Gygax 75: Reflections and Results

Over on Yochai Gal's lovely NSR discord server some folks (including your's truly) tried there hand at the Gygax 75 challenge during the month of June.

The opportunity to so this alongside a bunch of other people who would regularly check in on each other was great, as in the weeks prior I had attempted several procedures to make a classic dungeon, all with lack luster results (which just goes to show that different methods will work for different people, as these were perfectly functional procedures). 

As I've had a blast doing this challenge (way more than I expected to) I feel like sharing the results, despite being over a month late.

You can download the challenge for free over here. 

The 2nd Age is here

The first part of the project Adventures Buffo and I have been working on is complete. I originally approached Adventures Buffo after reading a great blogpost of his asking if he minded if I took a stab at the idea. Instead, he proposed we attempted something colleboratively and this is the result:

How I run: 'Overpowered' abilities

 Intro: Overpowered Abilities

A staple of my recent design is to work with absolutes whenever possible. This is because to me, these are a lot easier to track. Examples of these are 'mortal steel cannot penetrate dragon scales' or 'fairy dust allows you to fly until you touch the ground'. 

Worldbuilding without canon

 "There is no canon."

This, I feel, is the best way to deal with worldbuilding in tRPGs. Rather than fight against the given fact that people will alter your work based on the preferences and needs of their tables, you can learn to embrace it and actively make settings that do not have a canon, or at least very little canon. There are a number of ways I have seen folks embrace this idea: from sharing unfinished projects and incomplete thoughts to publishing material that deliberately leaves gaps that need to be filled in during prep or at the table.

How I run: complete adventures in under 90 minutes

 Intro: Not enough time

Almost every day I am confronted with an annoying fact: I have more interests than I have time for. Add a job and a relationship to this and I have not nearly enough time to do all the things that interest me. In short: there is little time for me to run and prep tRPGs.

Ordering the Chaos: Qualitative Harm and Encumbrance

I am having a really hard time explaining people what I do when I run games. It is the next section I am trying to work on for FLoK, but even with the help of some folks who I have run games for, it is slow going.

To help the process along, I figured I would make some qualitative systems that sort of line up with how I tend to do things at the table. Mind you, this isn't what I actually consciously have in the back of my head while running, but I think using this will land you in a similar place.

To help understand where I am coming from it might be useful to keep in mind what my number one principle is when running games: Fluff = Crunch. Both for players, as well as for GMs.

With that out of the way, here's some systems:

FLoK dev diary: Character Generation

Character generation in the original FLoK was deliberately sparse because I had no real idea of what the project was going to be yet. 

It was also one of the areas my playtesters had the most feedback on. Especially the generation of the standard attributes (strength, dex, etc.) was contentious. 

Some disliked that that these tags didn't really come into play, others liked how it informed their idea of their character and the way they roleplayed them. 

This made me consider making some Maze Rats inspired d66 tables to help those who like that input in visualising and roleplaying their character, without suggesting that these are tags which are supposed to come into play.

I also tried to standardise the equipment you get from backgrounds a bit more, allow folks to simply roll up their background and provide some examples of those 'twist' items. All also in d66 tables. 

Here's the current results:

Autopsy Report: Looking back at my first GLoG hack

Back when I initially started this blog I was working on a GLoG hack for the table I played with at the time. It is somewhat finished, but barely playtested and the few people that did play it seemed to hate it. 

Moreover, this is from before I realised you don't actually need rules for everything, so despite aiming for 'elegant design' it is a rather convoluted mess of rules I thought I'd need because they were so prevalent in other systems, rules I wanted to add because I thought they were missing from 5e and a bunch of systems and mechanics stolen from other blogs merely because they looked interesting.

For these reasons, I don't like looking back at it, it makes me cringe. However, every once in a while when I need an example of something I like, I find myself returning to stuff I wrote for this game and finding that the thing I remembered liking still holds up decently well. So I figured I'd do myself a favour and try to extract everything I like about it, so I won't have to dig through that mess in the future anymore. 

IT HAS LEGS!!!! FLoK DevDiary

 About half a year ago (shit, time flies) I cobbled something together in a flash of inspiration and hyperfocus:

The Free Laws of Kriegsspiel. 

It is the result of wanting to make something GLoG compatible, but more suited to my personal preferences. I warned during the announcement that I might very well never do anything with FLoK again, as the hyperfocus had ended and I was knee deep in Project Social which I wanted to finish first...

Fuck 5 room dungeons. (Or don't, I don't know what you like)

 

 

5 room dungeons fucking suck. This might seem weird coming from me, as the only tRPG content I have ever published on my itch at this point is a 5 room dungeon (the one from this blog post), but I honestly believe they do. To me, 5-room dungeons are trash and I think this for three simple reasons: 

1. They enforce a narrative structure that I think oversaturates contemporary fiction, has thus become incredibly predictable and worst of all, gets presented as 'the one true way' of writing a 'good' story by people who seem to think every movie should be like the original star wars trilogy.
   
   
2. Enforcing a narrative structure of any kind on your players is antithetical to what I enjoy about tRPGs.
   
   
3. Writing enjoyable stories, even when using prepackaged narrative sturctures, is difficult.