This post was originally sent to my email subscribers on October 1, 2024. It is being reposted here to create a more easily searchable archive.

Hello, my owl friends! It is October now, and this is always my favorite time of year. I love fall and spring – summer is too hot, winter is too cold, I need my in-betweens. I celebrated my 31st birthday this week, and I’ve never been one to make much of a fuss about birthdays, but between my birthday and a lasting “back-to-school” sensation, September always feels much more like a “new year” to me than January.

As promised, the second One Night Last Chance game is out today – Thrill of the Chase! This game uses the confined location and time constraints of the original game to simulate a daring casino heist. I’m so excited to have this second game out there, because I think having multiple examples of what the underlying system can do is maybe going to help others see what it might be able to do in their own hands! And also I just love a good heist story, it’s one of my favorites, and I’m pretty proud of coming up with a new mechanical take on it, because there’s lots of great heist games out there! Check it out now on itchio or DTRPG!

Project Updates

Dollhouse Drama

Last month, I mentioned that I had done basic layout and ordered a print proof for Dollhouse Drama, and that did indeed arrive this month! Something about being able to hold my game in my hands really makes it real in a way that I’ve never been able to capture just with PDFs. I do have some adjustments to make (there’s somehow always typos you don’t see until it’s in print), but overall I’m really happy with it, and the progress I’m making towards having the game ready for release in January.

Before the Season Ends and The Diplomacy of Queens

I actually went through a little cycle of doubt with both of these games this month, as I’ve been getting them ready for their upcoming playtests. Before the Season Ends is pretty much there now, I don’t think I need to make too many more changes to it at this point – I only have the bare outline of the session I’m going to run as a playtest, but I don’t really need much more than that for this particular genre. What I ran into some uncertainty about is how to manage a large cast of NPCs in this game.

It’s one of those things that’s a prerequisite of the genre – a large cast of secondary characters, who all may have different (and evolving!) relationships with the main characters. You can’t have a Regency romance without it. But creating and tracking those side characters and their relationships is not always easy, so it sometimes feels like threading a needle to provide enough scaffolding, but not too much.

Meanwhile, the wall I ran into with The Diplomacy of Queens was more related to the in-game currencies of debts, favors, and sway – it’s a political game, so it’s important to me to strike the right balance here. You’ll have to manage your allegiances to others, their allegiance to you, your standing in the public eye, how much influence you can exert without overstepping your bounds, and these things are all numerically represented, which is a different design path for me. Let’s be honest, a lot of my existing design does not do much with numerical mechanics.

Ultimately, the only way through is the playtesting itself, so it’s just a matter of making sure these are ready to go, and not driving myself nutty making small adjustments over and over for no reason.

Collegiate Gothic and Leaving Avalon

Given the previous note, I’ve been trying to divert more of my design energies back into other projects, and letting BTSE and DOQ rest until Metatopia. Collegiate Gothic is a game I started a while back and always seem to get the urge to revisit in the fall – maybe that back to school feeling I mentioned before. It’s a game inspired by the whole dark academia aesthetic, and The Secret History and that whole jam. There’s actually a lot of games that already kind of tackle dark academia, but they’re all (as far as I’ve seen) games that also include magical or supernatural elements. Much like most books that position themselves as successors to The Secret History are also introducing magical/supernatural elements, honestly. I don’t want to do that; this is a grounded mundane game, no magic, no monsters. It’s a little noir and a little crime and a lot of interpersonal mess between the characters.

Leaving Avalon, meanwhile, is a new project that I just started this month after having the idea and realizing it would – for once – be a pretty quick project to turn around. It’s a For the Queen hack – so a small game, based on an existing framework – based on the idea of Susan Pevensie. If you’re familiar with Narnia, you may already be familiar with what we call the problem of Susan (that she grew up and became interested in traditionally feminine things like lipstick and thus lost her access to Narnia, the children’s magical kingdom refuge).

So the whole gist is that you’re playing legally distinct Pevensies, who were the saviors of a magical realm as children, but now are faced with the question: do you hold onto those memories as you grow up in the real world, or do you let them go? Do you open the door to that magical world again, or do you embrace your role in reality? It’s straightforward, but I think there’s a really nice emotional core to it, and I’m really happy with it.

Further Thoughts

Language Skills Model as RPG Skills Model

One thing we talk about sometimes, though maybe not as much as I would like or in the way I would like, is the idea of player skill in RPGs. Not just system mastery or the ability to improvise, but something a bit more unique to RPGs as well as more encompassing of all of the different skills that players can (and should try to) bring to the table. 

