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Seriously like the blink of an eye
Compiling
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2007-12-13
: Mechaton rules questions?
Hey, if you're stopping by looking for answers about Mechaton's rules, welcome, and I'm at your service.
2007-08-24
: Poison'd errata and Q&A
1. The cruel fortune accursing is all wrong. All wrong!
2. Ask the player if her pirate is enduring duress.
Click in for the rest.
2008-01-11
: In a Wicked Age: Four Oracles
In a Wicked Age: Four Oracles.
Also check out the Oracles page at Abulafia. Dave's got the Four Oracles and the original AG&G Oracle, plus space for new "unofficial" oracles. I believe I'll be submitting some new unofficial oracles myself, come a day.
In a Wicked Age
sword & sorcery roleplaying
2010-02-08
: Seriously like the blink of an eye
Here's a pretty remarkable thing, to me at least. These are all Forge threads.
Shadows - Sebastian's 5.
The Nighttime Animals Save the World - Sebastian's 6.
Side-scrolling Anthropomorphic Limbo Universalis! - Sebastian's 6, Elliot's 3.
Prydain, the Hobbit, Pendragon ... Fun for Kids! - Sebastian's 7, Elliot's 4.
[The Big Night] Sheckleton's Sacrifice - Sebastian's 8, Elliot's 5.
Monsters! Monsters! - Sebastian's 9, Elliot's 6.
[Galactic] Character creation for Seb's new game! - Sebastian's 10, Elliot's 7.
With combined race and class, choose from 7 unique character types! - Sebastian's 11, Elliot's 7.
[Storming the Wizard's Tower] Times 10! - Sebastian's 12.
We're playing Pokemon Sorcerer - Sebastian's 13, Elliot's 9, Tovey's 4.
(All but the last are archival threads now - please don't post to them!)
These days, Sebastian's also running a bunch of Storming the Wizard's Tower and Mouse Guard for Elliot and his friend Josh.
2010-01-28
: Compiling
Most of a year's worth of rpg theorizing:
"Designing a roleplaying game means more than designing rules that we can all agree to play by, and that are playable. It means designing rules that capture us - rules that become a vital part of our experience of play."
Causes, effects, fictional, real-world. Adequate fictional causes. Of IIEE, initiation and execution.
Players' jobs. GM's job. Responsibilities and the tools to fulfill them. Lazy play.
Authority, no; instead, responsibility and assent. "Assigning authority is just one way of many to go about soliciting assent."
Resolving players' conflicts of interest by promoting one above the other, no. Resolve players' conflicts of interests by reconciling them.
Subsystems: the meat of your game design is in the interactions of its subsystems, not in the subsystems themselves. Your real design is emergent.
Naked rpg theory makes a very poor game. "RPG designs manipulate social interactions, that's all" is the position from which you begin to design, not the goal of your design.
What a game calls for. Your 3 insights: insight into your subject matter, insight into roleplaying as a practice, insight into human nature and human experience.
Seed content.
The game's fiction counts as a subsystem: design it. Set it to interact with the others. It is a full participant in your game's emergent play.
2010-01-12
: Something Ben Said
Something Ben said (here) has stuck with me.
I think there's a neat thing about PTA here.I've been turning it over and over in my head. I think it's true.
PTA succeeds when we take seriously that this is about good television. PTA fails when you treat it as "GURPS with a different reward system."
Also, when Primetime Adventures came out, television was much worse than it has been since.
2009-12-18
: Seed content
Another #rpgtweory assertion transplanted from Twitter: Content doesn't arise from people + creative process. It arises from people + seed content + creative process.
Giving the group a creative process - a set of rules - doesn't give them everything they need. They also need an initial something, seed content, to work with.
If you don't provide seed content yourself, you're not leaving it up to the group, but to the random media crap-soup we all swim in.
"I'm not making a setting for my game. The group gets to make the setting, so they're guaranteed to be interested in it!" Yeah, no, it doesn't really work that way. More like the group gets to make the setting, so they're guaranteed to be pulling easy elements from movies and TV they've seen recently, with no possible attention to usefulness, value or quality. Like in Universalis: "tenet: zombies!" You know I love zombies, but zombies are very rarely a good idea. They're almost always an easy bad idea.
You also deny the creative process a solid grounding in content, forcing it to rely upon process-as-such instead.
