Spider Queen

Having done a lot of deconstructing theory posts now, I'm working on some more positive posts - creating rulesets, logging play etc. But those are coming together slowly, so I thought I'd do a brief little article to keep ticking over. I was having thoughts about rules-light vs rules-heavy games, and wondering why I've started preferring the former over the latter. And I think the reason actually has to do with a different distinction - rules-light vs rules-heavy or rules-intensive is kind of a red herring. See, the thing about rpgs with lots of rules isn't that there's loads to remember. The reason for preferring light rulesets isn't just laziness. It's to do with the scope of the rules - how much they control. Think of this as the difference between an "open" and a "closed" ruleset, or rather, as the spectrum that exists between those two points. [Ed. note: The Angry GM has a recent article on this, although he denies it's a spectr

Mr Mike Shea , perhaps better known as Sly Flourish, has a wonderful blog and, indeed, a wonderful pen name. SF follows the philosophy of "The Lazy Dungeon Master". This philosophy can be put into a simple equation: If the quality of your game = the quality of your prep x the time spent prepping, you can up the quality of your game by upping the quality of your prep, here meaning its efficiency. If you can work out how to condense four hours of planning into just one hour by focussing on the right prep, then you can instead do two  hours of prep, thus earning two hours of quality time to yourself and  magically doubling the quality of your game into the bargain. I explain this only because I think more people ought to know about Mr Flourish and his insights. The actual reason I bring up Sly and the way of the lazy DM is because of a recent post on his blog about running big battles in D&D. This seems to be an eternal question - there certainly seems to be at least one th

I've danced around solo rping for a while, never quite taking the plunge on it. I used to pore over the Tunnels and Trolls solo gamebooks as a kid, but always felt constrained by them. Attempts to make my own dungeon-generation tables proved too cumbersome, while dungeon generators on the internet had too many drawbacks - seeing the whole layout at once, being stocked generically, and of course the ever present "not invented here syndrome". My own settings, or my own regions in others' settings, never felt fleshed out enough. Or, more accurately, they suffered from having exactly as much detail as was needed for the present adventure - there was no hidden detail to discover, none of Tolkein's "towers of a distant city, glimpsed through a sunlit mist". Well, two things have happened to convince me to have another go. A wizard playing with himself;  Image by Bob Giadrosich First, Chris McDowell, one of my all-time design icons (which sounds more like a fas

Just a brief one today. I've been noticing in my Wave Rats game (piratey, open world open table using Into the Odd, hence the punny name) that we're blazing through content super fast. Like, hyperspeed. Honestly, it's good for me as a GM because it's forced me to strip back my prep, making it more fluid and flexible. My prep now looks less like lashing together a maze of different paths and decision points, and more like throwing a handful of interestingly shaped objects into a bag, and handing that to players to poke at them, and watch them interact. Okay, weird metaphor - I'm prepping situation, not stories , is what I'm saying. Making a systemic game rather than a Telltale choose-your-own-adventure (or >shiver< an on-rails shooter). But I've been trying to figure out why  everything's been running so fast. Part of it is to do with the open table concept. I'm taking my cues from the "West Marches" model, and having a session be goi

So I've taken a look at World of Dungeons (WoDu) again, and find myself wanting to hack it. Why? Do I need a reason? Well, to head off a discussion (for another time) of how hacking a game is part of the process of learning about the game etc etc, I'll just give the reason: I want to run it as a potential oneshot where people with different levels of experience with RPGs (my current open table ranging from none to a fair bit) can just pick it up and have fun. More on the barriers to that in a moment.  Also , I want to use the opportunity to demonstrate the benefits of both rules-light and Apocalypse World-style storygames to friends I think would enjoy playing/running such systems. For that, I want a 1-page version, where we can roll up characters and get playing immediately, no rules questions needed. So I'm proposing a minor rules hack (quantum encumbrance) whose implementation might actually do even more than speed up the game - it might make an old-school experience acc

The answer: Different things to different people. But I'm going to try to make the case - as seems to be my regular mode of writing - that people think about them wrong a lot of the time. And this one's going to be tricky, because it's going to involve skirting close to breaking my number 1 rule: Write about things only because they're interesting, not because they annoy or frustrate you. Because there are things in here that have really rubbed me the wrong way in the past. But that's all ancient history, and I feel like we can learn from it. So here we go. 🕸 What is roleplaying? As in, what you do in a roleplaying game? Don't worry, the broad question has a specific answer. A lot of people would say it's being/thinking in character. And that looks right - you are playing a role. But there's a shallow way of reading that and a... well, a right  way, which is distinct from the shallow reading. The shallow reading has roleplaying, being in character, bein

Just a quick one today. Here's a phrase you see a lot on D&D Reddit: "No D&D is better than bad D&D." Now this is another one of those phrases where I'm pretty sure the effect of the phrase - its pragmatic or utility value, if you will - outweighs the value of its strict truth. That is to say, I'm not sure whether it's exactly strictly true (I think that would depend on your tolerance for bad D&D, or your RPG of choice), but it doesn't matter overly much whether it is or not - what matters is that if you treat it as true, good things happen. And, conversely, bad things happen if you don't treat it as true. We're already being slightly pretentious, so lets talk about the "social contract". The social contract in a game is the unwritten rules that hold it together. You could more or less sum it up as "don't be a dick at the table" - although I think that's more because breaking the contract is perceived as

I watched a YouTube video recently where the commentator, if that's the right word, claimed that the fun of D&D is in randomness, and not knowing whether your actions succeed. I want to state straight up that this is false, but I'm not just going to spend a whole post arguing that - I know the YouTuber in question doesn't think that the fun of D&D entirely boils down to the fun of blackjack or coin flipping. The claim was a hasty generalisation to prove that one of the key engagements of D&D is uncertainty. But it made me think hard about whether that's actually really true. What sort of uncertainty? Where does it have to happen? (The video is linked here  so you can make up your own mind if I'm speaking sense or not. Be warned, this fellow's style isn't for everyone.) 🕷 I've been running Into the Odd recently - I gathered together a bunch of my roleplaying friends, friends with whom I discovered D&D and roleplaying in its modern incarna