Observations of the Fox

I'm really struggling to get this character generator ready, every time I read through it I'm seeing more issues with it. I guess I'm just running into that eternal problem where "perfect is the enemy of good". A character generator needs context, especially when it is designed to create characters who integrate into a specifically established setting. So the question is "How much context do I need?" Things are blowing out, and the character generation system is rapidly becoming a "player's guide". Anyway...school holidays are coming up, I might get more time to work on things then. Tings are going so much slower when I'm painting a bunch of player pictures and trying to keep them consistent (before Photoshopping them into customised page layouts). I'm doubling and even tripling up on usage of the same images for the characters...but even though the whole process is taking a couple of hours for a new batch of illustrations, and more...

 Two nights ago, we had another "Medieval Tavern Night" at The Press Basement Bar .  It's been an erratic night. The first event was meant to be held in February but got pushed back to March, we had about 18 players, with 3 sessions at 6 per session, and another dozen or so Magic players (I think), who were participating in a card tournament. I ran an open exploration game focused on a ruined city that covered an island. It was once the capital of a corrupt and ancient kingdom. The each had goals on the island, it worked fairly well.   The second event was in April but coincided with ANZAC day, and a lot of people figured it would be called off, or simply had other plans. We had two games running, and I think there were some Magic players again. I ran 8 that night, where a bunch of the players had been in my session on the first night. For this session I ran a heist. All the characters were half-animal races, so I pitched it as Oceans 11 meets Zootopia. It was basica...

The average length of productions has crept up by around 32%, from one hour and 21 minutes in the 1930s to  one hour and 47 minutes  in 2022 (see chart) The Economist, 2023 The top 10 grossing movies of the year in 1981 averaged 110 minutes. By 2001, the average was 126 minutes. In 2021, it was  131 minutes . Center for the Digital Future, 2023 However, a typical D&D session can last anywhere from  2-6 hours or more . Some groups prefer shorter sessions of 2-3 hours, while others may play for longer periods of time. Quora, 2023 Most D&D sessions fall within the range of  3 to 7 hours . This timeframe offers a balance between allowing for meaningful gameplay and ensuring that players and the Dungeon Master don't become too tired. Dicedragons, 2023 A couple of random cherry picked bits of data to start off this post...and this isn't even including the various "cinematic experiences" that are split into multi-part releases. So this generally indicates that ...

 I pledged to the Altered Carbon RPG Kickstarter when it was going. It was meant to have been shipped in August 2020, but I guess COVID has stuffed up a lot of things this year. I have finally managed to have a look at the second version of the backer review copy of the game.   It looks alright. But as I read through it, I'm seeing lots of fiddly systems and subsystems. The core system looks interesting and fairly sturdy, with a system that's going to be a bit counter-intuitive to most gamers of mainstream systems. It's a roll under system, where characters start with a big die (a d12) as a crude level of skill/potential, and gradually get their die lower as they train and improve. Easy tasks have a high target number, while hard tasks have lower target numbers. Certain effects like having specialised equipment or training, seem to let you roll multiple dice (then pick the best result), while other effects modify the target number.  There's a few variations depending...

I don't want "Familiar" to be filled with stereotypes, or "diversity tourism" where the struggles of real people are filtered through the lens of a "male, white, middle class, able-bodied, english-speaking, suburban" author. Of course the problem here is the fact that I am a "male, white, middle class, able-bodied, english-speaking, suburban" author. Hence my desire to get the ideas out there, to get input from people outside this specifc demographic that controls much of the narrative in western society. I want this to be a game for people from different backgrounds, and want this to have input from people from different backgrounds. Over the years I've seen a few calls to authors from diverse backgrounds. In some cases it's been heavy handed... "we want authors, but not if you're cis, white, and male". In some cases it's been met by massive backlash from "cis, white, male" authors who cry foul abou...

For years I've used books from Osprey as sources of data for my RPGs, do it's interesting to see that they are branching out to develop their own games . After seeing what they did with miniatures gaming, and particularly Frostgrave, I'm a little excited about this. I hope it all works out for them, and based on some of the names I've seen associated with the project I'm expecting good things.

After reading bits and pieces of the 500 odd pages comprising the two starter books for the new FFG edition of Legend of the Five Rings, I'm looking at the pocketmod books that form the basis of my Other Strangeness game. I'm undecided... ...a lot of that 500 pages is providing context and background information for the setting, or explaining how elements of play tie into that setting. Since Other Strangeness is generally designed to use the real world as a basis for it's play environment, then modifies it according to the collaborative choices of the game's players, it doesn't really need this. The actual rules of the FFG game are a bit convoluted, and feel a bit counterintuitive at times, they're partly explained multiple times in a way that builds up the concepts from various perspectives. The way these fundamental rules are explained could fill multiple pocketmods, each of which doesn't actually explain the rules... as an example, I've had t...

