Here’s a question: if someone new to RPG design comes to you and asks what they should read, watch, and play to get up to speed, what do you recommend?
Dice Exploder Aftershow: The Boogeyman
CommentThis week on Dice Exploder: it’s the season 2 finale! Nychelle Schneider, also known as Mistletoe_Kiss, joins me to talk about customizing games for your table. Not making your own powered by the apocalypse game or whatever, but like adding new abilities and moves to Blades in the Dark or your game of choice. It’s a big conversation, way too big for one episode. This one is chock full of cool ideas that I hope people take and run with.
But since we don’t have as much in the way of specific examples on the podcast this week, I wanted to give some here on the blog…
Agon's Secret Sauce: Story Game Modules
CommentI had this weird experience picking apart the design of Agon.
Agon (second edition specifically, but I’ll be saying just Agon for the rest of this piece), by John Harper and Sean Nittner, is a game of Greek heroes, big action, and gaining Glory. It’s silly and fun and like The Odyssey plus The Fast and the Furious.
It’s got one main mechanic, a conflict resolution system that covers an entire scene and every player’s action in that scene with a single roll. The GM rolls for antagonistic forces, players roll to see if they best them, and then you go from worst player result up to best player result with each player taking a moment to describe their horrible failure or wild success within the scene…
Dukk Borg, Gem Room Games, and Me
CommentRanking Stuff, Awards Shows, and My Top 10 RPGs of All Time
CommentDungeons & Dragons Is A Comedy Game
CommentGoogle Slides: The Easiest Virtual Tabletop Around
CommentThe thing about Google Slides that makes it my favorite virtual tabletop is that everyone knows how to use it. No setting up accounts, no learning a new service, you just get right to playing. It’s easy to navigate and remember where things are. And if all you’re doing is dropping in jpgs of character sheets and putting text on top of them, maybe with a few extra slides for session recaps and notes, Slides is fully functional. You’re killing it even.
Here’s a tour of how I use it.
Calvinballing a Whole Campaign
CommentI’m kind of obsessed with this article over on the excellent Indie Game Reading Club. It’s a guest post by Jason Morningstar in which he describes his process for throwing together a game in an hour. And I don’t mean prepping for a session, I mean soup to nuts all the mechanics and everything, done in 60 minutes.
This post is more or less a love letter to that article. Here’s how my playgroup did that and what we learned.
The Book of Gaub: An Essay from The Awards 2022
1 CommentThe deeper I get into this hobby, the more vibes become everything to me.
Vibes are just as important to a game as the rules. Rules moderate your story / adventure / experience as you tell / navigate / experience it, but vibes guide what everyone brings to the table before a single rule kicks in. A beautiful picture can inspire the mood of a whole session or campaign. The design of a pdf or even just an itch page can tell every player what kind of character to think up when called to. Is this a mechs with emotions evening, or are we descending step by step into a scary murderhole? Either’s fine by me, we should just pick ahead of time, and the Pinterest board the GM put together half an hour ago might get us all on the same page…
Design Your Character Sheet First
CommentThere’s a (potentially apocryphal) story about the design of Apocalypse World that says that the first thing Vincent Baker designed for the game was the Angel playbook. (Or possibly Brainer? I’ve heard both.) Before what dice you were rolling, before the basic moves, before any kind of MC-facing mechanics, Vincent started with some evocative stats and abilities. Before he knew what “open your brain to the world’s psychic maelstrom” meant, those words existed on a page. From there, he and Meguey built the game around what that playbook would need to function instead of starting big picture and gradually filling in.
Now, I’m sure that first playbook was iterated on later. Maybe it was completely revised. I’m sure a lot of that game existed before the fifth playbook was written. Maybe all of this is a lie! But I think there’s something very useful about the idea of starting a game’s design with its character sheet and/or playbooks and building out…
Is XP a Good Design Carrot in Storygames?
CommentDice Exploder Aftershow: Do Games Need Conflict?
CommentOn this week’s episode of the Dice Exploder podcast, I talked with Michael Elliot (@notwriting in most places) about Antiquarian Adventures. And while editing it, I was reflecting on our discussion on conflict in games and stories. We talked about how providing mechanical motivations for players to lean into conflict is a great thing to propel your story go forward. Failure and disaster are great because they give your story something to react to. Without conflict, story is boring, and at that point what are we even doing here?
...right? Is that true?
Couriers: Designer Commentary
CommentThe Space Fam Scene Menu
CommentApocalypse Keys is a Wonderful, Frustrating Game
CommentI love so much of what this game is doing. Its vibes are immaculate. It has… just… so much, for better and worse. I wish my experience playing it had been more satisfying.
Apocalypse Keys is designed by Rae Nedjadi and published by Evil Hat. It’s “the Hellboy RPG” — a game in which you play monstrous humanoids investigating world-ending supernatural mysteries while you balance your humanity against your monstrosity. (It’s gay.) It kickstarted fall of 2022, and a full version of the rules was released to backers during the campaign.
Space Train Space Heist: Design Commentary
CommentBecause I’m shy on twitter, I never talked about the first RPG I ever finished designing: Space Train Space Heist. But I recently remembered how much fun it was, back when I was playing a lot of forum mafia, to read and write debriefs on a given game’s design and playthrough.
I thought today, while STSH is part of this itch bundle of Forged in the Dark (FITD) games, would be a fun time to revisit it. So let’s do it! Here’s a post mortem, retrospective, “director’s commentary,” and/or essay about the design of STSH.