Spider Queen

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...

 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...

I've been tinkering with and expanding my very-nearly-a-Risus-hack from a while ago. Specifically, I was thinking about character roles. One of the things that's brilliant about Risus is that you get to define your character archetype - in fact, you get to pick several archetypes that apply to your character in different degrees. I'll try not to get sidetracked on this discussion - I've started and scrapped posts about it before - but archetypes are really, really useful in rpgs. I make the case here that genre and tone are effectively the most important parts of an rpg, to the point where if you have those dialed in, you can pretty much run a satisfying game with, maybe, a super-slim rules system. In fact, the rules are almost unnecessary, because they're there to tell the GM how certain situations play out, and if you have a super clear vision of the genre and tone, they'll tell you the likely outcome of any given situation. And character archetypes are basic...

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...