Here's the second part of the updated rules for Other Strangeness. In this case it's the guide to the player who facilitates the flow of the story. Note that this is not the player who provides the story, because like in the other games generally produced by Vulpinoid Studios, the story is a collective endeavour that unfolds organically as the characters engage with the world around them. Here's the link to the pocketmod.   There will probably be additional hints about running things scattered through the other pocketmods in the system, but this should be enough to get a group started. The next booklet will be the guide for players to create characters, then a guide to create locations that might function as characters hideouts or places of interest, and then a guide to creating items. after that I'll present a few sample characters, places, items, and story hooks, before finally offering the various animals, cultures, and occupations that allow players to ...

Today's thing seems to be writing a list of 10 roleplaying games that have been influential in a person's interactions with the hobby. I've seen a few people writing the list with no further comments, I've seen others adding notations to their lists. There have been lists in order of most to least influential, there have been others written in chronological order of exposure or of publications. I like the idea of doing it in order of exposure, and adding a bit of notation to explain why it's influential to me, so I'm going to write my list that way. There are probably other games that have had a significant impact on me, and there will be a list of honourable mentions at the end. 1. Dragon Warriors This was the first RPG I owned copies of. I never played many games with it, but it's what started the whole journey. 2. Middle Earth Role Playing This was one of the few RPGs that my parents allowed me to own, because it wasn't D&D and it wasn...

Cortex had its "Hacker's Guide", D&D had its System Reference Document (and a few other games have followed suit). As I put together the bits and pieces that make "The Law" what it is, and allow for those components to be rearranged into something new, I'm thinking of things more from the perspective of a cookbook.  The ingredients are the fundamental components of the game, in this case I'm looking at... What makes an oeuvre?  What are the demographics of the setting? How is narrative resolved? What is the mood? What are the core rules?  The recipe is how those ingredients interact with one another... How do the demographics of the setting reflect the oeuvre? How do the core rules support the narrative? (every pair of the base ingredients can be combined in some way that provides some insight into the game we are planning to run) Finally, the presentation... What leads up to a game? What should a game in progr...

+Steve Dee 's game Relics is a curious beast. It straddles the line between a traditional game and a story game. On the traditional side, there is a GM, an agenda for the characters for pursue, a skill system where a randomiser determines the outcome in a fairly traditional "Fail/Success-at-a-price/Success" pattern, then improves chances of success if an appropriate skill can be applied to the task at hand, and then it applies a system where characters improve over the course of playing ongoing sessions. On the story game side, the skills used are generally freeform, the world develops organically through the interaction of the player group, and the characters are defined as much by their relationships with one another as they are by anything else. There's a few games trying to unite this divide between traditional and story games, but so far I haven't seen many that do it well without a dedicated set of driving rules that hone in on a specific niche or ...

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...

30. Share something cool you made if you can at all justify it as RPG related. Last One. With the Shonen Knife concert this week, and the production of an image to possibly get signed by one of my favourite bands, things have been thrown out of their regular schedule. This has been made even worse by other complications around the house, and generally not feeling well. As a result, this post is two days late. One of the curious things I saw as I was doing research for this picture was the fact that on the Band's bio page, two of the members indicate that they enjoy playing games. No specification as to whether they lay board games, card games or RPGs...but the fact that they indicated game play on their biographical details was awesome in itself. Still, I probably can't really justify this as an RPG related share. Instead, I'll have to share the Vulpinoid Studios online store. I've got heaps of things for sale there, and some of it even sells occasionally...

I think that one of the reasons I don't like certain crunchy styles of game is the fact that I like to keep the flow of a story happening. I don't mind looking up a reference if two minutes of page flipping will stop five minutes of arguing later... I don't even mind ten minutes of page flipping during the early stages of a game, before the atmosphere has been established and the intensity of play begins. It might even be feasible to look up books when characters are engaging on shopping expeditions (reflecting their exploration of the local markets and seeing what might be available)...or during those phases of the game when investigation is occurring and the characters have their heads in books or staring into computer screens as they work out how to proceed... But as soon as things get good, I don't like taking a break from the continuity to look up a table with results which get me to roll on a variety of second tables. Especially in the middle of a combat, or a cha...

