Spider Queen

 Musings I was having today: It's pretty well known that Gary Gygax was a stickler for detail when it came to dungeons - the name "Gygaxian naturalism" is used to refer to the approach to dungeon design that foregrounds the dungeon's "ecology", and demands a level of realism usually regarded as absurd in the context of a fantasy game. There's a lot to unpack here that I'm going to try to skip over. For one, the idea of realism being opposed  to fantasy is, in my view, an irritating fallacy. The response "Well it's fantasy, it's not supposed to be realistic" misses the point: An immersive and engaging fantasy requires at least some level of consistency, and a certain amount of relatability to anchor the players' interpretation of what's going on. If one nitpicks a detail like a character's being able to shrug off a stab wound, or goods in a shop costing more than anyone could possibly afford, the response "Well why d...

Something my players did in this week's game made me think. They trekked several days out from their home village, completely of their own accord, to visit a repository of lore (aka a library) and learn about... well, everything. History, people, places - lore stuff. It set me thinking, because you see a lot of GMs on the internet asking how they can get their players to care about their lore (and how to deliver it without "Lore dumps"). I've long had a pet theory on this, and in my mind this experience confirmed it. It basically amounts to the following principle:     Action Principle: Players fundamentally care about stuff that affects their actions in the game. Specifically as regards information, this gives us the principle that players only really care about information that is actionable . And this is a big problem for lore, because the word 'Lore' has effectively evolved into a bespoke game term referring specifically to the information players receive...

Yikes, what a title. Save it for the book, am I right? This is quite a long one, as it takes on quite a few points and blog posts. But there are some insights here, both from others and, I hope, from me. 🕷 Authenticity The Glatisant rolled around again, and fed me a slew of new blog posts. Chasing them down the rabbit hole, I found a discussion of FKR and OSR methods of play that focused on the interesting concept of authenticity. The best way to define authenticity is probably in contrast to its opposite, illusionism. This concept, from Hack and Slash, is exemplified by a technique called  the quantum ogre : The players go left, they face an ogre encounter; the players go right, they face the same ogre encounter, because it's what the GM has prepared. Even if you haven't heard of it in those terms, you'll probably have played at a table where the technique was used. The idea is that the GM has crafted an experience for the players, here involving an ogre encounter, and t...

I stumbled upon this article recently, and it kind of set me off. I've had a lot of thoughts stewing lately, as of the Kenku Structure post, and this seemed to trigger some of them into coalescing. The article does what I've seen a lot of things purport to do in the past, which is provide alternatives for the "You meet in a tavern..." campaign opening. As a culture, fantasy gaming has a strange relationship to this trope; some want to move past it as a particularly tired cliché, while some counter-revolutionaries want to reclaim or rehabilitate it. It's got to the point where it's become difficult even to play it straight, where you're basically running an affectionate parody if you do adopt the trope. The interesting point for me is that I think the argument that we need to spice up our campaign intros basically misses the point of the original trope. Say you meet in a tavern with your crew of adventurers, and some shadowy figure in a cloak comes to you...

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...