#alice is missing ttrpg

[skyriderwednesday]

OUGH I can highly recommend playing Alice Is Missing. Me and my friends are a MESS, I'm so sweaty, one of our characters probably died----

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played ALICE IS MISSING ?

By Spencer Starke

Alice is Missing is a GMless instant message-based RPG played in a single sitting. Players take on the roles of the teenage friends and family of Alice, a girl who has mysteriously disappeared from her town. Over the course of play, which takes place entirely over text messaging or DMs without in-person dialogue, players will send messages to each other in-character as they learn and reveal new information about Alice, their own characters, and Alice's ultimate fate.

Hauntingly beautiful, deeply personal, and highly innovative, Alice is Missing puts a strong focus on the emotional engagement between players, immersing them in a tense, dramatic mystery that unfolds organically through the text messages they send to one another.

[limayde]

32. Alice is Missing

Pretty intriguing game, I don't play a lot of games focused on roleplay since I always feel awkward doing it, but being able to text each other makes it a lot easier and I feel less embarrassed. Probably a good way to get into roleplaying for people who feel similar. But I also think it depends on the group you're playing with, as not everyone is gonna click with it.

[aidenwaites]

Not dead yet by lord huron playing in the Barnes n noble??,

[saintmichale]

Oooh ok I got Alice is Missing for Christmas and I have literally never played an RPG of any kind ever so if anyone has played or has tips pls help me

[jaden-r-h-quinn]

Reading the Alice is Missing rulebook is getting me super fucking emotional, can't wait to have a group to sit down and play it.

[mhizzberry]

played alice is missing. holy shit my immersion /pos

[seeingsanguiine]

my socially anxious baby child

[deckofmanyaces]

Inquiring minds want to know what your favourite TTRPG is (definitely not to add to our personal collections nope)

I'll (Chloe) go first! Mine is Alice is Missing ❤

[coffee-at-annies]

Honestly idk. I’m not seeing any (new) discourse about gygax or dnd tbh. I’m in indie rpg spaces outside of tumblr (one of the other special interests)(tumblr I keep to myself cause actual play fandoms burnt me tf out in 2020) so like I’m aware of some of the common gripes, just not this specific one? A lot of the bullshit I see stems from a couple different places which I’m throwing under a cut.

1) wizards of the coast and the parent company, hasbro, are big corporations and are y’know evil in various ways. Hasbro literally hired the Pinkertons to go after a guy last year bc he accidentally received a magic the gathering set early.

2) wotc/hasbro wants you to keep giving them money forever. A lot of ppl in online rpg spaces don’t want to do that.

3) the table top role playing game (ttrpg) space is so saturated by dnd that it is most people’s first and only game. This is exacerbated by actual play podcasts, twitch streams, and youtube series that only play dnd. This has led to many many rounds of discourse about “playing other ttrpgs” and “play indie ttrpgs.”

4) building off that, a lot of casual players and gms resist learning other systems when they can instead “hack dnd to do things and genres it was never meant to do so they don’t have to learn another game.” (Something I’ve had an acquaintance say to my face about a homebrew campaign she wanted to run).

5) the refusal to explore outside a nebulous “comfort zone” negatively effects indie creators trying to eek out a living on the indie/self-pub side of it. Would they have made a sale anyway? I dunno. But it’s hard to reach/grow an audience when half the market only wants to do one thing. (This circles back to #3)

6) idk people like to hate things and decades old misogyny is an excuse to start cancel culture puriteen bullshit. There was some nonsense a couple years ago about phylactery being a Jewish word and omg is this secretly antisemitic?

7) this one is personal opinion, but dnd isn’t actually the best system out there for everything and i feel like a lot of the arguments are people trying to get others to acknowledge that. Dnd has severe limitations and a habit of putting everything on the gms shoulders to “make the game work.” Depending on what I’m trying to do or what type of game I want to play there are other rpgs that do it better. My first thought, no time spent thinking, example is if I was going to do a wrestling game, I would go crack open world wide wrestling, a system designed top to bottom to tell stories about wrestlers rather than trying to figure out how to do it with dnd’s combat or skill check system.

8) a lot of indie games will handle things for gms and players so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel to make a game work. Some things can be hacked easily enough but I love cracking open a playbook and having everything handed to me. One of the first indie games I ever read/played was called Sleepaway and had people play as camp counselors at a camp haunted by the lindworm. Sure I could make the sporty counselor, the arts and crafts counselor, the lifeguard, and the newbie in dnd classes but instead the rulebook did the heavy lifting for me, and kept it thematically relevant. Why not let the rulebook hand me character tropes rather than inventing it by myself?

9) something something queer players should give queer creators money instead of it going to a soulless corporation or misogynist creators.