If you don’t know, my educational background is in linguistics. I never really nailed down my path there before I left, but I was always fascinated by the process of how we learn language, and how we evaluate that. If you’ve ever studied a language as an adult and wondered how that was tested, you may have run into an evaluation diagram like this:

There’s four skills you might be evaluated on: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Those are categorized in two ways: skills related to the written word vs the spoken word, and receptive skills vs productive skills. A comprehensive language education involves all four. Most generally, receptive skills come first (it’s usually easier to recognize a word and know what it means than to produce that word independently), and speech is generally understood to develop before writing, at least in children learning their first language (it varies in adults).

So, this is the model that I tend to approach the idea of “RPG skills” from, and I particularly find two things useful here. The first is the idea that there are receptive skills, and that recognizing, reacting, and understanding are skills in and of themselves, distinct from active production. The second is that there’s part of it that’s innate to how the brain develops as a child (do NOT get me started on the experiments linguists have done to see how speech develops outside of normal childhood conditions), and a part that tends to come a bit later, has more rules and complexities, and needs to be more formally taught. With that in mind, you might create a diagram like this:

Now, this is not to say that mechanics and roleplay are entirely distinct within the sphere of “play”, because they aren’t – but speech and writing aren’t entirely independent of each other either (this is why phonics works). They absolutely overlap and influence each other. But I’ll get into a little bit of what I mean when I note each of these categories of skill that we might look at.

Understanding the Rules: If you read a game text or have it explained to you, you’re able to use the basic game mechanics (ie, I roll these dice, I track these points, I spend these tokens). An extreme case of “understanding the rules” is what we tend to call “system mastery” in RPGs, but I don’t think “understanding the rules” requires any memorization on a basic level. Lots of games have player aids and I don’t think using those means you don’t understand the rules. I think it mostly entails the ability to understand the back-and-forth relationship of mechanics to narrative (ie, my character casts this spell, so I roll these dice. The dice come back as this number, so my character is hurt, etc.).

Intentional Manipulation of Rules: Game design itself falls into this quadrant, but so does any situation where you might see a narrative outcome you want and understand how to use the mechanics to get there. In my initial notes, I also wrote down “repairing/bridging” in this quadrant, where there may be gaps in what the narrative calls for and what the rules say, and being able to bridge that gap is here as well, as is being able to “fix” rules that “break” in given situations. 

Reacting to Story Elements: In a previous newsletter, I had noted a tendency of reactive players, who mostly sit back and let other players entertain them – this is the only skill they’ve mastered. This is the ability to “read the scene”, to understand what other participants in the game are doing, to pick up on the emotional tone of their roleplay (whether that’s comedy, tragedy, melodrama, etc.) or to see what narrative beats they’re setting up. In my experience, this comes first as a skill, but it IS still a skill I think, given how often we see table misunderstandings in this area.

Generating Story Elements: And then this is the active roleplay element, where you are speaking as your character, imagining things for them to do, and creating narrative elements for other participants to react to. You are moving the story forward or at least making things happen in the narrative layer of the game. A higher level of skill in this area might include events logically following from each other, or keeping things to a particular tone or genre.

This is all a very loose theory, and it’s entirely possible that I’m not cooking at all, but I found this kind of interesting to model out, and I’m going to keep poking at it! 

The PMG Video About Wargaming

People Make Games released a big video earlier this month about wargaming and it made something of a splash. I really hate sounding like a know-it-all or a hipster or both, but I was a little surprised at how surprised other people were at some of the information within, like simple things, like the origins of wargaming (IT’S CALLED WARGAMING) as an emulator of real battles, or the relationship of the ROOT board game to the GMT Counter-Insurgency game series. I thought that was all pretty common knowledge, so I guess on that level, I’m glad that’s out there!

As for some of the other conclusions in the video, I don’t know – as much as I admire the idea of keeping “our” games out of the hands of those who’d use them to train real government groups in war simulations, I can’t imagine how that’s possible on a practical level. All I can say – and this goes more for RPGs than it does for board games, because the empathic element of RPGs is that much more important – is to emphasize the importance of making anti-war games if that’s an important ethos to you. It is to me, which is why I keep pointing out the US military dropping leftover bombs from WWI on the strikers in The Price of Coal, as I’ve mentioned previously. 

A lot of my designs have moved away from having combat mechanics at all, and for most of them, it’s not even thematically relevant. For ones where it is, like Blood of the Covenant, it is only shown as a terrible thing for you to inflict as a wielder of exceptional power. This is not to say that everyone needs to stop including combat or fighting or war in their games altogether, or that we shouldn’t make games about those things, but that I was kind of grossed out to see how few of my peers had ever actually thought about it at all. That’s really my main point here, that I was disappointed that people I admire seemed to have barely even thought about the political implications of their art in the real world, and that makes me sad.

