon. It pushes boundaries, it provides ideas, it seems to work brilliantly with a bunch of ideas I've been having for my Dark Places setting. Actually, I think some of my ideas and some of his ideas have mingled in various facebook groups and other forums across the net, talking at cross purposes but feeding off one another none-the-less. A lot of the ideas in this book have instantly inspired me, they aren't exactly the way I'd handle things, but nothing ever is. That's all a part of gaming, translating the source material to your specific table... It's a part of all art, translating the artist's message into so...

No. Actually, I erratically read a few, but most of the people I regularly follow (see the lists on the side of this blog for those names) don't post that often. More often than not, I'll do a Google search for a specific game topic, and that will lead me to someone's blog. I'll read a few related posts, then move on. I used to listen to Clyde Rhoer's Theory from the Closet podcast pretty religiously, and I always keep an eye out for new Core Mechanics vlogs from Paul Stefko, but generally between university work, looking after a sick wife, and trying to get my own ideas out there, I don't have much time to read or listen to other stuff. If anyone has some good suggestions, I'm all ears.