10) idk I’m just adding bullet points at this point cause the adhd likes “and one more thing” and 10 feels like a nice even number

Anyway I feel like attacking the creators boils down to “you should hate this thing cause this guy sucks” and also a bad argument in favor of playing other games. I fully endorse checking out the extended ttrpg scene if you’re looking for something outside the fantasy genre that DnD has made its standard. There’s a ton of games out there worth playing. I am a better role player having played other games

okay but fr what is the goal of these "d&d creators bad" posts I keep seeing. yeah okay those guys sucked. now their games are played by women and queers and even - holy shit - queer women. so. we won! yay

"the game was made by bad people" ok?? so???? like is the end goal that everybody gotta make sure to prostrate themselves somehow before having fun because d&d is ontologically evil, since some dickheads touched it forty years ago??? this sounds suspiciously like bullshit

[luckthebard]

I wouldn't call myself a game designer, because all my game design is internal stuff for my friends and not published...however I have played a lot of experience with different kinds of games particularly crunchy games, and looking at Daggerheart if it was anyone else who designed and/or published Daggerheart with the production value and the design simplicity that it brings to the table, and the ability to keep characters in their sphere without having too much cross over and it being that flavor of Heroic Fantasy that people like...if it was anyone but Darrington Press aka Critical Role...people would be salivating in particular game journalists and game talkers.

I def agree with this, and I think the most baffling and transparent example of how the journalism covering this seems to be in really bad faith is the treatment of Spenser Starke.

Starke is the darling of the indie ttrpg design scene, due to, for example and among other things, praise (earned and valid!) of his game “Alice is Missing”. It felt like he was for a while the golden boy who could do no wrong.

I have never seen people nitpick and give transparently bad faith readings of Starke’s design choices like his systems published with Darrington Press have gotten. And what’s weirder is these critiques almost never name or credit him as the game designer. It’s all an attitude of “oh, Critical Role is out here with a rushed game cash grab” - completely removing one of the most popular ttrpg designer’s involvement or the fact that in some cases he spent years working on these systems.

There’s something related to this that’s another conversation about how reluctant this same media is to acknowledge that CR is an indie studio. Which is again bizarre because they’re happy to laud Dropout as a scrappy indie underdog when Dropout arguably had more start-up capital and industry connections than CR had at the start - and it’s not like Dropout has tried to hide that!

I guess it just feels increasingly like some of these major ttrpg journalists are out of touch in a way they can’t or won’t acknowledge with this history of the space, or they want the clout of being seen to be critical to the successful, popular thing.

[maximumzombiecreator]

Heya, you made a post recently about players getting the wrong expectations from AP podcasts for their own performance and experiences in D&D. The way you described it was almost exactly like something I recently saw at the table, complete with the getting into their own head and thrown off from unexpected interactions and then frustrated. Do you have any advice on how to deprogram, so to say, someone from this mind set and help them enjoy their time with the game more? Apologies if this is something you already wrote about and I just missed it

I ended up writing like 1500 words on this so let me put it under the cut.

So, there are a couple different approaches to this that I think work. The first, if they're willing to play a different RPG, is to play something with a different "play posture." That is, rather than playing a game where the players have a single PC over whom they have agency and nothing else, play a game that is more collaborative or where a player is expected to control multiple characters. For instance, I like introducing players like this to Blades in the Dark, where I'll have every player make two characters in the crew to begin with, and the core mechanic of flashbacks encourages players to take a greater amount of narrative control. I find this pushes them far enough outside their expectations that they're forced to take it on its own merits, and this helps them develop a more at-the-table style of play. Then when they take that back to more trad-style games, they can use the skills they developed and find a greater comfort level.

That said, playing another, stranger game after getting frustrated at their first game is a lot to ask of someone, so it's not at all something I'd take for granted.

In terms of helping at the table, the first thing is to recognize when it's happening. I tend to ask new players to my table what TTRPG experience they have, and one very big reason is that if someone is coming mainly from actual plays, I know to watch out for this.

What I try to do when this happens is pull back the abstraction level and talk about what's happening in a "discussing the characters" way. In particular, what I am most looking to avoid is making the player feel embarassed. That can make them defensive and blame others, or it can make them spiral and want to quit, it's a terrible feeling. So, for some specific examples of things I'll notice and ways to respond:

If the player is freezing - I'll pause the active roleplay, briefly summarize the current situation, and ask how their character is feeling. "So, Alice sort of came into this conversation expecting to bond with Bob, and got a lot of, I think, unexpected hostility back. What's Alice feeling in that moment?" By describing the situation, I am helping to clarify to all players what the current scene looks like. Maybe Bob's player doesn't realize that he's responding to a friendly overture by being a huge dick. Alice's player might be freezing because she came into this with a scene idea that isn't happening, but by making clear what the current scene is and asking her feelings, I'm giving her a chance to make a character choice even if she doesn't instinctively know how to turn that into a productive scene. Even if she decides Alice is feeling like "I want out of this conversation" I can then frame that as creating a tension between these two characters going forward. My goal is, basically, to frame this as a successful scene, just not the one Alice's player planned. To be clear that she didn't fail at making a roleplay scene, she succeeded, it just wasn't the scene she expected.

