Personable Thoughts

  The fruitful void, whitespace, rules-lite, et cetera. A set of role-playing rules will often be like a Swiss cheese: Some overarching rules to provide structure, and holes to fill at the table. When designing a game, you must choose the scope and specificity of the rules. You probably need to (perhaps metaphorically) write down at least  one  rule for what you're making to be considered a game (though you may convince me otherwise), and conversely, there is a limit to how many rules you can write down if you intend to finish writing within your lifetime. When then, is the correct amount of rules? Surely this must be a solved problem in the field of game design. The correct answer is of course whatever you think it is. We play game to have fun, or at least some kind of desired experience. If a game provides that without you feeling chafed under the weight of the rulebook, or lost in a big, empty or not very fruitful void, then the game has the right amount of rules for y...

  After two iterations of the age of Industry, and once in the age of electricity, Chris McDowall, AKA Mr. Bastionland, has decided to tackle the age of heroic fantasy , of the Arthurian persuasion. Rather than the explorers of Into the Odd and debt-ridden failed careerists of Electric Bastionland, Mythic Bastionland concerns itself with Knights on a Quest. Like previous games set in the world of Bastion, the rules are light as they come, though with a little bit of added complexity in combat in the form of Feats and Gambits, as well as wrinkles related to weapon types, mounted combat, and mass combat. You know, knight stuff. Besides that, it's just the usual three-stat roll-under and no to-hit roll. It all sounds cool and fun. In total, all of this ends up filling a total of sixteen pages, including the GM advice for running the game. At the end of the book are 30 pages of play examples with commentary (the "Oddpocrypha"), with the rest (the majority of the book) are ...

Theodor Kittelsen 1870s, Photo: Nasjonalmuseet/Ivarsøy, Dag Andre   Once again, I am stretching the definition of "big book", firstly because the Cairn 2e books are not that big, at least compared to chonkers like His Majesty the Worm or The Hidden Isle , and secondly, because I am actually looking at TWO books: the Player's Guide and the Warden's Guide. There were in fact several more books in the box set, but most of those were also Players Guides. For the purposes of this review, I will cover the idea of the box a bit, but mainly focus on the contents of these two "core books", rather than the adventures. The second edition of Cairn is, like the first, written by Yochai Gal. The books have beautiful cover art by Bruno Prosaiko and interior illustrations by Amanda Lee Frank and Keny Widjaja. I have played a little bit of Cairn 1e (a single session in fact, unless my memory betrays me), so while I have a passing familiarity, I am not deeply enmeshed in ...

  In a confluence of events, I ran my first session of Mothership this week, after having played it most weeks for the last six months or so, coinciding with the Paul Beakley of Indie Game Reading Club posting his review of the game. I think it is a well articulated critique, echoing some points made in Dwiz' review over on Knight at the Opera (now sadly unavailable). However, as a self-professed "system-curious indie guy", I think Paul underestimates the value of a simple but effective chassis (or at least, he comes to the conclusion that it is not what he wants out of a game). The strength of the stress system is how simple it is to interact with - yes, the rules in the booklet may not be enough to fully drive play on their own, but perhaps that was never the intention? I would argue that the core rules of Mothership offer just half of the game, with the other half left open to be filled by modules or an enterprising game master: The quality of the rules should the...

  Inspired by a discussion in the RTFM Discord, I have decided to write up some thoughts on how the properties of a modern "roguelike" video game could be adapted to a tabletop RPG. Of course, there is a whole nomenclature discussion to be had about modern "roguelikes" greatly differ from the original Rogue and its likes Angband , Zangband , etc. and is now essentially just a marketing term. However, I will nevertheless root this in modern "roguelike" conventions, as the originals could essentially be emulated by just playing an OSR dungeon crawl . Let us first define the specific genre conventions that we wish to emulate: Gameplay structured around short-ish "runs". You always start at the beginning of the "generalised dungeon" and make your way deeper until you either die or succeed in vanquishing the final boss.  Dying rather than succeeding is the expected outcome for the first many runs. There is no going back to town to resupply...

Once again I have read a book. Swyvers is not the biggest of books, but it's a nice hardback and thus not a zine, and as we all know "Zine" and "Big book" are the only two types of RPG. Swyvers is written by Luke Gearing with art by David Hoskins , published by Melsonian Arts Council . I backed the Kickstarter for the fancy deluxe version, so this is the version I have read. To the best of my knowledge, the only difference between this and the standard hardcover, is that this one has shiny gold foil (making it a more enticing bit of loot for anyone who would burgle me, I guess). The book has a total of 95 pages of content, written by Luke Gearing at his nastiest, accompanied by David Hoskins' excellent art, bringing Luke's dark fantastic Britain to life. Swyvers is a book full of tables, and this is a good thing, since this is also where the work shines brightest. Gearing's writing is darkly funny, leaving me unable to suppress my chuckles at sever...

  It is said that no plan survives contact with reality, and I find that the same is often true of RPG rulesets. Of course, one can make a concerted effort to follow the rules as written, but in many cases, you will end up with your own table's version of the game, having discarded some bits of rules that did not click with you, and added some house rules of your own. I have been running Songbirds 3e by snow roughly weekly for most of the year, and in this post, I will try to sum up my experiences with playing it, rather than just what's in the book. Songbirds is, in its bones, a very simple system, relying to a large extent on vibes as its selling point. Fortunately, the vibes are impeccable, and absolutely managed to sell me on the game. At its core are four attributes, each with its associated skills tracked with 5e style proficiency. Checks are standard d20+modifier vs DC rolls, though unlike 5e attributes only have a single value acting as their modifier. Combat is done ...

  One of the staples of old school play is gold for XP. I don't use it myself, because I don't particularly like it. This dislike comes down to main issues: I don't like counting XP, and I don't like counting gold (or silver, copper, or any other currency). In this blog post, I behave much like a cooking blogger, ruminating a bit on my thoughts before presenting something gameable at the end. If you just want the game juice, skip to the section just before the bullet points. In my mind, XP is by far the easiest of the two to get rid of in a satisfying way. Just level up whenever it makes sense, such as after looting the dungeon, slaying the dragon, saving the prince(ss), etc. or just throw levels out entirely and rely on diegetic advancement instead.  Money however, has the problem that it is already entirely diegetic. The money is normally tracked as it exists in the world, not as some external game currency. Adventurers need money to spend on survival, buying trinkets...

  One of the accepted wisdoms in the OSR (as codified in e.g. the Principia Apocrypha ), as well at the NSR (as defined by Yochai Gal or Pandatheist) is that lethality is good, and a core component of OSR/NSR play, because it means that player choice has real consequence. I do not entirely disagree with this, but I also do not entirely agree. My opinion aligns more with Pandatheist's follow-up post , arguing that "consequential" would be a better term. Perhaps my brain is poisoned with modern "trad" ideology, but when playing longer campaigns rather than one-shots, I find that the characters tend to evolve beyond vehicle's for the players' problem solving, developing interesting quirks and personalities that it would be a shame to lose because of an unlucky dice-roll (because that is one OSR tenet I do still believe in - the sanctity of the dice result). A dramatic death because of calculated risk gone wrong, or a heroic last stand against an ogre whil...