game eater blog

working on a post to map different ways TTRPGs tell you what you're supposed to do with them, the stories and settings they're supposed to work with. That's... a big topic, but I'm trying to fit it all in the term "scenario."

This post focuses on the rules-y parts. The other ones will also probably talk about rules but in different ways.

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Crucible of Aether just funded. To me this is the TTRPG Cohost Success Story. It's good news.

Heart-Eater, who is named Hollow, my Far Roofs homebrew for the Rooftop Library Jam, is now published!

There's two parts here: a Mystery (a major NPC and possible boss fight) and a group storyline (a smallish campaign or major arc) associated with it. I had a lot of fun writing this and I hope that comes through when you read it!

Let's say I want to find a synopsis of a movie. I can check IMDB, that's a pretty good resource. Let's say I want to find a synopsis of a novel. I'd probably try wikipedia for that one. These are both very broad community-maintained resources, if not truly neutral they're at least generally acceptable.

If I want a synopsis of a TTRPG system? suddenly things become much trickier.

There's a few contributing factors here I think. For one thing TTRPGs are so information dense that it might be more apt to compare a system summary to the plot AND the set and costuming AND the cinematography, so this might be a little unfair to expect in the first place. But it still feels weird to me. If I want relatively brief summaries of a system I have to look into specific community archives (like the old 1d4chan wiki, or Something Awful's community read-through archives) or search for individual reviews from independent bloggers. The closest I've seen to what I'm envisioning as a "neutral ground" TTRPG database is RPGGeek. They do good work there, but they don't have much in the way of system summaries. I'm interested in investigating French site Le Grog more closely for how it handles things.

We got a reminder of how fragile the TTRPG ecosystem really is just last week, when Itch went down temporarily as a result of overbearing copyright claim by Funko (yes that Funko). I guess I'm worried that without much in the way of easily accessible reference points, we're going to have short memories and lose track of each others' work.

Let's say you have an encounter of One Million Goblins against a party of four in an elfgame of your choice. the party's The Wizard has an anti-goblin amulet that can eliminate 999999 of those goblins. The goblins proceed to ignore three-fourths of the heroes' party and stab that The Wizard as many times as goblinly possible before that amulet can be used.

This was the most tactically advantageous option for the goblins, that is, it was optimized to secure their win condition. This was the most in-character option for the goblins, that is, it accurately reflected their emotional response to the anti-goblin amulet. From both of these perspectives, the GM played the goblins correctly. However, our hypothetical The Wizard player does not appreciate this fine alignment of ludonarrative incentives. They're upset, because they feel like the GM decided their character was overpowered and singled them out to die. From their perspective, the GM has failed their most important role: making the game fun.

(This is an expanded version of a Cohost post of mine from a few months ago. It's also available on my Neocities.)

The Chosen Heir

You don't even want to be here! It's those pesky crows who showed up with those trinkets and flowers and notes that said the Crow Prince was looking for a consort. How were you supposed to know how crow courtship works? You have to tell them that it was all just a big misunderstanding!

The Foundling

Your home is gone. It got swallowed up by the Outside, or some similar irreversible disaster. The rats took you in, they've been very kind to you, but, you think it's time you stood on your own two feet.

The Savior

Once, someone close to you disappeared. It broke your heart, but, you knew you had to move on... except, now you have a chance to get them back. Climb the Roofs, find where they were taken, and then...? Well, you have plenty of time to figure things out before that happens.

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I keep getting into super obscure subjects with very little information available on them in English, BUT wikipedia+google translate are valuable tools together

Example: the Demon King Chronicle article

This gets me:

• the untranslated name and nickname of the game, which opens up new means of research
• A link to the official website, which my introduction to the game did not have
• Context from both author statements and from reviewers
• AND a link to additional articles on a game that was influential on it but remain untranslated

On one level this feels kinda basic but it's still really exciting to me, this is my first time encountering extensive information on Histoire at all

I grabbed Castle Falkenstein because I wanted to research the origin point of a few different card-based TTRPG systems I knew of. There's some great stuff in here (the game supposedly uses cards because alternate universe Victorian high society is opposed to dice) and some questionable stuff in here (there's a swoon table for female characters specifically). The book starts with a ~120 pages of prose narrative and lore spreads, describing how a fictional game designer was isekai'd into the 19th century of a steampunk parallel Earth. It's helpful enough to note that if you want to skip to the rules, you can. but! It takes like fifty pages for the rules section to explain the basic resolution mechanic.

Instead it opens with genre grounding, character creation, skill lists, even tips for running a campaign, before it explains how to play cards to make things happen. Is this just how 90s RPGs were organized? i have no idea

The concern for genre references is particularly interesting to me. I'd think that including 120 pages of narrative and setting material and the front of the book would be a great reason to not reduce your target genre to a few simple principles for your readers to imitate. The whole setting exists to enable steampunk swashbuckling, so why explain that twice?

I'm not opposed to redundancy, I guess, and I wouldn't be as weirded out by it if the book was organized a little differently. But lately I've been thinking about genre and setting as... alternate paths to a target experience. You can say "it doesn't matter what the town is called, it just matters that we're playing a romcom game," or you can say "we're playing on Arrakis, the emotional arc of the narrative is up to you" and both are valid ways to set base expectations for a TTRPG. Trying to do both at once feels messier somehow. I've considered the idea that narrativizing is corrosive to the "reality" of a setting, but I don't think that's quite right. I do think it's true that the more you send people to other works to let their genre inform yours, the more that everyone else's genre work will start to overwrite the more unique or distinctive parts of your own setting.

Getting back into my mecha timeline. I had not realized how much the genre absolutely exploded in the 1970s. In the magical girl shows I've written up so far you get like, one or two a year, but they just keep making robots. Groizer X is there. wild.