So, my obsession this week with Dream Askew and some discussions about Valence and GM roles in Jennachat inspired me with a Chuubo’s!Dream Askew hack. The basic concept is that character abilities are simplified into high-valence MP-costing moves, ordinary-valence, and negative-valence MP-generating moves. In addition to playing a character, each ( Read more... )

I got Ryuutama for Christmas and it seems really interesting! Much more D&D-y than I'm normally into, but I'm digging the Oregon Trail feel and the whimsy. I haven't gotten to play or anything yet. But in character creation I got frustrated at how non-self-contained things were, so I decided to prototype a PbtA-style-playbook-inspired character ( Read more... )

So, periodically I have disagreements on the word “narrativist”, so in an effort to overthink games more, I’ve been thinking about how exactly I use it. Well, literally I use it mostly for story-focused tabletop systems and experimental-to-me LARPs.* But when I’ve historically described something as narrativist, I think I’ve been referring to one ( Read more... )

I’d had Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance recommended to me years and years ago, when I really liked Writing Down the Bones. I’m… really not sure at this point why that makes sense. But I'm glad to have read it and have lots of thoughts, some of which I’ll relate here. (Spoilers for a decades-old weird book.)

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So, we recently finished book 1 of my Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine campaign, and apparently people liked it enough to keep going (after a brief Dogs in the Vineyard break). It’s been a lot of fun and really eye-opening in terms of the realms of possibilities for tabletopping mechanics. I thought I’d take some time to write down some of ( Read more... )

So, I finished Torment: Tides of Numenera. It was good! It was very Planescape: Torment-y, which is exactly what it said on the tin. In the manner of one who spent the whole game comparing, I have some various and sundry thoughts. These… probably end up sounding overly harsh, but it’s really just that it’s easy to nitpick and overthink stuff like ( Read more... )

So, I ran Singularity (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/186728/Singularity) last weekend. Five times, in fact. It was my first time running an in-print published LARP, and (depending on technicalities) probably my first time running a LARP I’d neither helped ( Read more... )

So, I’m not sure how much of that Truths stuff will actually make it into Librarians at this point; it’s probably a bit general. Here’s some other, more specific stuff I’ve been thinking about since then. (Thanks, Sarah!)

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So, there were a couple of things I was thinking about when I braindumped about Truths. One was about the role of player secrets, and more generally player knowledge and “metagaming”. Like with basically everything, how you handle secrets in a game depends on what you’re trying to accomplish and your intention.

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So, mucking about with my ideas for Librarians Errant, I've ended up positing a system, working name "Truths", that's heavily influenced by my experience with Chuubo's, WTF, and Dogs in the Vineyard. It's still very much in flux, but here's a basic sketch of part of it… with examples almost completely of no relation to Librarians.
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