If the player is getting frustrated - I'll usually try to tweak their out of character frustration into in character frustration. Pulling back to discuss the scene again, I'll say something like, "So, Charlie is really stonewalling Alice here, not giving her any information, and it seems like Alice is getting frustrated by that. What does that look like, what does she do?" Again, describing the situation sets a ground level clarification for all players, but it also lets Alice's player save face. She's not getting frustrated, her character is, and that's good drama! It also gives me the chance to cut the scene short if it's not going to be productive. I can turn to Charlie's player and say, "So, seeing Alice react that way, does Charlie respond any differently, or is he gonna keep stonewalling her?" And if the answer is the latter, I can tie a neat little bow on the scene and move on. Once again, I'll frame this as a successful scene, as establishing a future drama.

If the player is shutting down - I'll look to give them an outlet for their desire to play their character, but ideally one that they don't expect. Come to them proactively with a roleplay scene that they can respond to. If I'm playing with players I know well, I'll usually have one or two I know can be prompted to be an accomplice in this. In a moment of downtime, I'll ask Alice's player what Alice is doing, and then prompt the other player. "Dan, you notice Alice getting pretty deep into her cups, she seems troubled, what do you do?" I may need to nudge Alice's player a few times in this scene, if she's really shutting down, but I find for these players asking the one-two combo of "What are they feeling?" and "What does that look like?" gives enough to keep things moving. If I don't have an accomplice I can trust in the party, I'll try to do the same with an NPC. In this case, I do feel I need to keep things shorter, but it's vital to keep the player from detaching entirely because things aren't going how they'd like. If I'm doing it with an NPC, I'll try to create a specific unusual context to give the player something to respond to. It won't be an NPC coming to them to ask, "hey buddy how ya feelin'?" it'll be the barkeep asking for a hand moving some huge kegs, or a travelling scholar asking for directions, and sharing some philosophical musings, or whatever. I'm looking to pitch them a softball, but one they haven't already formed an opinion on. I'm trying to get them used to roleplay as listening and responding.

If the player is doing alright, but demotivated by things not going how they want - I'll try to catch this at the end of the session with a bit of retrospective. I'll call out a scene they were in that didn't go how they wanted, praise some specific aspect of what each character did in the scene, and ask how they felt about it, and what they think their characters will do going forward. "That scene where Alice went to try and talk to Eve about the heist plans, I love how Alice is watching the other characters and picking up on their skills. Eve's response was kind of unhinged but in a really interesting way, I feel like it comes through that she's a bit unstable. How were each of your characters feeling about that interaction? Do you think they'll approach each other differently after that?" I want to place attention and importance on scenes that might feel like treading water, and to make them into narrative fodder that the player is going to reflect on, rather than dismissing as being bad or wrong.

All these also apply if it's a scene with an NPC they're having issues with, except that I am usually more malleable to adjust my reactions if I feel it's appropriate, or to clarify where the NPC is coming from if I think the NPC's reaction shouldn't change. Overall, I'm really trying to coax my Alice into a place of understanding that scenes that don't go they way she wants are still great, honestly even better, because the chaos and variety of play, the unexpected responses, are what make TTRPG storytelling good. I want her to feel like she didn't play wrong because things didn't go like she wanted, and neither did the other players, and to teach her to respond and react to the unexpected.

All of this, of course, comes with the caveat that this is what works if the player is otherwise fine, but a bit actual play-brained. A fairly frequent comorbidity, however, is the player with main character syndrome, whose frustration comes in part from everything not warping around them and the other players not being wowed by their cool, badass character. When this happens, I have less success deprogramming people (and honestly, less energy to commit to managing their play experience), but it's still possible. The biggest thing I'd add, in this case, is that I will really try to frame my prompts in such a way as to encourage Main Character Alice to appreciate the other characters more. Rather than just asking her how Alice is feeling, I'll specifically ask about how Alice is perceiving and responding to the other characters, and make her spotlight more dependent on reacting to other PCs. This can go badly, if she reacts to other PCs by belittling them or otherwise sucking, but once that happens it becomes a "talk about it out of play" issue entirely and I don't think there's any point addressing in game.

[canmom]

assorted TTRPG things

nugget from the tab bonfire: at some point I was reading about RPGs. some things that are old, some are new(ish). here are some links, since I think they are interesting, and some additional comments.

first-up: my own RPG posts are now archived here. that section of my site is looking a whole lot more fleshed out now.

1. ritual

in 2021, Meguey Baker wrote this one about 'ritual in game design', fitting TTRPGs into her frame of faciliating rituals for essentially therapeutic purposes, aimed at parents. since I like talking in a vaguely (vaguely) anthropological way about the analogies between TTRPGs and other activities (improv comedy, kink, wrestling), this is very relevant.

by Meguey's definition, a ritual is defined through this series of words: intentional contained conscious creative action. of course, she gives these words fairly specialised definitions. she's mostly interested in addressing TTRPGs that go into tough, bleedy places, described in books like Alice Is Missing, BFF, and Bluebeard’s Bride - of these I'm only familiar with the third but I'm kind of aware of the genre of game she's talking about. she suggests that these principles don't really apply if you're just playing to hang out and have a good time, but to my mind, just because you're less formal about it doesn't mean that's not an aspect of ritual, and the analysis is similarly applicable there, just lower-stakes.

in fact I think a whole lot of human activities are rituals (classic bryn move to grab a conceptual hammer and start seeing nails everywhere). the analogy goes the other way too, rituals are kind of like games.

