– The Water Magician if hunting monsters and delving into dungeons is so organized and regulated, you’re not playing a fortune-seeking hero, you’re playing a government employee with a weapon I was talking with some friends a few weeks ago about adventurer’s guilds and found myself confronting this popular understanding of organized adventuring. I get … adventurer’s guilds: the anime perspective
The annual convention for Warframe, TennoCon, happened this past weekend. For those unfamiliar with the video game, it’s a space ninja looter-shooter with uncharacteristically benign monetization. Unlike other free-to-play games, Warframe ensures that all players can earn premium currency and has even removed microtransactions when players were using them too much. Between the lore and … warframe & tabletop game design
About a week ago, I jokingly announced to my friends that I had seen one too many posts about torches. My comrades in the OSR have received abundant mileage from blog posts talking about torches, torch alternatives, lighting, making light matter, and all manner of darkness mechanics. Truly: I love that for them. I am … alternative game fantasy: a manifesto
I’ve been working on some organization lately by putting together a library of all my tabletop games. Part of that process involves trying to come up with a “pitch” for each game — a brief summary on what the game is about and what makes it different from any other given game. Sometimes this summary … design ramble: expectation & structure
A little while back, I showed one of my friends the website I’m building and she asked me what faggot games meant. I directed her to click on the link, as I believe that Eclipse expresses an eloquent vision for the movement in her post. However, I wanted to give a shot at explaining in … Faggot Games: in my own words
I grew up in Suzhou, China, which had a population of about 6 million people when I was living there and has only grown since then. I considered it to be a small city in comparison to Shanghai, which was roughly an hour away and had a population of 25 million and better public transportation. … urban depthcrawl
On January 1st, Idle Cartulary over at Playful Void threw down the gauntlet by challenging everyone to make a dungeon zine. Everyone should make a dungeon, at least once. Everyone should get in touch with the hands-on craft of something physical like a zine. Everyone should get a little messy with it. I took this … dungeons (where do i start?)
Let’s take the fact that System Matters is given. How do we determine whether a specific system is a good or bad fit? What are games, actually? The good news is that people have been giving this a lot of thought for a long time. The bad news is that there are no clear definitions. … system anatomy: theory 103
In July 1999, Ron Edwards posted an essay called “System Does Matter”. A copy of this essay is available on the now-defunct forums of The Forge, which was a community of people interested in publishing their own RPGs. A large percentage of all ttrpg discussion and discourse can be traced back to this fundamental concept. … system matters: theory 102
Jargon is necessary to have deeper conversations from an academic perspective. In order to build upon ideas, we develop a shorthand to refer to foundational concepts. I don’t want to assume that any readers of this blog are already familiar with pre-existing jargon, so I’m going to explain foundational concepts as they come up. rules … rules elide: theory 101
