mastodon 4.7.3You examine the S. John closely, but find only a small tag proclaiming him a product of the Frobozz Magic Game Designer Company.
I haven't been a #GURPS gamer in decades, and I've no desire to return to it as a GM, but I learned valuable things from my GURPS days and they've been bubbling up a fair bit lately. Got a little bump of nostalgia seeing the promotions for the 4thEd Basic Set finally being available as a single book.
I won't be getting it or learning 4thEd (still) but it's nice seeing it trundle along in some form.
I want to follow a social media account that just posts RPG clickbait headlines. Not articles! Just headlines.
YOU'VE BEEN SEARCHING DRIVETHRURPG COMPLETELY WRONG.
WE TRIED THE FIVE BIGGEST SUPERHERO RPGS. THERE WAS A CLEAR WINNER.
THE TERRIBLE THING YOU'RE DOING TO RUIN YOUR CLIFFHANGERS.
MILLENNIALS MAKE THE WORST COMEDY GMS. HERE'S WHY.
WE ASKED SEVEN PRO GMS THE BEST WAY TO GENERATE A RANDOM NUMBER FROM 1 TO 12. THEY ALL SAID THE SAME THING.
Stuff like that. Somebody do that.
A big, weird part of what I'm up to this year is teaching myself, to give myself, and accept from myself, the permission to do industry-level work instead of Cumberland-level work.
Not universally of course. That's not allowed to touch a book like Hammondal: Light of the Candle Islands, or the campaign book.
But with the plan for the compost/sketchbook ... I can just write the way I used to for White Wolf or Pyramid etc, and not be ashamed.
Theoretically. 😅
One of the many fun parts of treating history as a dumpster into which I dive for fantasy tidbits, instead of a source of rules to be followed:
Sometimes I'll come across reference to some historian who's been totally debunked, _utterly discredited_ by modern scholars for wrongheaded assertions about how something worked in ye olden tymes.
I get SO excited to track that discredited work down and absorb it as a source. 😂
I know nothing about the new Firefly Animated Series except that it's a continuation. So, I'll just say into the ether how I hope they use Alan Tudyk:
Jayne brings a boyfriend onto the ship to bunk with him, and it's played by Alan.
Jayne isn't good at relationships, so every 2-3 episodes he brings on a _completely different_ boyfriend, also played by Alan.
Partly because this lets Tudyk's range shine and mostly to make Baldwin uncomfortable. 😄
For Pi Day, we tried a new pizzeria, and it had a bunch of old boardgames, and I kept staring at the Laverne & Shirley boardgame. 😮
It's not "Ages 7 and up," a family game. It's "Ages 7 to 14."
Sorry, Mom and Dad. Sorry, fifteen-year-old sibling! For you are _too worldly and sophisticated to enjoy the Laverne & Shirley game!_
You'll just have to play Booby-Trap* while we 7-to-14s make with the Schlemiel and/or the Schlimazel.
* Cutoff for Bionic Crisis is even younger!
Okay. I _finally_ found an HTT Traveller scenario!
It's arguably a case of "HTT by virtue of being a seed," but ... it feels legit to me. Multiple problems; the facts aren't one-dimensional (social stuff, motive stuff, an exploitable dependency, etc) and it's definitely both open-ended AND open-middled.
It's "The Dam," for MegaTraveller. Challenge #49. Designer is Kevin Scrivner ... who worked for Iron Crown, making this suddenly much less surprising. 😅
In #HTTRPG #AdventureDesign, there's a firm "floor" for complexity & nuance of the playground: viable PC approaches must be innumerable, with at least a dozen consciously considered by the designer (they needn't be explicit in the module, though!)
There is also a "ceiling," because we're here to support the GM, not _drown_ the GM in detail.
This is why an understanding of problem-quallity and even individual fact-quality is important. High-quality facts can do a lot with a little.
Pondering the Starfleet Academy news.
I think the cancellation is the best possible outcome now that Star Trek is owned by Trump loyalists. I'm also glad that they'll still air the already-shot Season 2.
I like the show a lot; I look forward to seeing the next/final season. But honestly I'd rather see it go, than see it transformed into something its new owners would like.
I hope they sell Trek off, and that not a single episode or film is made under Ellison.
Got a fun email from a computer game developer interested in turning a Risus thing into a computer game you could play via Steam and whatnot. I'd be all for it, but of course it's not up to me. 😆 I passed the email along to Big Dice Games and we'll see if anything comes of it.
I think the oddest thing I ever licensed Risus for in my day was a _card game,_ which never happened.
Well, that and the clothing boutique chain decor, which _did_ happen. 😮
In RPG adventure modules both old and new, it's rare (not unheard-of, but rare) for the adventure to offer the PCs a chance to help others directly.
Lots of indirect. Plenty of assurances that if the PCs Retrieve the Thingy and Defeat the Opponent, that helps.
In high-trust designs (both old and new) there are more chances to help directly.
Which is something I should probably mention more often than I have.
I need to remember my own reasons for loving scarecrows in RPG design. 😆
Thread:
A potential workshopper was asking if I'd be running more HTT games on the YouTubes someday, and ... probably? No current plans but I'm sure I'll get around to it again someday. I haven't sought it out for a few reasons:
(1) High-Trust Trad is just an approach to trad. It _looks and sounds_ like a regular RPG, because that's exactly what it is. The biggest difference is in the adventure design. We don't have a special handshake or anything. 😅
[continues]
Let's try to cram #HTTRPG #AdventureDesign into one toot. The Duke Meany examples demonstrate a simple idea: Some facts constrict the viable range of PC approaches; some facts expand/multiply that range. In this context, we likey multiply-ey.
The Duke Meany examples have just six supporting notes each, which is enough for a seed but not quite enough to call a ready-to-run scenario.
But 30-90 well-designed notes? Solid one-nighter. Make it something the PCs will be passionate about.
There are a lot of topics where #HTTRPG Game Masters that I've known _lean_ a certain way, even though those leanings are not themselves HTT matters.
Most tend to appreciate genre-agnostic systems, for example (Hero, Fudge, etc) even though there's nothing intrinsically high-trust about them. Any trad system is suitable for HTT.
While it's important to separate those things from HTT for clarity's sake, I also need to be less apologetic about them.
Sometimes I sustain myself with the fantasy that someone _has_ recently published an RPG thing for gamers like me and I just haven't heard of it yet.
A lot of the process of #Hammondal design is a mad back-and-forth between NPCs and communities ... the Virid who keeps the seed library is stressed because her son fell in with a shady crew, who are actually doing secret work for the prince, who's being a pain in the ass to the theater community, there's a Mantoche crusading against that, etc.
But then there's the peaceful stuff like building out the cycle-of-the-seasons article. I like those parts; they're snuggly. 😁
They finally posted the Colbert Questionert from the night Sandra and I went to the show several months ago!
At the beginning, when Colbert mentions Rose Byrne, there's a tone/pause referencing an earlier moment in the taping when Conan got her name wrong, and Stephen thought it was hilarious and insisted they'd leave it in the broadcast. They didn't really leave it in the broadcast, but that's why he says "Rose ... Byrne" like that. 😆
