This is a year of cutting back - I anticipate further cuts to my time and there are other things I want to prioritize with the time left, so gaming gets triaged. Keep playing weekly or biweekly. It's good! It's probably the only friends time I have. See if I can make it more in-person if possible.  No more commercial products. I'm already sitting on a vast dragon's hoard, full of well-regarded stuff I haven't even gotten around to reading; so no paying for anything, and no piracy either. The exceptions: paying for shipping or printing costs for things I've already Kickstarted, getting a ..read more

Spriggan's Den proposes #lore24; let's fuckin goooooo. I failed D23 pretty instantly, but I've always been a more general lorehead, so maybe I'll have more luck with this one. Here's a calendar of prompts. Each month and week has a theme, and there a couple of cycles through other various prompts. It works best if you ignore most prompts and just go with whatever stupid idea pops into your head; it deliberately has too many. Replace mine with ones that work for you - modifying them on the "ref" tab will automatically update them on the "calendar" tab ..read more

There are a lot of rules systems, debates over the extent to which system matters, and groupings of rules into groups. Based on advanced paleontology, historico-linguistic comparative analysis, and the latest genetic evidence, I have cloned the most basic systems to display them in this post, my personal Jurassic Park.  Primordial Sim Players describe what their characters do, and the GM decides what the likely outcomes will be. If it's not obvious whether it would succeed or fail, she flips a coin. FKR isn't about the amount of rules, but one can read a lot of FKR-style play as essential ..read more

(These are for 5e, but can be adapted to just about anything. The most important thing they're meant to do is to make downtime a meaningful scarce resource, and to give players a cast of NPCs for us all to play with. There's also an attempt to attack 5e's five-minute adventuring day and caster-martial disparities, especially around high levels and outside of the combat situations, where they are strongest.) During a week of downtime you can take downtime actions. You can take actions equal to three plus the number of extra attacks/cunning actions you get. Unless otherwise noted you can't doubl ..read more

One day these may blossom into beautiful Posts. Today they are just slush.  revisionist terminology: anti-narratology fictional → imaginary, makebelieve  character → (imaginary) person setting → (imaginary) world (You’re an adult; assume “imaginary” is implied from here out.) scene → moment, event, the time and place when… plot, arc, theme → no character development → ways this person has changed   Aaron Trammell's "The Privilege of Play" Deeply frustrating book. Some really great archival research, and some really interesting arguments about how geography and professional ne ..read more

I have little to add to these debates but there's some interesting insights in the back n forth on the latter! Google kills Jamboard. I had considered using Jamboard as a lightweight VTT with integration with my Drive stuff, but held off because of the likelihood of something like this. There are other options but they get by by SaaS rather than stealing your data, which in theory is slightly less bad but in practice I figure Google/the NSA already have anything they want on me already. Lanterns of the dead were towers "originally constructed to warn passers-by of the danger of i ..read more

This takes 5e and replaces all the chargen and magic rules with GLOG. All remaining gaps and inconsistencies are left as an exercise to the GM. WHY you would do this is also an exercise for the GM. Instead of your character class, take the UR-CLASS. This is just a nearly blank slate to which you can add GLOG class templates. HD: d6 if you got an MD this level, d10 otherwise  Save proficiencies: one of Dex/Con//Wis, plus one of the useless ones Skill proficiencies: choose three Gear proficiencies: anything in your starting loadout If a template would give you +1 to something you get advan ..read more

Not like antivenom or antifascism, which are not venom or fascism, but like antimatter or antipaladins, which are wonky types of paladins or matter. The blorb levels of truth are: explicit GM notes, and if none exist, procedures like random tables for generating truths flagged by the GM in advance, and if none exist, GM fiat Antiblorb is quite similar, actually, following the hierarchy: explicit GM notes and overwise established truths, and if none exist if the facts would be known to PCs, established player headcanon, and if that does not exist or is inapplicable, if the facts would alread ..read more

Marcia writes with airtight logic that 1 HD = 4 hp. But hit dice are meant to be rolled! From my perspective, the ideal is to split out unbloodied and bloodied tracks. The unbloodied track is a known quantity; it represents the minimum level of how much a thing of that order can take. The bloodied track is a mid-combat surprise: you've tested this guy's mettle, and here's how tough he really is.  This has a couple of benefits from my perspective: It's an anti-railroading device, much like reaction and morale rolls. If you're mechanically transparent and let the players roll for opponents ..read more

Harsh words but I'll stand by them.  Metagaming is when the player knowledge affects character behavior over and above what character knowledge would afford. Bad metagaming is when we don't want this, which depends on lots of things: most obviously how trad vs. storygamey we want to be, and even in very trad games there will be metagamey elements that arise, most often for the sake of smoothing things out and getting to the interesting bits: leaning in to cooperation with other player characters, even when the characters would have more reason to conflict speeding up/slowing down action ..read more