Games I’m Into

Hearts of Wulin

I actually played Hearts of Wulin a few years before its release, at a convention in 2019, and I had very fond memories of the game, but I actually came back to the book recently for inspiration on two points. The first is the way the game, which is Powered by the Apocalypse, updates the standard relationships you see in a lot of these games into entanglements. A normal PbtA relationship might be like “[character name] is my best friend and I’d trust them with my life.” HoW restructures entanglements to include two characters, one of whom is complicating your relationship with the other. So an example HoW entanglement might be more like “[character A] is my best friend, but she doesn’t trust [character B] and won’t tell me why.” And I just think that’s so juicy and dynamic – it wouldn’t work for every game (nothing does!) but it certainly works for what I like to do.

The second is that the game gives a specific instruction, just for maintaining the vibe and tone of the game, for your characters to speak obliquely around their true meaning. For one thing, I love just giving clear instructions as to how to speak in a roleplay situation. For another, I think that kind of “let’s speak in veiled metaphors to get around the difficulty of this conversation” is something that should come up more in games overall, and I love doing it. I’m sick of characters speaking in modern therapy-speak; let’s have an extended metaphor about boats, and I’m SO serious about that.

Checking out D&D 5.5e

With the release of the new players handbook, my Tuesday group has decided to check out the new D&D edition (I cannot believe they’re going with “5th edition (2024 version)” as the official name of it, by the way. I refuse to call it that). People keep telling me about various differences between the old and new editions, which is all very nice for them, but I can’t imagine caring about the minor mechanical points of difference in a Dungeons and Dragons product anymore. It’s still D&D! It does the same thing as it always does and has always done and will always do!

If you couldn’t tell, I was pretty disinterested in playing D&D anymore, not out of any real dislike for it, but just because I’ve been playing it for more than half my life and I feel like I’ve gotten everything out of it that I could ever want. There’s nothing interesting in it for me anymore, when I have a pile of unique, different games doing truly novel things that D&D can’t or won’t do. There’s no juice left in this orange, and I don’t want to spend my limited gaming time chewing on a dry old orange peel, you know? But my friends love it, and I love my friends, so here we are.

My general condition for playing it again was that I would not have to buy the books, because one thing I am not going to do is give Wizards of the Coast any more of my money than they already have. I used the free basic rules to make my character, we’ll play a short campaign to give people a taste for what’s new and different, and then my hope is to move on to something else again. And in the meantime, I’m playing a halfling rogue who ran away from home to join the circus, as you do.

Closing Notes

Iliad and Odyssey

I recently read the Emily Wilson translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, and I generally had a pretty interesting go with it. I did not know previously, for example, that most of the “iconic” things we know about the Trojan War (the abduction of Helen, the Trojan Horse, etc.) aren’t actually IN the Iliad. Or that most of the iconic episodes of the Odyssey (the Cyclopes, Scylla and Charybdis, etc) are glossed over pretty quickly in the middle four chapters, and a vast majority of the Odyssey is about Telemachus, and the killing of the suitors.

I also really quickly noticed how the Iliad is a very male story, while the Odyssey is a surprisingly female one. I started digging around on this, and I found a really interesting theory that the Odyssey as we know it is not – mostly – written by Homer, but that the version that’s survived was edited and added to by a female author about a hundred years later, now lost to the ages. There’s no real evidence for this, but it’s one of those things that feels emotionally compelling, even if it isn’t intellectually so. An interesting thing to ponder!

Megalopolis

Of course, the movie everyone is talking about – you KNOW I was there opening night. I loved it, but I also fully understand why people wouldn’t. It’s a big swing! It’s doing something different! And people don’t always like art that’s doing something different! And of course, at the end of the day, it’s very much a “late period” movie – the most obvious thing about it is that it is made by an old man who is acutely aware that he is running out of time. I was actually really touched by it, but I think you have to be open to being touched by a movie like that. 

Anyway, it’s one of those movies that I hesitate to recommend, just because I don’t want to hear people’s bad takes about it. Like, go see it, but don’t come back and be wrong about it at me. I hope someday I’ll be 85 years old and at the height of my creative power, and I’ll make some absolutely ridiculous passion project that turns out to be wildly divisive. I want that to be my legacy too.

That’s all for this month, folks! Don’t forget to check out Thrill of the Chase!