I'm not entirely convinced the breakdown into jargon words really does a lot for me, but the crucial thing here is the sort of entering and exiting into a constrained social space which has its special set of rules. meguey writes these cool little coloured lists which depict the various stages of getting you into a game/ritual headspace and exiting it afterwards...

...and specialises it to the case of roleplaying games as you see. it's pretty BDSM-like isn't it? sure, that's something I'm currently interested in, I recently read The New [Topping/Bottoming] Books, but it certainly does suggest that analogy strongly for me; I think a general recognition that RPGs should have aftercare would do a lot more for the scene than a lot of the other 'safety tools' like X-cards and so on. (a weaker analogy is the principles of animation: anticipation, action, follow-through.)

this idea of ritual also strongly parallels the definition of 'play' of roger callilois:

1. it is free, or not obligatory 2. it is separate from the routine of life, occupying its own time and space 3. it is uncertain, so that the results of play cannot be pre-determined and the player's initiative is involved 4. it is unproductive in that it creates no wealth, and ends as it begins economically speaking 5. it is governed by rules that suspend ordinary laws and behaviours and that must be followed by players 6. it involves make-believe that may be set against 'real life'.[6]: 100–101 

as a set of traits which describe a somewhat fuzzy sphere of activity. meguey's account of 'ritual' focuses more on the set of steps you follow to enter and leave the ritual space, but it is describing, I think, a heavily overlapping 'thing'.

why so explicitly break down a process that most people seem to come by naturally? well, probably for the same reason that kink people do it: the more you play with [emotional] fire, the more care you must exercise to keep it contained. but it is also pretty important, I think, to pursue some degree of ritual for the middle part to actually work. you need to switch mental gears first to get yourself operating in 'game space'. same goes for a number of other 'spaces' for that matter. in RPGs we already have plenty of rituals: getting set up around the table (for offline games), general chitchat beforehand to get us feeling social with the other players, the brief summary of the previous session to mark the transition into RPG mode...

one non-obvious extension that Meguey makes, in the third excerpt above is to the actual text of RPG books, in terms of how they are presented to the reader. I think this is genuinely quite an insight - when you read a book you get into RPG space a bit and imagine playing the game, building up the fantasy of what playing it will entail (c.f. what's the book for, part 3).

though, that said - it is tricky to pursue a strict ritual structure in presentation, I think, because I think RPG books tend to be read very non-linearly. only quite short games tend to get read cover-to-cover in one sitting. otherwise you tend to skip to the part that you need. still: the manner of presentation is very important to an RPG book serving its purposes. and this is a fascinating frame for it.

I'm not sure this essay necessarily gives a new direction (as a designer or a player), but it does give an interesting angle to understand things I was already doing previously, and do them a little more deliberately.

for example, when I make a point of mentioning moments that I enjoyed in the time after an RPG session before we all part ways, that is the 'return/celebration' part of the ritual, and crucially it reassures everyone that even if they were playing an unpleasant character or there was inter-character conflict in the session, it was something I was looking for and appreciated. I do this because there have been times when I've felt a bad kind of bleed, fearing that my character was 'too much' and was detracting from the session, or that a conflict in-character reflected an OOC conflict. having an explicit affirmation helps drive away those fears.

2. rule zero in D&D

this history of 'rule zero' in D&D editions dates all the way back to 2012 (although it seems to have been updated since), but it's still very relevant to my current efforts to understand RPGs, books, and all the weird practices around them, the role of 'rulings' in OSR, etc etc.

right off the bat, I appreciate the nuances that this early paragraph expresses:

The attitude towards rulings vs. rules in the game shows up  - directly and explicitly in the rules text - implicitly in the text and detectable via textual analysis  - in the surrounding publications considered semi-canonical (Dragon magazine, nowadays forums and designer blogs), and  - the culture of gamers surrounding it.

while the rest of the post is still focused on what books say rather than what people did with those books, it's a relief when people note that there is a difference.

so, the essay traces a general evolution of ideas about what role the rules in the book are supposed to follow as D&D moved away from wargaming and passed through the hands of different publishers. how much interpolation and discretion the DM is supposed to apply to the text, how authoritative they're supposed to be at their own table compared to the non-DM players...

it's fascinating to observe how the culture of the game evolved. it's also tricky to distil the different currents down into a brief summary - I tried and realised I was just recapping the article in less detail. luckily the author wrote a summary so I can just quote that:

