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...

A very short one today. I've been continuing with my open table sandbox in The Black Hack, and wanted to share my process for handling death and dismemberment when characters drop to 0hp, because I think it's been working really well at the table. I'll first explain the ritual very briefly, then explain why it works , and why I think it finds a good middle ground between the old and new schools. 🕷 First, allow me to introduce  The Dice That Will Kill You . The Dice That Will Kill You My brother bought me these as a Christmas present - they are cast in metal, and very heavy, like little angry sea mines. They have already scored and dented our dining-room table. Note the skull, barely visible, on the bag. The Dice That Will Kill You are what give the procedure its special ritual tone. These are the special dice that only come out when a character is near death. On such occasions, I hand their player the bag, and recite the exact words: "<Character name>, these ar...

I think we think about adventures and hooks wrong. It struck me recently, when writing about illusionism , that we use hooks all the time in games where they really aren't warranted - we use hooks to disguise the buy in for a game in the narratively-focused style, trying to make it appear as a sandbox. Let me explain. A lot of narrative-focused campaigns (I even want to say "most") start with a quest hook: Someone comes up to you in a bar and gives you a quest, or bandits attack the town, or you get a message saying that the king is dying, would you mind awfully blah blah blah. By "narrative-focused", I mean campaigns where the GM has prepped a plot they want the PCs to follow - not a bad structure in and of itself, as I'll discuss. But these campaign openers annoy the hell out of me, because they're empty scenes: They look like they have some meaningful choice in them, namely the choice to take the quest or not, but there isn't actually a decision h...

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 been typing up a lot of stuff lately, then revising it or throwing it out. Partly this is due to a dearth of actual play  on my end - other than having two wonderfully enjoyable games at Grogmeet this month - but partly it's just that I keep straying away from my Golden Rule. It's not enough, for me, just to avoid the sort of Angry GM performative internet anger I could so easily slip into. On top of that, I feel I actually have to try to say something insightful about topics that get me all riled up without  descending into a sort of toxic rant. That means I'm constantly chasing what frustrates me about, say, the Kenku Structure , without achieving any actual catharsis about anything. So here's a sort of "thought for the day" style post, just briefly following up a train of thought to make sure I've actually posted something. These (giant) dice will determine your fate... Modern play and classic play in ttrpgs are often distinguished using the c...

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...

Rereading some stuff from The Alexandrian blog and listening to Chris McDowell's podcasts has got me reflecting on my experiences both as a GM and as a player surrounding information, and techniques and structures it supports. In an rpg, information is kind of everything, but this goes double for mysteries. And I feel like mystery scenarios get abused, because of the idea that you can tightly control the information granted the players, and therefore control their activities - basically, if your railroad contains some unknown elements, you can slap the label "mystery" on it to make it kosher. If you couldn't already tell, I'll be putting my Golden Rule ("Ye shall not get yourself Wound Up") under considerable stress here - hear it creak and strain with the pressure! [A note: I've updated this from its original version, stripping out a lot of useless asides (yes, there were even more originally!), and intend to post a follow up to these ideas as and w...

I think it would be a good thing if more players were high maintenance players. I'm a high maintenance player. What does that mean? Well, there's something to be said for thinking of being high maintenance as engaging with the story outside of "office hours", i.e.: sending reams of character backstory, fanfiction etc to the GM. If my players are that engaged, I regard it as a huge bonus, and a vote of confidence. But that's not what I mean here. What I mean is this: I pipe up and talk to my GM about things that don't work for me or that I don't like. Obviously I do this out of session time, not at the table. But I frequently take a while to get my thoughts in order and compose a message explaining what rubbed me the wrong way and why. Bonus points if it comes with a list of potential fixes or other helpful suggestions. Is this a slightly overbearing way of letting your GM know about your preferences? Sure. It helps if you're good friends, or at least h...