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In which Maybe and Lizzie have a real conversation, and Phido gets lots of scritches.
Content warnings on this section: capitalism and labor abuses in the videogame industry (past, mentioned).
( Read more... )With our first two tarot card draws of spring, Maybe begins their village witch work.
Content warnings on this section: food (including meat), hoarding.
( Read more... )We're feeling like making a very different setting than the last time we played Village Witch, so I think we're going to go … cyberpunk post-dystopia post-apocalypse? The surveillance states fell apart, they fell apart hard, and in the wreckage it was local groups which took up the slack when it came to keeping people alive.
Is that solarpunk? We don't know what solarpunk is.
( Character introduction and first scene. )
We finally published the TTRPG supplement we made with a friend of ours!
Five Kinds of Deception is a US$2 booklet describing different ways people fool each other and how you as a player or GM can use that to help tell better stories in your games.
It's eight pages and three and a half thousand words, including quick-reference tables with mechanical notes and narrative prompts. We hope it is helpful!
So, I don't know how many people are still thinking about the 200 Word RPG Challenge in 2022, but earlier this year when we were looking at our completely unused Patreon, we decided, "what if we started writing 200-word tabletop roleplaying games and posting them every month?"
And then we did! It turns out that it's just a really good format for us, and it lets us finish things in a way that we struggle to with larger projects.
Anyway, here's what we've posted so far:
- May: maryland tornado warning, a mini-larp: an imitation of the experience of sheltering in place to wait out tornado warnings.
- June: conspiracy in reverse: a solo fiction-writing game where you use an oracle deck to tell a story of someone uncovering secrets about themself.
- The Packbats' playing card oracle system, which we invented before we had a tarot deck of our own.
- July: as you would expect: a two-player game about one character visiting the dreams of another.
- August: space to unfold: a freeform game about escaping a repressive culture and discovering yourself now that you're in a safe place.
- September: talk about your lives: a letter-writing game: in which you tell each other about events in your lives, good and bad, and use those events to make up stories about events in your characters' lives as they also write letters back and forth.
- October (today!): where things will happen: a worldbuilding game designed to set up the games that follow it with a setting that the players know and that has a few plot hooks to draw on.
We're hoping to finish out at least a full year, so, this is the official halfway point! Feeling optimistic about continuing - we have some bangers in the queue, I think.
...oh, and on the subject of mini TTRPGs: we also made a podcast pilot episode for a jam where us and our podner (podcasting partner) invented a roleplaying game to create the prologue to a YA creature horror story and then played it. It's an hour and fifteen minutes, and a copy of the post-recording edited version of the game is available on the page - feel free to check out either or both! (The jam was for The Podcast Mines, which is a delightful show about pitching podcasts but never actually starting any of them; our episode will likely be a part of their Episode 100 special that should drop tomorrow.)
There's this great joke d20-based tabletop roleplaying game that we do not know the name or author of, but which has very simple mechanics:
- If you do something, then roll a 20-sided die.
- If you roll 2 or better, you succeed; if you get a 1 on a die roll, then you die.
So, your character wakes up (die roll), gets out of bed (die roll), puts on clothes (die roll), opens their bedroom door (die roll), walks down the stairs (die roll) ... you see where this is going. And where this is going is approximately a twenty-minute life expectancy. This character is gonna die.
And that doesn't really make sense, right? Your typical person has a lifespan of at least half an hour, and often much longer. However generous the checks look on paper, the frequency of the checks tells a different story.
...so in the name of not beating around the bush, lemme put a formula in front of you:
If consequence rate is how often (times per day, week, year, whatever) you want a given thing to happen, check rate is how often you want someone to make one or more die rolls that could cause that thing, and check probability is the chance that any given check will lead to the consequence, then:
consequence rate divided by check rate equals check probability.
If you want to tell a story in which something has a chance to happen, and you want to defer that chance onto random luck, it's very easy to make that chance way too high or way too low. And that's kind of why we want to talk about it, because it felt like that came up in an actual-play we were listening to today.
( What happened was: ... )Like, it's easy to miss this in the language of rulebooks, but numbers tell stories. And when players and GMs know what stories they want to tell, it can help them to know what stories their numbers would tell.
