Observations of the Fox

Kind of a follow-up to my last post. I can see why a lot of comedy games fall flat, in much the same way that I've seen a lot of horror games fall flat.   (no pun intended)  Every time I've seen an interpretation of Discworld for a tabletop RPG it has been a thin veneer of the people and places from the setting thrown over an existing rule set which has been designed for a very different style of storytelling. D&D is not a good fit for Discworld, the core mechanisms of play are too serious, too self important...I guess that makes it ripe for violation, but with the rules lawyers I've encountered over the years there's a really good chance that any violation won't be considered benign. Sure you could house rule ideas into the system and establish them as canon in a session zero, but that starts drifting away from the rules as written. It's not quite as bad as the " D&D/Green Lantern " post I made a few days ago, but the same kind of compromises ...

I first remember hearing this term a few years ago. Here's a link...   It was first proposed as a paradigm for comedy by A. Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren at the Humor Research Team / Humor Research Lab (HuRT / HuRL).   The topic was raised in the last couple of days, when she asked "Why is a fart funny?" and I tried to explain how a fart is generally unable to hurt you (it's generally benign), but is a violation of the senses. Some people don't find them funny, and that may be because their do not consider the gaseous aroma to be benign at all and this they are left with the violation which simply offends them...or they may not consider it a violation because they regularly encounter far worse assaults on their senses as a part of their daily lives, thus leaving them with the benign and something which really doesn't make much impact on them at all (farts are just a part of everyday life). We can similarly see how some people might perceive racist comments as ...

The liminal space is a powerful thing. The idea of being able to step out of yourself for a couple of hours, inhabit a character in a shared world with friends, where there is a ritual8se space with instruments sacred to the moment like dice and possibly maps, figurines, tokens, cards, or anything else that might help create a stronger link between the real and the imagined. Texts that describe the interactions within the world, or how the sacred instruments can be utilised to affect the imagined world. Some of that text is written by Prophets (game designers), published in hardback and purchased...other parts of the text are defined by the the local arbiter/priest (DM/GM/MC/etc.), perhaps in hastily written notepads and journals, maybe printed in a folder... then there's the elements of the text written by the congregation (the players), who might be writing accounts of their own experiences in the liminal world, and those accounts may be fed back into the space when the GM says ...

 If you're reading this, you're either: A. an uber hispter delving into arcane knowledge from an obscure designer who'll probably never make it big, so it's safe to read and maintain your indie credibility... B. someone who has followed a link from a social media site because it seemed interesting, but otherwise aren't sure... C. a person who has come here in the far future from when this post was written, because finally the authr actually has made it big in some way... D. an AI trawler bot that has been programmed to go through blogs and collect data for the LLM that drives other parts of the algorithm... E. someone who founf my moderately successful series of map drawing tutorials, and you wondered what else might be around here... F. someone I haven't accounted for... ...either way, here comes a bit of a rant.  In my experience, most people who participate in the hobby of TTRPGs don't run games for themselves, and most of them only ever play games under ...

  There has often been a debate between "Rules and Written" (RAW) and "Rules as Intended" (RAI). The debate goes back to the earliest days of gaming, and can probably be traced back to the concepts of rules versus rulings. I've indicated a number of times over the years that I'm not a big fan of systems that build convoluted sets of mechanics that detail different ways of resolving different types of task. I prefer an overall system that will basically approximate everything, and keep the complexity of the game to a manageable level. I know it's not as "realistic", but what is "realism" in a session of fantasy escapism anyway. The post above prompted my thoughts on this. It's kind of the reason why I'm developing the "SNAFU Cookbook". Cortex had its "Hacker's Guide", showing ways you could adapt the system for various purposes. A lot of this comes down to issues I've discussed many times here on the...

 I seem to have found myself in some good places on various social media platforms. I'm seeing lots of folks promoting innovation in game design, and plenty of thought provoking questions being raised. I've developed a range of games in different sizes over the years. From games on business cards or single sheets of paper, through to books with a hundred or more pages. or even collections of booklets with hundreds of pages between them. The "What is a TTRPG?" section has almost always been the first section to go when I'vr needed to reduce the page count or make room for other parts of the game. Typically when I have decided to keep this section intact, it's not been because I have assumed that my game will be a player's first exposure to the hobby of TTRPGs, after all most of my games are sold through online marketplaces amidst thousands of similar games, instead I include it to show a point of difference between the way my games might operate, and other ...

