At Some Point In Time, A Man Used A Deer Antler To Knock Walnuts Out Of A Tree.

At some point in time, a man used a deer antler to knock walnuts out of a tree.

That time was 2024. That man was me. I am the weirdo in the park.

I also don't pay corporations for walnuts. It's all about perspective.

I'm bored of elemental giants. Use environmental giants instead.

Environmental Giants all start out the same, but their bodies take up the features of the place they live in. They become a reflection of their domain.

Giant takes up residence in the cliffs of dover? Not a stone giant. No, that's specifically The Giant of Dover. Its body is made of chalk. It can create dust clouds of chalk with its breath, its shoulders are padded with tufts of short grasses and blackberry bushes.

Giant takes up residence in the ruins of a highway during an apocalypse? That's the I-95 Giant. It has rebar spines along its back, skin of pavement and concrete, and wears wrecked cars as armor.

And to make this idea more dynamic, the giant's form changes as the ecosystem changes. A river gets diverted away from a Giant's domain? Then the Giant dries up along with its land. Now the Giant has an incentive to protect its dominion, and a weakness that its enemies can exploit.

Played the board game Arcs for the first time yesterday! There are a lot of good things to say about this game's design. The turns are snappy, the trick-taking action system is genius, and declaring/scoring ambitions makes you think long and hard on the hand of cards you're given. But I wanted to draw attention to one specific design choice that likely went unnoticed by many, but is invaluable in my eyes.

The design choice in question is the way which HP is tracked on buildings and units! For those of you who have never played a war game before, HP can be a pain to track for individual units, and Arc's entire design philosophy is to deliver the war game experience while minimizing the busywork. And when you have up to a dozen individual pieces on the board per-faction, that can become a real problem.

How Arcs solves this is to use the geometry of the game pieces. Every ship can either be upright (2 HP), on its side (1 HP), or removed from the board (0 HP).

Likewise, every building token is double sided, having both "healthy" and "damaged" sides which you can flip over when taking damage. This also simplifies the math in the game to mere counting. No need to use a calculator here!

Choices like this, while not particularly impactful with how players interact with the rules of the game, are vital to how players interact with the experience of the game.

Simply put, when making a game, keep in mind the physical space your players will be playing in. It might alert you to some problems, and if you're wise, might even offer you some solutions!

One of the strangest things about writing a TTRPG in the Horror genre is that many of the typical trappings of TTRPG design get flipped on their head. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that you're not writing to fulfill a power fantasy.

I've run into this phenomenon a few times while working on my wild west horror rpg. Here are two of the most relevant incidents:

1. Started the game with traditional Classes. Switched to a table of flawed character Traits. Turns out, giving the Characters flaws was way more interesting than giving them skills and abilities. Instead of answering the question "How does this character solve problems?" it's more entertaining to answer the question "How does this character create problems?". So I've opted to let the Players themselves answer the former question, but only give tools for the Players to expand upon the latter question.

2. Up until recently, the Players could harness the magic of the setting whenever they wanted, as long as they sacrificed something for it. While the sacrifice concept does narratively fit into the rest of my game, I've found that Players having unregulated access to magic meant that Players could reasonably "chop-finger-off-ex-machina" anything the GM throws at them. I want the Horror of a session to have some staying power, and it'd be best if the Players interacted with a specific narrative thread to harm a Horror instead of having a catch-all rule for interacting with the setting's magic.

I'm just about level 100 in Elden Ring and my favorite quest line BY FAR has been Ranni the Witch and Starscourge Radhan.

My jaw dropped the first time I wandered down into Siofra River and saw the starry night beneath the earth. My jaw dropped twofold when I was told how those stars got there.

A lot of fantasy games should take notes on this kind of worldbuilding. Too often I find that settings (my own included) are unwilling to do things as outlandish as "arresting the stars and imprisoning them underground" because the writer is worried that such a concept won't be taken seriously by Players. Perhaps this is because said writer is concerned that it will ruin the suspension of disbelief for Players, as it directly contradicts the cosmology of our own world.

But brother this is FANTASY, let your cosmology go wild and let your Players get elbow deep in that cosmology in turn. Freeing the stars from Radhan's grasp and watching that crater to Nokron appear on the map has been one of the coolest things in the first 100 levels of Elden Ring.

TTRPG where instead of levelling up to get new abilities you can just yell and new abilities appear on your character sheet.

Will they be good abilities? Not always. But they will certainly be new abilities.