A couple of days ago I went through the process I'd follow when creating a relationship map for a game. This was specifically done for the Dispatch Guide for "The Law" which I've been working on. The development of this relationship was done on my electronic whiteboard, with board captures done at a few intervals to explain the process and why certain design decisions were made. After posting a few photographs of the board, it became obvious that a lot of people were familiar with the concept of relationship maps, but quite a number of people either hadn't completely grasped how useful they could be, or how to make them work for their own games. One of the more interesting comments repeated by a few people linked back to the idea of "I have too many NPCs in my games, my relationship maps would be too complicated, therefore I don't bother with them." Honestly, if you have that many NPCs in your games, how do you keep track of them? If you d...

Here's a copy of The Law. It doesn't have images in it, but just imagine dark-gritty-noir-cyberpunk-2000AD-Dredd inspired images all through it. I've thought long and hard about the extra things I want to add to it, but most of those things are probably better suited to a GM/Dispatch guide. Such things include... details about how to actually guide agents through a patrol ideas about different types of scenes that could be played through (vehicle chases, interrogations, negotiating with kidnappers/terrorists/corporate-management, etc) twists in the story that could be inserted when agents cause certain situations to unfold (eg. discovering later in the story, that killing a certain gang member a few scenes ago was a bad move) ideas for the Department of Law R&D labs, and how they can offer untested equipment to agents if a requisition roll is made ideas about linking multiple patrols into an ongoing story ideas for developing quirky gang members and citiz...

Pseudo-Dredd now has a name.  But it has run into my inevitable quagmire of expanding word count. The idea was to wrote up a basic 16 page comic, print it in the form of an '80s 'zine. Crudely printed on a photocopier, black and white, stapled...maybe with a cover using heavier weight coloured paper..again printed with a black toner photocopier. There would be enough in the rulebook to run a game, but it would be richer when added to a notebook filled with images of the tower setting, where a group could either buy the prewritten setting (where I scribbled over the pages describing the inhabitants and the stories within), or they could buy the 'blank' version of the notebook (which was still filled with maps and images, but had heaps of room for players to write in their own exploratory notes).  I'm rapidly finding that the gameplay I want needs more than this, players in the game portray 'Agents of the Law', the GM role is referred to as 'Dis...

Over the years I've found that the kinds of people who scream "CULTURAL APPROPRIATION" are the kinds of people who give progressives and the left wing a bad name. There are cultures, there are people who belong to cultures, there are people to adapt the stories of their own cultures, and there are people who adapt the stories of other cultures. Sometimes the people who adapt the stories of other cultures, do so without understanding the context of those stories, and thus their adaptions ring false, or highlight the wrong things about the culture being presented. When this occurs, I've found it is often due to a lack of understanding more than anything else. Do not attribute to malice, that which could just as easily be attributed to stupidity. I'm not saying that there aren't people who deliberately twist words to make others look bad, a quick look at modern politics shows this sort of thing at all levels of society; instead I'm saying that a call of ...

#365 Day 14 - A fun game of FUBAR at #EttinCon Summer 2017, #Katoomba #rpg #gaming #tabletop A photo posted by Michael Wenman (@vulpinoid) on Jan 14, 2017 at 4:10am PST I've finally managed to get to another EttinCon. I was at the first one in Winter 2015, missed the Summer and Winter ones in 2016, but managed to reach the Summer 2017 edition. Both times I have attended, I've wanted to participate in some indie gaming goodness, whether that might be of the "storygames", the "OSR", or some other flavour. Both times I've run FUBAR to an enthusiastic group who picked up the game pretty quickly, but didn't get the chance to play anyone else's offerings... actually, at that first EttinCon, I played a few boardgames, but no other RPGs. It was the first EttinCon I've managed to get Leah along to, and the first game convention I've brought her too since GenCon Oz back in 2009. For a game session I had in the back of my mind f...

Today I intended to spend an hour or two watching a roleplaying game being played out over a Google+ Hangout. It was being hosted by  +Kyrinn S. Eis , pretty similar to something that I've run at conventions before (characters with little understanding of who they are, waking up from cryostasis, we then explore the characters as we explore the world), but using her own system (something that I offered some suggestions on during the week). In her time, it was 8.30pm on Saturday night, which made it 10.30am on Sunday for me. My wife Leah was sick, so I didn't go along to my regular Sunday LARP, and the recent upgrade to our internet has made Google+ Hangouts vaguely possible. I hadn't really participated in one before, but watching it seemed a good way to put my toe in the water. I engaged the hangout just after the starting time, and became swept away in the game, with two other players ( +Ethel B  and  +Keith Bailey ). The biggest issue I had was a sick wife at the...