0e – the referee is an aribiter and fills in the gaps 1e – the DM is large and in charge, the rules are pretty good, your players are at both’s behest B/X and 2e – the DM and players are both important, the rules are super mutable 3e/early 3.5e – the rules and players and DM are leveled out in importance, meaning rulings are minimized and a negotiation with players BECMI/late 3.5e/4e – the rules are pretty fixed and players and DM are equal and subject to the rules as law; RAW is an option OSR and Pathfinder – splitting off in their own directions in reaction to 4e, OSR back to a mix of 0e and B/X flavored attitudes and Pathfinder to a hybrid of 1e/2e/3e attitudes 5e – The DM is clearly in charge and can ignore/change rules and rolls as they deem wise, with the goal of everyone having fun (as opposed to the sometimes-stated 1e goal of “keeping the players in their place”.) It reincorporated a lot of the 1e and 2e thinking into the game to an even greater degree than Pathfinder. PF2e – Effectively back to 3e positioning fairly exactly. It stepped back away from where PF1e and 5e were going and got a little less enthusiastic about GM authority, carefully scoping it to interpretation and, sometimes, changes to make things fun. Maybe a *little* more towards 5e than 3e was, but only by a hair.

anyway, there are a couple of interesting points I want to pull out of the discussion. first is this insightful comment on the broader implications of rules that grant abilities - something to discuss further in a later post...

The problem with [D&D 3.5e's claim that you can try anything and the rules only govern chances of success] from a textual interpretation standpoint is that it’s hard to not interpret the raft of “possibility” options in the 3e branch of D&D as being restriction of options. I can try to throw my opponent in a grapple – until a feat comes out that says “In a grapple, you can now throw your opponent.” Thus despite mitigating statements by the designers, their design itself passively promulgates an approach to the rules as written.

there's also an interesting line about how 'old school' the OSR actually is, answer being that it's complicated.

Some, however, consider this to be a bit of a retcon of how old school gaming actually worked. As you can see from this research, it is and it isn’t – the “rulings vs. rules” concept was very strong especially in B/X and 2e, somewhat less so in 0e/1e, and actively militated against in BECMI. Hackmaster and the Knights of the Dinner Table comic prominently parody the not uncommon rules-adherence mode of play in AD&D. As all nostalgia does, the Quick Primer picks certain elements out of the past to bring back and leaves aside some other elements.

finally, we have this comment about the (then very new) 5th edition approach to framing its rules:

It also appears to take a hint from the OSR’s formulation of “rulings, not rules” as well as the prominent fiction-first modern indie games like Apocalypse World when it describes the basic pattern of play – 1. The DM describes the environment 2. The players describe what they want to do (and the DM decides how to resolve those actions – importantly, the PCs don’t decide what rules they use) 3. The DM narrates the results

...which is somewhat true to my experience of 5e, although I think there is still a fairly significant component of 'I use this ability on my character sheet' in the game (I use this weapon, I cast this spell, I use this special ability). So the players do often decide what rules they want to invoke. Although, that is also true of Apocalypse World - something to go into another day.

mostly I think it's really helpful to have a proper sense of the space of practices represented by D&D, since popular discourse (including the game's rulebooks) way too often seems to assume there is only one way that D&D is played. this is a good stab at exploring some of the dimensions, and will definitely inform whatever is the next investigation I make into the structure of RPGs.

for another angle on D&D history, I came across this old (2016) ENWorld post tracing how Gygax got increasingly proprietary and litigious with D&D, and hostile to people putting their own spins on it.

it seems like for more on this topic of early RPG history I should be taking a look at The Elusive Shift by John Peterson, so posssibly more to come on this subject when I get round to reading that one.

3. blorb

I came across Sandra Snan's website, idiomdrottning.org, which is another one of those classic static-site treasure troves of someone's thoughts on everything for like the last decade.

like me, she came back to playing trad games like D&D after spending a while exploring the storygames milieu. She landed on a set of practices relating to the concreteness of the setting, in explicit opposition to 'no myth'-style games where anything not stated out loud is fair game to be modified for the sake of narrative.

she calls this 'blorb', and as these things tend to, it gets something like a manifesto. many other articles on this site talk about various facets of roleplaying games are written about on the site in relation to this.

'blorb' focuses on the relationship between preparation and improvisation: making a big show of referring to things on paper, and making decisions in the open, to reinforce the sort of metanarrative that there is an underlying reality even if it hasn't fully been discovered yet. it emphasises more granular simulation over abstraction.

since it's a little hard to navigate Sandra's archives, I've gathered the posts that are relevant to the subject here:

the chasm width problem (motivating, raising the issue that few games explicitly address the how of DMing)

blorb principles

realism and blorb (which discusses the other name 'klokkverk' used elsewhere in the milieu, and compares it to 'no myth') + the fictioneers talk about blorb again

radically transparent DM-ing

say the DC

antiblorb

GM-less roleplaying games

a blorb thought

the quest queue

there's probably others but these are the main ones I read

for contrast, no myth, a somewhat overlapping and somewhat very different paradigm of games that broadly sums up the norms of the Forge/'story games' tradition.

