Observations of the Fox

  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...

I remember back when I started going to conventions in the early to mid 90s, where I met a range of people who'd actually been running games for 15 years. I had read about long-term campaigns in RPG magazines, but generally thought they were urban legends until I met some of the people who had actually taken part in a few of them.  As far as I'm aware, a bunch of those folks are still running the same campaign worlds. The characters have certainly been and gone, I've heard that many of the first generation of players have literally died of old age, and the original narrators have passed on the mantle to new ones. Many of these games even shifted through game systems, from early D&D to Advanced D&D, then 2nd edition, sometimes even swapping to completely different game systems as the needs of the narrative shifted, perhaps moving to Pendragon, Ars Magica, or Rolemaster. These were the kinds of epic campaigns that I always wanted to be invited into, or wanted to run. ...

I've made single page games, I've seen other people make single page games.  More often than not, these games give you some kind of system that can be used to resolve actions, and some kind of goal or motivator for the characters. In some ways, I guess that's the absolute basic essence of a roleplaying game. The "role" is defined by some kind of goal (that may align with the goals of other characters, or may bring them into conflict). The "game" is defined by a system of dice, cards, "Rock-Paper-Scissors", or other element that helps you resolve how well characters are achieving their goal, or who comes out on top in a conflict. The "playing" in the middle is the grey area where players' imaginations share the narrative, drawing on the goals and systems to help maintain the flow. There are other descriptions...far more elaborate than this one. But then again, there are far more complex games than the single page RPGs I just descri...

I've just come across this post describing a variant form of Lycanthropy . It has really got me thinking about the other entities that might exist within the setting of the familiars. One of the key elements in Familiar is that there are humans yearning to be something more spiritual and aware, and there are spirits who are striving to be more intimate and meaningful to the greater cosmos. The two halves are coming at a journey from opposite ends, each bringing ther own baggage (both positive and negative) and it's only when they meet that a new quest for transcendence can begin. But I've toyed with side ideas a few times as I've developed the project. What other connections might exist between the corporeal and spiritual worlds? If a mystic has a wide range of potential powers, capable of mixing-and-matching metaphysical fragments according to their imagination, perhaps there are other symbiotic relatonships between mortals and spirits that have different eff...

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When I developed The Law there was an automatic driving force within the narrative of the game. This was a game about keeping the peace in a post cyberpunk dystopia. That's a good basic premise, it gives the characters something to do automatically. There are inherent things within the setting for characters to react to, because there is always crime happening, and if the character don't address those crimes then things will either gradually crumble into anarchy around them, or rapidly explode into rioting and revolution. As a GM, you don't need to define scene by scene storylines for players to be led through, but if you want to create cases for characters to investigate it fits within the premise, and you can always punctuate events with street crimes to react to when the pacing needs to be shifted. It's a fairly open world concept, characters can go wherever they want, they can be virtuous protectors of society, or corrupt monsters, but there are always expectations...

The grizzled veteran partnered with the new recruit...the master and their apprentice...the immortal wizard, the elf who has lived for centuries, the dwarf only slightly younger, and the hobbits barely out of their adolescence. We've all encountered the stories where characters are not equals, yet it remains the default state of the table that everyone is "equal". I've certainly encountered long term games where characters are killed off, and then any new characters are introduced at base level. I'm similarly aware of campaign play in Ars Magica or Pendragon , where a single story can continue over the turning of decades and  generations. But the default is still the "equal" party across most gaming. Personally, I think the potential dynamics of young and old characters offers an added level to a story. I'm thinking of a system where characters start the game at various levels. Those who are young are still filled with dynamism and wonder, t...

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...

One of the things I liked about the World of Darkness was the specific potential for telling very different stories in the same world. I guess that D&D was doing that for years previously, where you could cross dark stories into any setting by applying the Ravenloft rules to whatever setting you regularly played (or Spelljammer if you wanted pseudo-spacefaring, or Planescape if you wanted something a bit more metaphysical). But the World of Darkness claimed to produce distinctly different urban fantasy horror stories all set in a single rich world that didn't require jumping between worlds or planes to change the tone of each story. In this alley, werewolves were ripping apart a corporate executive who had greenlit a gas-mining exploration plant in a delicate ecosystem, while two alleys over a pair of vampires were delicately settling a blood feud that had been ongoing for centuries (by similarly pounding the crap out of each other). In theory, you could run alternate weekly ...

+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...

If I say that I'm going to "storify" or make a "story-games version" or any existing crunchy mainstream game, what does that mean? Does it mean simply coverting anything an everything in the system to the "Powered by the Apocalypse" engine?  That might be a valid way to point in the right direction, but misses a lot of the point. My disdain for games that are powered by the apocalypse is well known in a lot of circles, but it's a bit misrepresented. I'm not sure where I made the comment recently, but I'll repeat a paraphrased version here because the intentions still hold true. It came from two artists that I had conversations with a long time ago. Both artists I had respected for their work, but after a half an hour or more of conversation with them, I really respected them as people too. The first artist was James Gurney, among other things he wrote a book you might have heard of called Dinotopia, and a couple of sequels. The ...

Many of my thoughts about Vampires and other supernatural beings in space have focused on a sci-fi perspective. But upon waking this morning I considered another idea... What if the epic battle of the outer solar system were playing out simultaneously with our recorded history? ...and what if the religious texts of the modern world were simply half remembered and mistranslated accounts of event before formally recorded history? Noah's ark may have been a tale about a interplanetary ship captain who fled his world as it was being "flooded with radiation" due to an environmental catastrophe on a lost world which became shattered into the asteroid belt... The Tower of Babel is a reflection of an ancient space elevator which opened a diaspora to the stars... where the bible says people were flung across the world it's only because ancient translators could understand the concept of a diaspora across many worlds... Izamani and Izanagi didn't so much creat...

Hmm... I've spent three quarters of my roleplaying experience as a GM, so the moments I recall most readily are those where I've established scenes for my players to interact with (often built on the events previously assembled collaboratively through the actions of player characters and the preloaded triggers built for the sandbox environment), then I throw in a twist by pulling a concept that had generally been forgotten from a previous session... ...then watch the chaos. I haven't found many tabletop GMs over the years who run stories in similar ways. Mostly just the types of GM who get a pre-written module (either published, or pre-written by themselves) then lead the players through and don't have a lot of scope for changes to their plans. So there haven't been many opportunities for player characters to shine. My style of play follows my style of GMing, I plant the seeds, I spend a few sessions nurturing the plants, and by the time the fruit is ripeni...