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...

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've been having ideas left and right for stuff that I want to write about, and spilling out words onto the page, but in the tangle of offshoots and cul de sacs that follow, the bolder ideas have been getting lost in the murk. If you want to hear me ramble on at length about something very few people will really care about, you can read my doctoral thesis when it's done. So I've cut about 75% of this post (no really), to focus on what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is war stories. You see, ttrpgs are all about stories - no duh. But there are two types of stories (at least in trad gaming) as I see it. I call these "narratives" and "war stories". A narrative is what you get when a GM sits down ahead of time and thinks up what action the coming session is going to contain. It consists of set-pieces, and connections between them. There are a few reasons people do their game prep in terms of narratives. One is ease: You generally have to do l...

I've only just realised that's a punny title. It appears I can't help myself. I'm always trying to think of how to explain the OSR, especially to relatively inexperienced gamers, who are often the ones to rock up at my table. It's tricky for a number of reasons, not least of which are that it's largely defined in contrast to a playstyle these new players will have little or no experience with, and that the priorities of the OSR as a quote-unquote "movement" apparently keep shifting. But I think I've found a new way to describe it, the way I'm going to explain to people, from now on, why you'd play using an older ruleset, or even something completely different that's designed to evoke  an older ruleset. Do you remember hearing about ttrpgs for the first time? It's an experience I imagine you and I share, and share with a lot of people. I can't remember the actual event itself, but I definitely remember the experience - confusion ...

At the risk of stating the obvious, the B/X cleric is a little underpowered compared to their modern equivalent. Or should I say that the modern cleric is over powered compared to their B/X ancestor? I've blogged before about how the Cleric's niche has been removed by increments, to the point where there's now nothing particularly unique to the class. But this doesn't necessarily diminish the appeal of taking the cloth; the fact that the cleric has no particular specialism in the modern game means that they end up being pretty darn good at everything, arguably embodying the role of kickass warrior-spellcaster much better than either the Paladin or the Arcane Knight, and all without much in the way of religious requirements or limitations. But 'twas not always thus. It seems almost absurd now, but the B/X Cleric started play with no spells. This means that they, in fact, couldn't make use of their trademark healing abilities until several successful dungeon-craw...

 A tiny, tiny post today. I've been working on writing things for the game I'm putting together (an unholy fusion of Risus, Blades in the Dark, and other games from around the place that I'm sure I'm cribbing from but can't exactly recall). Specifically, one section I've worked on, part of the GM section, was "Why make this game?" Terribly self-indulgent as it sounds, my point was to get some thoughts down about what the game does , and especially what it might do differently  to other games that would help people run it by telling them what sort of dynamic I was shooting for with my design decisions. Sort of like telling someone just starting Blood (a 2.5d game from the 90s) "Don't try and play this like Halo, or it'll be deeply unenjoyable. Here's what the developers were thinking when they put it together..." The point I'm rambling around to is that I get a feeling sometimes from commentators on the indie rpg scene that the...

Been a while since posting, but that's because I've been cooking up a fairly in-depth one.  Randomness as it works in games generally, and in particular in ttrpgs, has an interesting feature to do with buying into different layers of the gameplay. This basically means that you construct games within a game. This has implications not just for good game design, but also for perceived fairness. The old-school style (if it's coherent enough to call it that) is often criticised for being unfair or confrontational, or at least overly blasé about killing off characters. Hopefully this will explain how the approach is a) justified and b) actually a valuable thing to bring to games . 🕷 Allow me to explain. At length, I'm afraid. Recently, I’ve been playing the excellent indie videogame Noita. Noita is a roguelike, meaning the environment you explore is generated randomly each playthrough. At each level, you get to a shrine, where you can heal up. If you somehow bring a mo...

This blog is still ostensibly focused, at least in part, on OSR play. So, while I get on with writing my Black Hack campaign setting, and until I can blog about that, here's a point of comparison between the new school and the old school: You pretty much need at least one healer (meaning: Cleric) in old school Dungeons and Dragons. You don't need such a thing in fifth edition Dungeons and Dragons. Is this noteworthy? Well, it says a lot about the specific mechanics of the games in question, but also more broadly about their expected playstyle. Let's start with specifics, briefly. In 5e, there exists a concept called the "short rest". Basically, this amounts to a breather, taking one hour, in which a character can roll as many of their Hit Dice as they want, and recharge that many Hp, up to their maximum. Those hit dice are then expended, to be recharged with future "long rests" of 6 hours (4 for elves, for reasons). So, for those who've played Into t...