The more concrete in the fiction you can make your rules - escalation rules, resolution rules, exploration rules, development rules, whatever your game requires - the more concrete in the fiction, the more momentum they can build in play. In each moment of play, the seed content can be, if you design your process to work with it, last moment's content, live and electric.
Otherwise, what you get is the abstract, mannered, flatly interpersonal and over-explicit "conflict resolution" that has such a presence in the games of our little scene. I've been banging on about this one for a while now.
Finally, you limit yourself to expressing only your insights into roleplaying as a practice. You cut the legs out from under your insights into your game's subject matter and into real human nature.
Dogs in the Vineyard is a game about crime fiction and early Mormonism, and a game about human violence, judgment, faith and mercy. It's also a game about how to GM. But if it were only a game about how to GM, it wouldn't have the currency it has. Its content, not its structure, is what brings people to play it and brings them to play it again.
Nobody loves a game, like I say, just because it manipulates their social interactions. If you want people to love your game, you have to give them something to love it for.
2009-12-09
: Eppy We Have Heard On High
Happy Epimas, everybody!
(Buy a PDF as a gift, choose a PDF for yourself. It's a good deal.)
2009-12-08
: Your 3 Insights
I offer this as a tool for examining and talking about rpg design.
When you design a game, you're taking three different positions, expressing three different insights, putting forth three different opinions. Saying three different things. First, you're saying something about the subject matter or genre of your game: something you think about adventure fiction, or swords & sorcery, or transhumanist sf, or whatever. Second, you're saying something about roleplaying as a practice, taking a position on how real people should collaborate under these circumstances. Third, you're sying something about real live human nature.
Dogs in the Vineyard, for example:
1. Subject matter: I think that the blood-and-sex stuff underlying crime fiction (as I learned it from Sorcerer's Soul) and the principles underlying my own family's stories about faith, sin, and early Mormonism are very compatible. I think that you can successfully use the one to explore the other.So that's pretty basic and obvious, but I think it'll help us when we talk about, for instance, how a game's mechanics should do justice to its subject matter, or how having an insight into roleplaying as a practice isn't enough to design a whole game, you also need to make two other assertions. At least two!
2. Roleplaying as a practice: That's the how to GM chapter. I think that for GMing this kind of game, you shouldn't have a solution in mind, you should drive play toward conflict (say yes or roll dice), you should actively reveal the town in play.
3. Real live human nature: I think that you throw a punch because you're losing an argument but you don't want to give in. You draw a gun because you're losing a fight but you don't want to give in. I think that people escalate because they care about what's at stake, but they can't win it or hold onto it using only the tools and techniques already at hand.
In comments, please ask clarifying questions, of course, but also please feel free to tell the three opinions your own games express, like I have for Dogs.
2009-12-07
: You know, it probably will.
Vanity googling led me to this: This will keep you warm in a post apocalypse world.
2009-12-04
: TAKE IT TO YOUR BLOG, BAKER
Quoth J.
Three quick #rpgtweory assertions, transplanted from their 140-character native soil:
1. Naked rpg theory makes poor rpg design. You have to better dress it up in beauty and illusion, trick & seduce your audience.
2. As a designer, be a magician. Don't say "and now, using only this cabinet with a hidden mirrored panel, I will make her disappear!"
(Was "many indie rpgs are poor magicians: 'and now, using only this cabinet with a hidden mirrored panel, I will make her disappear!'")
3. "RPG rules coordinate social interaction, that's all" is the position from which you begin to design, not the end sum of design.
2009-11-27
: Testing the Migration
Testing, testing.
Update: The Forge is live.
The Forge Bookshelf is live.
The indie-rpgs unstore is live.
Still in process: articles & reviews
2009-11-23
: The interesting prob with Sons of Anarchy
I've watched a good bunch of Sons of Anarchy now. I'm not quite caught up but getting close. Here's what I think: its writers expect us to make allowances for the characters for what they feel, over what they do. For instance:
Clay: I'm going to keep this thing secret from Ope to protect myself.The writers expect us to think that Clay and Jax are morally different - that Jax is a better person than Clay - even though they're making the same moral decision.
Jax: Well I'M going to keep it secret from Ope too, but I feel cranky about it.
It's something that The Shield (for instance) never asked of us, but something that Battlestar Galactica (for instance) expected of us constantly. I'm finding it weak, but a pretty interesting weakness.
Otherwise it's a fun show.