to sandra, 'blorb' is a statement of the type of roleplaying she finds vastly more satisfying to operate, and the crucial elements to make that happen.

what I find interesting about blorb is that, since its main interlocutor is the Forge/story-games tradition, it puts a fair bit of discussion into how this affects the fiction in practice. e.g. what you should prepare and what you can still improvise, and how the existence of the 'gloracle' (the combination of prepped materials and dice/rules, and rigour in consulting them) shapes our notion of 'the fiction'.

via this post, vincent baker back in 2012 defined RPGs thus:

To me, the crucial feature that makes a game an RPG is that it works by the (so-called) lumpley primple: in order to play, we have to create fictional stuff and agree that, for gameplay purposes, it's true. This is a pretty technical and inclusive definition. It includes Once Upon a Time and that game where you sit in a circle and pretend that some of you are werewolves, for instance.

something I find very interesting RPGs is the process of 'synchronisation' of the shared fiction. the idea of 'shared fiction' is something of an elaborate illusion. every player has a different version of it, with different emphases, different things that are fresh in memory, different interpretations of the images...

consider verbal descriptions of locations. my sense of what is in a scene will constantly be adjusted based on the stream of description I'm receiving from other players - the 'shared fiction' is at best something we approach asymptotically.

in an extreme example, a DM could lead with an elaborate description of the architecture, decorations, and layout of the room, before wrapping up with 'and curled around the central pillar is a mighty red dragon'. dun dun dun! suddenly, I have to recontextualise everything in the scene I was building in my head to accomodate the presence of the dragon.

the unreliability of this communications channel was a source for a vein of classic D&D humour, such as the Dread Gazebo of yore, where the communication channel breaks down leading to an inconsistency in the 'shared' fiction.

'no myth' and similar ideas come from the recognition that, until something is said out loud and enters part of the shared fiction, it can be changed freely between any possibility consistent with the 'established' facts. sort of like the wave function collapse algorithm. they take the attitude that you should do this deliberately to maximise drama and add complications, taking on more of a writer/director role. this character enters a bar, what should they encounter there? it would be fucked up if they encountered their ex, right? ergo their ex is there.

there is a degree of this in every RPG, not just your high-improv post-Forge story games. in order for some sort of consensus to be reached, parts of it must be black-boxed and unpredictable. for example, if I am inhabiting a character, I have my idea of how they will act and what they're feeling and thinking about, and that's authoritative. but that means for everyone else's characters, I have my impressions and predictions, but they're subject to being updated as soon as that player speaks.

for Sandra, this recognition that everything is getting moved around for drama undermines the substance of the world - an inescapable awareness even if the players take pains to make the established, spoken-out-loud fiction consistent.

so, additional 'authority' is central to the 'blorb' playstyle. that is, in addition to each player's authority to make up stuff within their domain (e.g. what their character does), you make a big point of deferring to some additional authorities such as pre-prepped material and dice (which Sandra calls the 'gloracle'), and making it explicit to the players that you're doing so. for example, you might talk about the random encounter tables you're using and what would change their contents, or declare the DC before every roll.

it's kind of a defensive style of DMing, in that it's entirely designed to forestall any suspicion of 'fudging' behind the scenes. the tradeoff is: more explicit discussion of game mechanics which might detract from the sort of 'atmosphere', but equally a stronger sense of inhabiting an external world where things are 'really' happening 'offscreen'.

to me, the idea of 'fudging' doesn't bother me nearly as much as it seems to bother Sandra, but I think there is some truth to the thought that if everything is subject to random tables or pure off-the-dome improv, the game can start to feel a very homogeneous. as Sandra puts it in one of her articles:

I don’t want to expand randomly as we go either, because if everything is randomly rolled as you go along, where’s the agency? South becomes the same as north becomes the same as west because wherever you go, the dice are furnishing for you, so the choice about where to go matters less.

it's probably got something to do with information theory, right? once you become familiar with the table, and you know when the table will be invoked, you've broadly found out what there is to know about that thing. there are only so many bits of information.

I was saying the other day, games are interesting because they are something to explore through interacting with them to discover all their weird nuances. players are pretty good at sniffing out how complex and varied the underlying system is. a wide set of interesting, spicy locations - and logical relations between them - has more nuances to discover than a random table with, say, 10 entries.

the problem is of course that such a prep-focused playstyle can lead to huge amounts of 'wasted' effort fleshing out elements of the gloracle which may never be activated, especially if players don't spend their time rubbing against your creation in various ways to discover its nuances. Sandra's approach is to work out what's easy to improvise on the fly (the 'wallpaper') and what is crucial to pin down in advance, and largely prepare the latter - the difference, I guess, coming down to experience. we can think of it in programming terms: a small authoritative state and things that can be derived from that.

in my experience, at least some players have become a lot more considerate of the workload of GMing. far from trying to resist 'railroading', they will often generally deliberately try to steer themselves towards whatever location a DM has prepared as a courtesy; meanwhile the GM will be able to get a sense of where the players are planning to go so they can prep between sessions. however, that is contrary to the more 'sandboxy' approach where the core appeal is 'you can do pretty much anything', which is what Sandra is trying to generate I think.

