One of my weaknesses here is that it's going to be really hard for me to tell how much of the book is weird because it's trying to be Vampire, and how much is it because it's just a weird book. But I persevere.

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Jon Peterson continues to be an extremely worthwhile read. currently in the section of Playing at the World 2e that describes the development of "character" as RPGs understand it. Apparently there were hacks of Diplomacy that used a map of Middle-Earth instead of Real-World-Earth, and put the players in charge of Lord of the Rings nations... and in the positions of LotR characters. We know these guys. They're in the books.

This is, if I were to describe art in terms of its component parts instead of as a social phenomenon, sufficient for a role-playing game in my mind. The game gives you a role to play, fulfilling that role is playing that game. LotR Hack Diplomacy is missing several components that are essential to the TTRPG experience for a lot of people (it's PvP, the GM handles paperwork instead of being a narrator, you're not creating your own character, there's no principle of "anything can be attempted") but I'm not a lot of people, and for me it's good enough to count.

has anyone created a dungeon crawler version of diplomacy. hold on lemme look this up

sometimes you research TTRPG events and incidents and run into something called the Babylon Equity Project and i'm like oh cool i didn't know we were doing Evangelion or perhaps patlabor. and then you get zero hits on google for it.

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

big ol' survey but it's from reddit and we know that won't be the full story. In the meantime, would like to hear anecdotal amendments to these (for example there's a surprising amount of Fabula Ultima/Exalted fandom overlap, and my Jennagame obsession came from friends in the Lancer server)

Fascinating review of a.. dating sim rhythm game RPG? i'm still a little unclear.

One of the things that really fascinates me about dating sims is the way they let the player decide their measure of success: "victory" is ending up with the romantic interest of your choice. Cordo d'Oro has its own set of romance options, but also separate notional goal, victory in the recitals. But from what I'm reading here, the game doesn't condemn you for deciding that pursuing that goal isn't worth your time. I imagine that I'd try optimizing to get both the romance option and the victory at the recitals, but that probably says more about me than about the game.

The notional goal with the well-supported possibility of ignoring that goal reminds me of some TTRPG design motifs, but my thoughts on the resemblance aren't terribly well-formed

perhaps my grand networking schemes and my "refuses to get a bsky" idiosyncrasy are in conflict or perhaps contradiction with each other. alas!

you know, playing a bunch of raising sims was probably not expected preparation for Slay the Princess, but, it sure does give me a unique perspective on things

there's a lot of ttrpg discourse out there. i have seen too much of it. Eventually you start to see it converging on a pattern of:

(I) "A game that does X can't exist"

(II) "And if it did, nobody would like it"

(III) "And if they did, they shouldn't"

each of these is annoying but at least the first two can be disproven, the third has to be a whole clash of philosophies. dueling in lava, choral soundtrack, the works

now you can refer to arguments you see as Category 1/2/3 Totalizations, if you so desire

I keep mentioning this bit of tech/framework so I might as well write out what I mean by it, with some examples. By the end of this series I want to demo how I'm writing scene prompts for my current project.

The first game that got me thinking about scene prompts as a distinct bit of design tech was Princess Wing. When you create a magical girl in PW, you fill out a table of your character's hobbies, interests, or personal traits, each corresponding to a card value in a poker deck. During the game's investigation phase, you play cards to set scenes based on those cards, like playing the 4 of Hearts to play out a bit of chemistry class (your character's strong subject), or the 10 of Clubs to play out a scene reflecting on your character's future dreams. If the scene advances the story, you tick up an investigation clock.

[Note: "Advances the story" is determined by the GM, which means it's possible for this to play out more restrictively for a specific group, but the game is clear that the GM isn't supposed to plan things out ahead of time so that information can only be found in math class, or a specific location. The players are invited to justify their scenes by introducing bits like "My club president might be helpful here" or "I've seen them before at my favorite restaurant," and the game flows much more smoothly if the GM is generally permissive about how scenes relate to the investigation.]

The combat phase is all about managing the cards you play to get your desired effects on the mechanically defined board-state. In the investigation phase, what you do doesn't determine the mechanical output, just the decision to set a scene at all. The clock ticks up the same regardless. Instead, choosing what kind of scene you want to play is making a decision about what feels interesting or sensible based on your prewritten Life Tags and random hand of cards. This is theoretically more limiting than "start any kind of scene you want," but... I don't always know what I want! Getting a bunch of scenes to choose from makes things easier for me, and can take things in directions that people weren't expecting, but appreciate anyway. That's why the scene prompts in Princess Wing are so intriguing to me: They put authorial/directorial responsibility in the hands of the players, but give you a little more support so you don't need to come up with the ideas ex nihilo.