So, consequence rate divided by check rate equals check probability.
(Oh, and something like AnyDice to do the arithmetic to find check probabilities, if you don't know them already.)
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"Non-Player Character" is a portal fantasy about an anxious neurodivergent person who is cajoled into joining their MMO friend's tabletop roleplaying group, and we kind of really love it? It is, like a lot of portal fantasies and adventure stories in general, very much about someone being pulled out of their familiar world, forced to deal with a new and terrifying situation, and discovering and developing new strengths in the course of rising to that challenge...
...and in this case, that actually starts before anyone is sucked into another dimension? Tar joining the Kin game is such a brave moment for them, and that ends up being enormously positive in their life before they and their group are handed a whole lot of magic and another entire world to try to navigate. It's a story about making friends, supporting each other, and saving people along the way.
It's also about disability and neurodivergence. It's about people having struggles because their brains and bodies can't do what needs doing on their own, and it's about people having friends who help them get through anyway. It's about having internalized negative stereotypes and being told how amazing they actually are. It's about finding ways to manage, no matter how weird.
It's about a group of marginalized queer people surviving and thriving. It's a kind of story we personally haven't read enough. We're glad we had a chance to read this one.
(p.s. In the course of writing "Non-Player Character", Corva accidentally wrote a sourcebook for Kin, the tabletop roleplaying game from the book, which we haven't yet played but could imagine ourselves running a game of. The flavor is very good, and we like how effectively it simplifies its mechanics by reusing systems.)
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I don't think it's very confusing to think of someone who writes out a set of rules to guide the play of a tabletop roleplaying game as a game designer. Their decisions shape everything that happens at the table - what aspects of the experience get focus, what aspects get glossed over, what deserves reward and what that reward looks like ... their role in a tabletop game is very clearly that of a designer.
The idea of a GM as a game designer comes up periodically in GM advice columns. I think we first saw this in the form of blog posts highlighting elements of the Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics (MDA) framework as relevant to GMing, particularly the idea of aesthetics of play; a player who thrives on experiencing discovery at the table is going to want different things out of a session than a player who thrives on performing a role as a character, and GMs are well-served by being aware of what their players want (and what they themselves want) and designing what they create and provide to the players with that knowledge in mind.
A lot less obvious, I think, is that the players design the game as well. Pacing is an element of game design - and the same combat created by the same GM in the same system, for example, can be a tense three hours spent calculating every move to deal with one's opponents as effectively as possible or a single whirlwind hour of snap decisions and adapting plans on the fly, depending on how the players conceive of their roles and how they act within them. Narrative focus is an element of game design - and the same scenario can be a romp from battle to battle or a series of negotiations to muster enough support from all the parties involved to forge a peace, depending on how the players interpret their role within it. Tone is an element of game design - and the same system can produce a lighthearted comedy or a grim struggle, depending on what the players contribute to the story with their choices.
None of the participants in the event of a roleplaying game have full power over it - it is, as everyone always says, a collaborative storytelling - but all of them have some power over it. And I think it benefits all of them to be conscious of that - benefits the authors of systems to know what they want to facilitate, runners of games to know what they want to provide, and players of games to know what they want to do.
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So, we learned today that D&D's default setting has, instead of an entire meaningful afterlife for atheist[1] characters the way worshippers of gods have, those characters' souls get used as bricks in moldy wall somewhere-or-other off in some Astral Plane sub-plane or something: The Wall of the Faithless.
That's boring. I think there's way better ways to acknowledge the presence of players with characters who don't want to worship any of the gods in the setting - ways which grant the faithless dead afterlives as thematic and as good a source of plot hooks as any of the others. Honestly, there's a lot of better ways. Here's one for y'all's amusement, though.
Those who die without connection to any gods are sent instead to the Ancient Sands, a plane of trackless desert whose sun circles the horizon endlessly, offering no means of navigation. Those alive or dead that choose to wander the plane, however, find themselves coming upon first landmarks, then people, with those they encounter being connected to their own alignment. In this way, these souls find fates in keeping with their choices - the cruel surrounded by the cruel and the kind by the kind - with those who wish for stability seeking out a resting place and those who wish for novelty forever exploring the place and its people.
