Observations of the Fox

  Again, we can look at this diegetically (considering the rewards that characters get in the game), or non-diegetically (the rewards that players get outside the game). Rewards are something that is often expected, it’s just a part of the concept going back to the earliest days of TTRPGs, sure there are plenty pof games in the past 20 years that have deviated from this pattern, but it’s still fairly common across the spectrum, especially among trad games. I’ve tried to play with the way rewards are offered in game, starting early on with the idea of levels (because I didn’t know better)…moving to point buy systems where you had to earn experience relating to a specific aspect of your character, then only improve that aspect when you got enough…and to general systems where you earned points for playing with fidelity to your character, the story, or the genre tropes, then allowing those points to improve anything with a bit of justification. I’ve toyed with systems where you ask...

Experience points, development of characters… or the experience we get from playing a great session of a game. I remember my first few TTRPG sessions, I don’t know if it was the people running the game, or the systems we used (old school D&D Rules Cyclopedia), or maybe the mismatch of what I expected from the game compared to the other players in the group. I just didn’t get the imagined experience I was hoping for. I played games with a few people, and I caught a glimpse of what could be. Moments where I caught the dragon, and moments that I looked for again, hoping to string them into full sessions. Wanting something more, and chasing the dragon like a junkie chasing the amphetamine high. It was a moment of enlightenment, satori, where a bond with others led to something more. It was how I tried to run my games, trying to make sure everyone got a taste of what had addicted me. I became a dealer of the TTRPG narcotic, and became a “forever DM” as a result. I don’t know tha...

(I’ll knock out the last of these today, then get back to my other observations and musing. Maybe even get back to some other design work… we’ll see) I’ve always found TTRPGs to be a fun way to connect with other people, to connect with story and to connect with an imagined world that simply doesn’t work in most other mediums. The SNAFU SRD is specifically designed to reflect this concept. Everything in the game is connected, it’s all about the connections, the interactions between parts in a network…the way ripples pass along the web of those connections, and the way they may magnify when multiple wave ripples combine in unexpected ways. Even though this system does everything I think it needs to, the trick to a good TTRPG system isn’t just the ability to simulate elements, or drive a story. The trick is to form meaningful connections to the players, because that’s what the game is, yet that’s only a part of it. A TTRPG is a tool to facilitate the connection of the players to an...