game eater blog

papercult has had two different threads on generic systems. which is fine. which is cool. both have come to the conclusion of "it's better when a game has specific goals rather than trying to be the One Game For Everything." which is fine! which is cool!

...but. i do not think that so-called generic systems should be reduced to trying to be the One Game For Everything. i think "this game doesn't work for every campaign concept" is always going to be true! which makes it a boring observation to me. It's much more interesting to me to drill down into the specifics of what they do work for and why. In this sense, "generic" can still be a meaningful (if not perfectly accurate) label for gesturing at some setting flexibility, but it's not like, the main appeal. I don't think the genericism is ever the main appeal, really.

idk i have a vague dissatisfaction with Generic Systems Discourse because it takes a foundational bit of design theory (different mechanics produce different outcomes, so should be used intentionally) and then stops. once you start talking about several generic systems at once, they aren't mechanically unified, so you're no longer talking systems! you're just saying "games should have goals" without trying to analyze the goals of the games you're discussing!

i think this means i don't have any beef with any individual generic system i just think people talk about them weirdly

how does Exalted have "girl who is sword" and she's not immediately the most popular character in the game. I've played Xenoblade 2. I've played Lancer. I know there is a ready audience for this. and yet I have only found ONE (1) piece of fanart of her.

"maybe they realize this archetype is necessarily objectifying" i did not think that would stop Exalted fans

just added these to my Neocities link page, but might as well send them here too:

The Dungeons and Dragons community forums were shut down in late 2015, shortly after the release of D&D 5e. The forums hosted tens of thousands of discussion threads across several editions of D&D.

The G+ Archives is a set of exports from now-defunct Google Plus TTRPG communities. A full directory can be found here.

The Story Games Index preserves threads from the Story Games community forums. The design-focused subforum, Praxis was more poorly preserved.

The Gauntlet forums inherited many users from Google Plus, especially the Gauntlet community that inspired it.

Fictioneers is, unfortunately, a community I know very little about. It seems to have focused on the "storygames" lineage of TTRPGs.

Wynwerod was relatively short-lived, but while it was active it seems to have hosted some of the Gauntlet survivors, and may have shared users with Fictioneers.

If there's similar resources available for other historical TTRPG communities of note, let me know!

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.

I picked up Emergent from an ongoing trans fundraising bundle. I struggle to read through all the character options and monsters right away, but...

This game is something special.

It has style, it has neat dice tech, it has fascinating ideas for scripting structure a campaign, it reminds me, in very good ways, of Monsters and Other Childish Things. I'm keeping an eye on this one.

The main thing I hear about Exalted is its maximalism. Your characters are the strongest and the coolest, there's mountains of lore, and there's rules for everything. I check the rulebook (3e) and it's almost seven hundred pages. That's a lot to read, but that's what I'm there for, right?

sorry there's how many expansion books?

hm

They do have an alternative, Exalted Essence. It's basically a parallel edition that covers all the types of Exalted at once, but it sells itself on being simpler... will that still give me the maximalism I'm looking for? It should, yeah, there's still multiple pretty large books.

...the current Essence crowdfunding campaign has some really nice deals on 3e material

...3e won't be so bad if I limit myself to just one type of Exalted, right?

and that's why i'm currently on course to get into Most Of Essence and 3e, But Specifically Dragon-Blooded Exalted

surely only good can come from this

big fan of fake words

I'm also a fan of this post for outlining different play preferences and the ways they overlap or contradict. You see attempts at this every so often, but very often they fall into the trap of "and that's why THIS particular preference is Real TTRPGing and others are lesser." This accounting avoids that pretty well.

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???

The project from my last post hasn't run out of inspiration yet, turns out knock-off grail wars are a lot of fun

---

It is the law of the world that miracles may only appear at the darkest hour.

When your strength has been spent, when your hopes have been crushed, when your spirit cries out in desolation, then, and only then, can fate be turned aside.

This law of the world, like so many others, has been tried, and tested, that humanity might learn its secrets and make the law their servant.

The Magiamachy exists to produce a miracle.

You can blog through Itch! People have begun blogging through Itch. Here are people I personally know who are now blogging through Itch.

cattail kobold's blog

hoopyfreud

The MinMaximalist Blog

And here's people I don't know, but whose blogs I now follow

Blog of the Bronze Bison

Haunted Walrus

Gem Room Games

blog moment