As I write this, I'm sitting on 2501069 views for the blog, and I've been getting a steady average of 2000 to 3000 views per day. The numbers have really skyrocketed this year, however I'm not sure if this is people actually reading, or if it's AI trawlers digging through my pages for data.  There was a weird anomaly month in September last year, and I thought things would generally drop back to the regular schedule after that point, but things have actually been improving. I don't know if I should read more in to this. But it's nice to think that regardless of whether it's humans or bots, my writings are going to have an influence out there in the world.

I've raised this idea a few times, but this seemed a really succinct description and something I can work with. I've played both Ars Magica and Amber, and I love both the games. They can both generate really immersive experiences but they both do so in very different ways.  From this perspective, Ars Magica is very non-diegetic in way it describes the world. It functions in the traditional style of a series of procedural manuals and pseudo-historical textbooks. It gives an idea of what happened in the past and what can happen in your games, but not necessarily how to make if feel. Arguably, this is very "facts over feelings"... there are a whole lot of regimented ways that things work, and this fits the rigour and research of the magi at the heart of the game, while providing a lot of ideas about how things can be expanded to include the other characters who live their lives around the magi. Amber on the other hand could be described as a lot more diegetic. By reading...

Simon Burley (@squadronuk.bsky.social) has been posing some really interesting questions on BlueSky. Erin alerted me to this one...          ...naturally this one really got my interest because it plays into the 3-way tension model, because it's keeping certain elements of the game fixed, while playing with variables in other parts of the session's ecosystem. We're basically looking at a situation where the diegetic information and elements of the scenario/system, and the GM/Narrator remain constant. While the players change and the non-diegetic elements of the system are replaced. It really wouldn't be possible to change this tohave a new system and the same players, because even with the same players we'd have a circumstance where the first time the players proceeded through the scenario they'd have little prior knowledge of how the game was meant to unfold, and a second time where they'd have meta-knowledge about the scenario and could easily be expected...

 I saw this post the other day, and figured it needs some unpacking. It's a really interesting idea, and it's something that I've described in the form of an "accepted shorthand". If a story is set in the current world, an author doesn't need to provide all the necessary information because the reader can be assumed to know the basic context for the narrative... they know that gravity works and how it generally affects things, but they don't need to know the scientific reasons why... they know that money can be used to buy things, but don't need a degree in finance. Cognitive convenience is actually pretty cool because it lets people generally get on board with things quickly, and then focus on the differences that might actually be pertinent to the story. Much the same applies to RPG sessions. If we can use some short-hands by saying... it's just like this movie, or it's like that TV series, but with a bit of that thrown in... then we get ever...

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

Influenza, bronchitis, man-flu, not sure what it is... but I'm off sick at the moment, so that gives me time to finish off the run. 29. Labour The first phrase to come to mind here is a "labour of love", and in 30 years of designing games that's what it's always been for me. The number of hours I've spent discussing game design, running games of differet types as research, sharing my games with the world, writing this blog, and organising my shopfronts on various game-trading websites over the years has easily been in the months if they were combined together (24hrs a day, 7 days a week, ≂4⅓ weeks per month... 728 hours for a solid month, so yeah, I've easily done this. It'd be fair to say that I've spent thousands of hours on the hobby.) In that time I've probably spent about $10,000-$12,000 on RPGs, and have probably earned $12,000-15,000 from the products I've sold. At worst, it's been a self-sustaining hobby, at best I've earned...

  27. Hunger The first thing to come to mind with this prompt is naturally the systems that have evolved in Vampire the Masquerade. The first version that continued from the first incarnations of the game through to the 20th Anniversary Edition (which I still think was the climax of the line) had a point pool system. You'd drink blood to fill up the pool, while waking up, healing and using certain powers would deplete the pool. It was a nice balancing mechanism that really fit well with the genre being emulated, but still had an easily understood way that it functioned in play. The newer incarnations of the system have a diue that is rolled instead of a pool that is gradually refilled and depleted. It makes things a bit more dramatic because you don't know if your character is going to become more ravenous when you use a power, or if they're going to remain stable at this stage. The downside here is that it strips a little more agency away from the player, they don't ha...