[1] In this case, worshipping no gods rather than thinking none exist.
The following bit of fiction is an in-character post-LARP report from a game of Off Recipe, a solo cooking LARP that was a part of the Solo But Not Alone solo-TTRPG charity bundle on itch.io that we just purchased.
( Content warnings for food, naturally. 460 words. )Tags:
It's almost difficult to remember what it was like to just ... assume, on a bedrock level, that D&D as we experienced it was just What Tabletop Roleplaying Games Meant.
We actually didn't start with D&D - our first system was SLUG (Simple Laid-back Universal Game) - but it was very easy for us to go from playing SLUG as a kid to playing D&D and acculturate to the latter. The social structure of the table is the same in both cases: each person at the table owns a single character except one, who owns the entire rest of the universe and is usually called the DM or GM instead, and it is the job of the character players to use their characters to successfully traverse an obstacle-ridden story created by the universe player.
It functions. It facilitates a kind of storytelling focused on preparation by the universe player - massive sprawling networks of tunnels and rooms, full of secrets and setpieces, with challenges designed to strain the abilities of the protagonists - and that's wonderful. Our hours spent exploring such spaces were not wasted.
I suppose it was technically collaborative. It didn't feel that way. When we first read the rules of Fate Accelerated Edition, we found them completely alien - the players get to write the same kind of "this is what is true in the universe" cards as the GM? It was the world turned upside-down and we were not prepared for it. And when a DM tried to get the players to do some authorship in the form of adding worldbuilding details, we felt terrifyingly anxious and out of place - we did our best but we felt overwhelmingly that it was not our place. Our one GMless game was ... well, it was a farce, which would have worked if we'd gotten the joke, which we didn't.
Somewhere between 2013 and 2019 our feelings changed. I'm not sure by what.
Somewhere between 2013 and 2019, we tried games which were both themselves and not D&D, which helped. Somewhere between 2013 and 2019, we had conversations with people laying out all the myriad ways in which D&D is an incredibly specific tabletop roleplaying game system and not generic at all. Somewhere between 2013 and 2019, we internalized some ideas about game design and aesthetics of play. Somewhere between 2013 and 2019, we realized we were trans and transitioned, which helped us developed a better degree of connection with ourselves and, we suspect, more capacity to play characters we chose as opposed to just Packbat's Dude Cosplay. Somewhere between 2013 and 2019, we gained an appreciation for games that openly acknowledged their limitations, as contrasted with games that purported (and failed) to be unlimited in scope.
Somewhere between 2013 and 2019, we changed from the kind of people who had no way of understanding what Fate Accelerated Edition was trying to do, to the kind of people who could make decisions about what we would want to use Fate Accelerated Edition to do. We could recognize a system that approached the question of "how do you create the pieces needed to evoke a world and tell stories within it?" through freetext concepts instead of formal systematized mechanics, and which incorporated the Session-Zero "what kind of game do we want to play?" questions we previously didn't know needed asking into the act of player character design. And tried to encourage and also force players into staying in character very clumsily - the compel rule feels like one that would be useful to stop minmaxers from trying to maximize all the numbers but framed as a general game mechanic, and we'll probably houserule it away because compelling players to play their characters in a specific way is not something we want at our table. But we understand it.
We don't have a conclusion here. We just kinda started typing without knowing where to go.
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We tried one half of don't cut the tree/be the tree today.
( Spoilers for 'don't cut the tree' )It felt a little inadequately edited, and the metaphor was heavy enough in our minds that we couldn't really approach it as a prompt fairly? But it was still a meaningful story...
...a GMless tabletop roleplaying game on itch.io, included in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality (ending tomorrow from time of posting) and Tabletop Treehouse BLM Bundle 2 (ending in four days).
...about understanding cities not as maps, but as neighborhoods, points of interest within them, and people to be found at those points.
...a process of yes-and - of sharing and developing and enriching ideas.
...pulses of character and place - moss roads one traverses quietly so as not to break the concentration of wizards, a relay race of ropes for an elevator to climb on as it rises or sinks, the bench one sits on after walking for hours through a market.
...considerate of the emotional safety of those who wish to create their street magic.
...kind of beautiful.
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