I'm too much of an improv-focused GM to really become a partisan of 'blorb' - for me, discovering improv-oriented story games after D&D was as revelatory as discovering D&D after storygames was for Sandra lol. I trust somewhat in my ability to come up with weird interesting stuff on the fly and flesh it out later, and I tend to find the moment of being in the hotseat of an RPG gets the creative juices flowing like nothing else, so it's actually quite difficult to come up with anything good during prep.

however, I think there is a lot to be said for the value of making at least certain things concrete, and communicating that to the players, and Sandra makes a good case for showing your hand. it's a way to make the shared fantasy take on certain qualities it won't have if it remains purely arbitrary improv, even if the only real functional difference is when you make something up. both because it's hard to keep track of everything in your head without some kind of aid, and because the first idea you come up with will rarely be the richest, most interesting.

so next time i run a game, I'm not going to take such a zero-prep, all-improv approach, but try and work a bit harder on 'overall consistency'.

definitely a provocative blog to encounter...

[dungeonofthedragon]

Let's help our fellow creator! As a nice bonus, you'll nab some awesome stuff including Apocalypse World, 13th Age, Scion and Alice is Missing.

Meguey Baker was diagnosed with breast cancer in July 2022. She's been through her first round of surgery and radiation, and is readying herself now for round 2.

[theinstagrahame]

It's a bad day, and I've been dragging my heels on this. But, I got a bunch of neat new TTRPG stuff in October, so here's what landed in my mailbox.

Break!! - A few years ago, I stumbled on some art on Twitter. It was fun, it was vibrant, and it felt inviting. I wanted to know more, looked into the artist, and discovered it was spot art for an upcoming RPG called Break!! So, I kept an eye on it. The book is beautiful, well laid-out, and really cool, so maybe one good thing came from Twitter*.

The Electric State - Tales from the Loop and Things from the Flood have been pretty high on my "To Play" lists for years. A follow-up, set in a similar (or the same?) world was kind of an instant pickup. Not as interested in the movie, but the game seems pretty rad.

The Geologist's Primer - I picked up the Herbalist's Primer when it came out, and was really impressed with the quality and care that went into it, so when I saw "That but for rocks" was in the works, I was definitely already in. Also excited for the follow up "Mushrooms next time".

Starkhollow Hall - I accidentally fell into a Gothic Fiction kick over Spooky Month, so the timing of this was perfect. I don't know a ton about the GUMSHOE system, but I do feel like what I know about it makes it a perfect fit for the genre. Gothic heroines (and I guess heroes) are at their best when they know there's a dangerous mystery at the heart of what's happening around them, and go looking for it anyway.

Forsaken - Kyle Tam is, honestly, a designer to watch. I picked this up because it was part of an Afterthought Committee project, which is a team I've also really enjoyed work from (my game Water Landing is built off of their game Cast Away). Does a better job of establishing a sort of grimdark/Soulsbourne vibe than some stuff that explicitly tries to.

Iron Edda Reforged - The pitch for this caught me immediately: Cyberpunk Norse Mythology. Tracy Barnett is another Designer to Watch, and I really like all of their stuff--haven't played the original Iron Edda, but have heard it on Party of One and really dug it. Was really hyped to see this come into being.

Electrum Archive v2 - I went through a Weird Sci-Fi phase this year, and the original Electrum Archive was an early pick for it. I really loved the world, the way each class worked differently, and the magic/currency/MacGuffin that it used. Obviously I wanted more, because the second book is here.

Alice is Missing - Silent Falls - My friends and I have been talking about the prospect of another Alice is Missing game since playing the first one about two years ago. It was a really memorable experience, partly due to the game's really compelling design, and to some of the in-moment decisions we made (I played the facilitator character, who starts the game having returned after a long absence, and another player immediately got pissed at them for sorta abandoning the group. it created an interesting play dynamic for the whole session)

Kill Him Faster - I picked up a previous Kovidae Games book as a lark: a collection of exercise-based RPGs. I nearly ignored their other stuff, but this had a pretty compelling pitch: What if time-travel was invented mostly so people could speedrun murdering Hitler. Since Eat the Reich came out, I've thought a bit about Hitler Revenge Fantasy as a genre, and honestly, I'm kinda into it. He was a loser, and deserves to be reduced to a video game villain and killed over and over again; so, yeah. Let's kill him faster next time.

Splat (issue 5) - I'm not usually one for essays and interviews, but this is a zine featuring and by some folks I really like and respect, and this one is packed with thoughts about the state of the indie TTRPG scene and industry from a diverse and immensely talented group. It's honestly a must-read.

(Already getting a few things for the next edition, but also feeling too garbage after the Clusterfuck Election to think about doing anything else today...)

