Gaming

My rough plan for Dungeon23 is to write one borough of Bastion per week, as follows: Monday: Basic map of transit lines Tuesday: Points of Interest named and described Wednesday: Complications written Thursday: Three to five One to three factions outlined Friday: Three to five One to three NPCs outlined Saturday: Encounter table Sunday: A Treasure Update: three to five NPCs and factions was optimistic. One to three is better. I will capture the day’s work on Mastodon, hash tagged #Dungeon23 and #Bastion23. The completed borough makes a Sunday blog post, which are also tagged as #Bastion23. ...

I’ve been thinking about Delta Green in relation to copaganda for a long time. That is a different blog post, because it’s a long topic, but recently I started wondering about collective action in the Delta Green world. As a practical matter, I believe that mutual aid is a better environment for mental health than any police force. What would that mean in relationship to the Cthulhu Mythos? Let’s start with the existing rules for using Bonds. ...

New text AI! Let’s try it on some tabletop RPG work. Bold is my prompts; I’ve snipped the polite banter out of most of the AI’s answers. Spoiler: this is way better than the last one I tried. If I repeat the same prompt it gets a little repetitive, but still not bad.

I got access to Lex, one of those AI writing assistants, so I tried to do the inevitable. Bold text is mine. I’m not sure this is entirely useful.

I made a thing! I have been on a minor roll with python recently and this seemed like a fun project so I started working on it. Towards the end I reached out to the awesome person who inspired me, since she didn’t seem to have been keeping her tracker up to date, and she said I should go ahead and launch mine. So here we are. I used this as an excuse to try out new technology and libraries. Click and Cloup made the list; the first because I wanted to try out new argument parsers and the second because I needed option groups. This forced me to learn to use setuptools better, which was a win. I am gonna keep using this tech going forward. ...

Or: ”A Lyric Scenario for The Yellow King RPG” Gather no more than three people. Watch Last Year in Marienbad together in silence. Select characters from those depicted in the movie. Discuss your motivations, remaining in character. It is unnecessary to agree on the facts of the fiction. If there is disagreement on motivations, play Nim to resolve them. “It’s a stupid game.” “There’s a trick.” “Just take an odd number.” “There must be rules.” ...

I’m playing Magic: the Gathering Arena right now. I went through a few approaches while figuring out how to make it fun for me. I wanted to satisfy my competitive urge, spend as little money as possible, and not get overwhelmed with the complexity of deck-building. Here’s what I came up with.

I watched The Firemen’s Ball recently and enjoyed it quite a bit. The way Forman extracts humor from the banality really struck me. It also reminded me of the Electric Bastionland mini-campaign I’ve been chewing on. I mean, tell me this isn’t a Bastion Council at work. You could just run the whole movie as a background thread while other things are going on. “Ah, no, Monsieur Bagatelle can’t speak right now, he’s at the Firemen’s Ball.” “Well, I’m willing to do you that favor, but you need to make sure my daughter wins the beauty pageant.” “Huh, when did that building burn down?” But it also intersects nicely with the Piertown Borough ideas I’ve been toying with. Don’t read after the cut if you’re playing in my mini-campaign. By which I mean if you want to play in this, drop me a comment, I have two slots I need to fill.

This post was prompted by a recent Rob Donoghue tweet (original). To save you a click, he’s arguing that most RPGs have bad endgames: there’s no set process for what happens at the end of a game. I recently finished up a Lady Blackbird game, and yep, there’s nothing explaining how to finish up the game. I mean, sure, the PCs achieve their goals probably, and perhaps those goals have changed over time, but. Look at it this way: Lady Blackbird explains exactly how to start a game, with situational advice and a solid reason to act. Nothing much on endings. ...

Finished up that Lady Blackbird campaign I mentioned earlier, which was a blast. I might actually be about done with feeling like I’m a mediocre GM – still had the same tension I always have right before a session, but we got through this one with zero delays on account of my stress levels, which is pretty good for me and I feel great about where our improvisation led us. More to the point, I’m completely sold on Miro. I’d been thinking I needed to do a ton of work to make a Miro board useful, and that I’d need to be messing around with it a lot during play. This is in fact untrue. I just set up an image board for NPCs and dropped a couple of reference images in it (one map, one picture of The Owl), and that was immediately helpful. Later on, I added a couple of rules references. Again, useful immediately without any serious work needed on my part. ...