 ....some kind of viral infection has taken me down over the last couple of days, so this should have been posted 2 days ago. Sorry 25. Familiarity One of the things I love about being familiar with a bunch of different games is being able to bring across fun game mechanics from one system and use them to tailor the session experience in another. I also love it when different players in a group are familiar with different elements of play, and various members of the group can become the default experts for specific subsystems. This was really apparent in the old LARP campaigns I was a part of (and often ran). There was simply too mush happening for one person to handle, so sub-GMs became necessary, each being familiar with the stuff they knew best... one handled the gods, one handled trade, one handled the town guard, etc... I've seen a few smaller scale tabletop games split GM duties in similar ways, but I haven't necessarily experienced this done successfully in a more intima...

  23. Fortune Chance, randomness, the whims of things outside our control. One of the key elements in many TTRPGs is the way it brings random fortune into the game. There was a lot of talk about "fortune at the end" or "fortune in the middle" back at The Forge, I even remember some folks proposing an idea of "fortune at the beginning", but what does this all mean. Like a lot of my posts, I'm going to paraphrase based on memory as I describe this, and probably modify the original intentions to mesh with my current thoughts about game sessions.  "Fortune at the end" reflects a system where players state their intentions for the upcoming events, perhaps focusing on their characters actions or some other element of the narrative, then they declare everything that will modify the potential outcome in some way. Beneficial factors, problematic ones, positive outcomes, negative results, then the cards are drawn, dice are rolled, tea-leaves are read, ...

OK, so somehow I used the wrong prompts on the last post. I ended up using the prompts for days 16 (Composure) and 17 (Intensity), instead of the ones for 13 and 14. Today I'll go back to those last ones and play catch up. So that brings us to... 15 (for which I'm using the prompt from day 13) . Strain I could tie this back to DURF and its encumbrance system, and that was actually the first way I thought of taking this particular prompt, however I'm going to go in a different direction to link things with my three-way tension and vector theory models of TTRPGs. For this purpose I'll go with the definition of strain as a physical, mental, or emotional pressure. From an engineering perspective, strain is the result of stress, and this basically applies to narrative as well. It is under moments of strain that new properties are revealed in a material, and it's similar to the prompt pair I mentioned in the last post . Strain opposes stress, up to a point. Once stress ex...

      The above picture is from the SNAFU cookbook, which is full of symbols describing various parts of play and how they interact with one another to create the experience of a TTRPG session. The last post generated a bit os discussion on the socials (but not here, so I can't really archive what's been said without extensive cutting, pasting, and screenshots), so it's time to delve a bit deeper into the way I understand TTRPGs to work. Remember that this is my observations, archived and written down, your mileage may vary.  Crystallisation for Vcetor Theory and the 3-Way Tension model occurred during a BBQ I cooked for three Norwegians in my home at the time in southwestern Sydney. The meal I cooked was kangaroo and salad, the guests were  Matthijs Holter (designer of Archipelago , here's his  itch page ), Ole Peder Giæver (designer of Itras By ) and I want to say the last visitor was  Martin Bull Gudmundsen (co-designer of Itras By). I think it was...

It might be easy to say that Forge terminology has become muddied over the years, however as a linguistic descriptivist rather than a prescriptivist, I'll be vocal in saying that it was always muddy. Yes, there were prescriptivists who claimed that there was a correct and narrow definition of the terms, but there were always people using the words in their own interpretations. Sometimes there would be definitions of the words that reflected their usage in more common parlance, sometimes there would be some other contextual spin on the terms. The gatekeeping was problematic, especilly when two people would be talking across each other because they couldn't agree on the basic semantics of what each other were saying.This whole situation is a shame, because there were some really interesting ideas raised back then, especially on the "Forge adjacent" forums. Taken directly from the Provisional Glossary (which is now over 20 years old), three of the biggest takeaways from...

The last time I responded to someone's ideas about TTRPG theory, it got a bit of traction... if not here, then across several of the social media platforms I'm linked to.     This is a really interesting set of ideas, and it was relatively dismissed on the TTRPG Design Community forum where it was posted. At the time of my screenshot, the majority of the comments indicated something along the lines of "That's certainly an opinion" or "You seem to have a narrow understanding of specific TTRPGs", but comments like that are pretty dismissive. It's got some merits, and yes, while it is an opinion, and while it does reflect a specific style of game, there are some elements that can be delved into.   It's a complex take, and probably akin to the sorts of things I'm often writing here. People look at it ad they say "I agree with this bit, but I don't agree with that...however since the ideas I like and the ideas I don't like seem to be ...