---

footnote: * Technically, two good things came from Twitter. I also once expressed sorrow that I'd missed out on a limited T-shirt from a web comic artist that said "Sorry, Glenn, the only Beck I listen to has two turntables and a microphone", and the creator saw it and had an extra in my size.

[nephriteknight]

Thoughts on Daggerheart!!

I'll admit I haven't really been following it until today, but after watching the videos released today I got very excited and ended up building a character and reading a lot of the book, as I am wont to do (might post about them later lol).

Now, full disclosure, I wouldn't say I'm all that familiar with the TTRPG space outside of D&D, so take my opinions with a grain of salt. That said, I've played D&D, Wanderhome, Alice is Missing, and the fan-made Hollow Knight TTRPG, and I've watched some AP of Kids on Bikes, Call of Cthulhu, Monsterhearts, and Candela Obscura, which is a longer list than I was expecting. Huh. Anyways, my thoughts!

I really like the duality dice! It's such an interesting way to do mixed success that incorporates story/character into mechanics, which is great.

Related to that, I also like Hope as a fluid resource, and I think that Fear is a nice way to both prompt GM action and to just create a fun sense of dread as the GM takes more tokens

The lack of turn order/action economy is... cool, and a really interesting idea, but my thoughts on this are complicated. As we're seeing in the oneshot right now, it really helps to keep combat as part of the story and give the players and GM room for creativity. (For example, Bunnie describing a counterstrike as part of her dodge, and being able to take it as soon as the GM's turn is over, as well as the tag team feature, which is very cool.) That said, I think this mechanic might not work so well with less experienced or less confident players, who might have trouble taking the initiative (heh) to act in combat (I know I certainly would if I wasn't playing with close friends). That's not really a criticism though -- this is a collaborative storytelling game, and part of playing it is making big moves and taking turns guiding the story. If that's not for you, then you might prefer a different system, which is fine! I think this mechanic has the potential to be really, really dope, but I also think it's the bit that has the most potential to go poorly in my eyes.

The art, design, and general aesthetic feel of this game are so unbelievably up my alley. I love it. That's all.

I'm excited to see that they're working on mechanics for playing disabled characters, but since they aren't out yet I can't really comment. (I did notice that the character in the bard art is in a wheelchair, which is dope.) Also, as others have noted, Daggerheart uses "heritage" and "ancestry" rather than "race", which is a small but good choice.

Personally, I also really like the choice to move away from precise measurements of distance and gold. This one is very much a personal preference, and I know some people will rightfully disagree, but I like it! As a DM, trying to determine the appropriate costs and rewards for things has always been a headache, and this seems much easier to manage; measuring distances with convenient and tangible measurements like the short side of a playing card or the length of a piece of paper also feels much easier to use.

The downtime mechanics are great! Each of the activities you can take prompts you to describe how you heal yourself or another, destress, repair armor, or prepare yourself for what's ahead, which really encourages quieter character moments both introspectively and with others. I'm a big fan of this. This combining of role play and mechanics is also present in other features, such as one of the major level 1 healing abilities, which is more effective if you spend the time it takes to cast learning something new about the person you're healing or sharing something about yourself.

I didn't look at this too closely because I was just making a character for fun and don't have a party to play with, but as part of character creation you're given questions about your relationships to your party members to answer. Wanderhome also has these, and they were MASSIVELY successful in creating depth and meaningful connections between players -- after our table's session zero I was already so invested in all our characters, and when we actually played them they really came to life. I haven't looked to closely at Daggerhearts version of this, but I'm very excited to see them.

The experience mechanic seems really fun and creative, and I especially like the idea of using a phrase rather than something specific. That said, when I played the Hollow Knight TTRPG, which also lets players create their own skills, the open endedness of it was more confusing than inspiring, and there was a lot of potential for a usefulness disparity between players. I do think Daggerheart explains it better, though, and limiting the use of experience with a Hope cost helps to counteract any choices that might be too broad, so hopefully it will work better

I probably have more thoughts, but it getting late and I have a headache, so that's all I'm saying for now :D

Overall, Daggerheart has combined a lot of things I've liked in other games with promising mechanics I haven't seen before, and I'm very excited to try it out. I'm now realizing that I just made a list of things I like without any negative feedback, which isn't what I wanted to do, but I'm not really sure what to criticize without having played it myself.

I'm most curious to see how the non-initiative mechanic works; it has the potential to be a really excellent solve for a major problem in D&D (plenty of people have talked about how initiative limits teamwork, can be boring when its not your turn, etc, so I won't get into it here), but I don't think it's a solution that will work for everyone. Of course, games can't work for everyone, and shouldn't try to. It's working really well on CR's oneshot as I write this, but making choices and sharing spotlight in TTRPGs is literally their job, so I'm not surprised this works for them. I could see this going really well with some tables I've played with, and really poorly with others. I'm still really optimistic, though; it seems like the kind of thing that with the right table could be really excellent.