game eater blog

Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine isn't as tightly structured as Princess Wing, but it does provide some guardrails:

1) The game is divided into chapters, that typically cover a length of time determined by the campaign genre

2) Each player can (and usually will) perform two XP Actions per chapter, with available XP action typically determined by campaign genre. These are usually specific emotional beats, or actions that become significant by having attention drawn to them, rather then their outcome.

3) After performing an XP action, your character "fades," or loses narrative focus.

All of this combines to form a revolving spotlight effect. If the spotlight falls on you, it helps to have a scene prompt ready!

Your scene prompts are bundled into quests. A full quest write-up contains:

1) A situation your character is presently involved in, or a situation they keep coming back to. This is the Quest itself.

2) Major goals, significant narrative beats that you can expect to happen during the Quest a limited number of times. The GM determines when they've been fulfilled.

3) Quest flavor, minor narrative beats that you can expect to happen during the Quest 1/chapter. The player can declare that quest flavor is happening without waiting for the GM's suggestion.

So! Of these, the quest flavor is the scene prompt tech closest to what I discussed with Princess Wing. The player decides that the scene will be about something in particular from their character material, and the scene will be about that. A quest's major goals work a little differently. I'd suggest they're prompts for the GM instead, scenes that the GM should be on the lookout to set up and create the opportunity for. I've heard the phrase "character flags" used for this kind of thing before.

[In practice, a Chuubo's game will probably see players saying "hey GM I have an idea for how to fulfill my major goal," and that's totally fine. It's a game that wants everyone to spend a little time in the director's chair, even if the GM has the most explicit power there.]

Much of this structure and prompt tech returns in The Far Roofs. This time, the quest flavor summons not just a narrative beat, but a specific emotional reaction to it from the player character, as determined by a Mood Roll. That's a lot to work with from just a couple lines!

Lastly, Far Roofs has a few prompts associated with its Mysteries and the neighborhoods of the Roofs.

The other prompts I've discussed here are linked to their games' progression systems. You get XP or other benefits from invoking them, which drives your character's story forward. The Errantry prompts, by contrast, are only there to spark ideas, characterize the element of the setting they're associated with, and invite players into the director's seat.

so i've been in a couple conversations recently about the idea of "playing to win" vs "playing to lose" in ttrpgs. Playing to win means taking the actions most likely to result in your victory (whether that's within a specific scene or within the overall campaign context) and playing to lose generally means taking whatever actions are most in-character, without concern for whether they actually bring your character closer to their goal.

...except, I'm not sure it always means that. Sometimes the way "play to lose" is used, it suggests "be okay with losing" instead. That's a different idea! Your behavior when you're trying to win, but accept the possibility of loss, is different from your behavior when you're not trying for a victory at all.

[As an aside: some of the games I focus on most are games with dedicated combat scenes where "do what's in-character without concern for victory" is either counterproductive or a false distinction. So I'm leery of descriptions of "play to lose" as fundamental to the hobby]

"Play to lose" is really weird advice to give when your game's player-side mechanics consist of ways to win, and ways to make winning easier, flashier, or more effective. It's mixed signals, at the very least. On the other hand, "don't be a sore loser" makes perfect sense in that situation. Even while players are trying to win, they need to accept the possibility of loss, or else, when they inevitably do, they won't be able to pick themselves up again

[As another aside: TTRPGs have such a weird relationship to loss in general. lose a video game you usually just try again, lose a board game, you shake your head and try again next week or decide to play a different game instead, but loss in a TTRPG often a permanent change in play or gets removed as an option completely in response to those kinds of permanent changes in play]

So as I'm thinking about "don't be a sore loser," I realize that, this isn't language I hear very frequently in TTRPG spaces? We very rarely talk about these things in terms of sportsmanship, and I'm not sure why. Off the top of my head:

1) culturally inherited aversion to sports, even as a turn of phrase

2) TTRPGs tend towards such high emotional and social investment that we avoid talking about them as "just a game" like the concept of sportsmanship leans on

now I won't act like sportsmanship is a single coherent and legitimate phenomenon we can talk about without any chance of miscommunication, but like, this is an already-existing idea that's extremely relevant to a lot of talk about social expectations at the table. So it's very weird that I don't see it invoked more often!

Am I missing something? Is it just a vocab difference I've missed? has "do what's good for the story" somehow replaced the concept of sportsmanship???

With my homebrew out i want to get back to adding more to my site's theory section. Goblin post was good, so maybe next I can expand some of my past thoughts on social mechanics... or I can write something up about "scenario," that what-are-we-doing-here part of a game. I don't know where exactly I'd go with that one, other than my typical distribution-of-effort thing, but it's something I keep coming back to lately. idk what's the hot new design discourse

warning: the kind of (game) philosophy that's arguing about definitions. this will not make you a better GM, this will only maybe possibly make you a better designer, and that's only if you're the same kind of freak i am.

( Playing and games )

the bit that reinforced pro sports as "true" games is the part i really felt like needed to be said, the rest is just what ended up bundled with it.

I'm going to describe two habits I notice in myself, and have also observed across multiple TTRPG communities. I tend to associate them with "system designer mindset" and "Game Master mindset" in my head, but that's not entirely accurate, so instead I'll call them the illustration tendency and the collage tendency.
( rambles incoming )

I care a lot about TTRPGs. on one level this simply means I passed the "wow this hobby is super high investment" filter, on another it's because i'm fascinated by how different systems create spaces of play, or add tools and toys to imagination play. lots of ways to describe what's happening there, i'm trying not to get too tied down in definitions in this one

Because I care a lot about the medium, I find myself pushing against default prescriptions of "this is what a TTRPG can be." sometimes in ways that are like, not actually in line with my own preferences! I like character creation and combat-heavy games, but I tell everyone I can about how good Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast is, which is a game for premade characters in slice-of-life vignettes. I've played Yazeba's and enjoyed it, but it's not the kind of game I like most.

It's interesting. probably healthy, to recognize that my own preferences and Good Game Design are different things. just kinda funny that I'll be looking for games that really push the boundaries, but then my own preferences are significantly more tame