The Gaming Den

Letters can be an archaic term for academic learning generally, or more specifically for keeping up with the oldtimey equivalents of social sciences and The Discourse.

Wanted more Adam Scott in my life so I watched his Netflix movie "Little Evil." I'm not gonna say it was a great movie, but I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected to.

I don't understand how to interpret your suggestion that RPGs have a separate "physics engine" and "UI" in a way that makes sense here. How is it meaningful to say that you're running a world on 3.5 "behind the screen" while the players are playing Risus?

Is there are accepted phrase for the opposite of "rules-light"? Is rules-light still considered a useful or meaningful phrase? To me, the hallmarks of typical rules-light are a universal resolution mechanic you can plug various skills or traits into, coupled with the absence of game struct...

I'm hoping to post a review of Blades in the Dark soon. It's a solid hack candidate and the market isn't saturated yet.

you seem to be implying a kind of underlying scale of embedded-unembedded play . . . and again, these variables can relate, but not in particularly predictable ways. . . . to flatten this into a typology of embedded-unembedded misses a lot of the nuances of what's going on in a situation like this,...

I would recommend in any future posts or restructuring that you begin with a statement of what I as a Player, DM, or game designer am supposed to do with any of this. Good idea. Let's try "Thesis: Most people who are tinkering with 3rd-edition-style heartbreakers would be better off if they st...

He didn't invite me to place my criticisms of his other thread here. I intended to; I guess I should've done so more explicitly. That was what I was getting at when I said that I thought we might get into a long back-and-forth. You tell me how I should respond to "Hey I'm looking for validatio...

So far the most important takeaway lesson for me here has been PL's recommendation that I embrace humility. I made a token effort in that direction, but I should have been way more explicit at the beginning that I was basically at the "thinking out loud" stage of development and that a lar...

There are a lot of existing “high context” games and playstyles. My favorite RPG is Blades in the Dark, which is ultra-high-context by default, but people are doing this in D&D too. The Intrigue and “Wilderness” campaign structures from Chamomile's DM guide both introduce plenty of context. Game...

Dungeons & Dragons is the ultimate “big tent” game. Because D&D has more players than anyone else, they have to try to appeal to more players than anyone else. I don't think it makes sense for an independent designer to try to fight them on that battlefield. D&D can be played a million d...

You've really hated on You talked a bunch about liking My thread, really, really is not a list of likes and dislikes. There is a definite upper limit to how much context a game can even afford to deal with. You are probably going to want to skip some types of context to make room for the ones that ...

Rhetorical Devices vs. actual models. Sometimes when I'm looking for an expedient way to explain something I end up doing something that looks like I'm proposing a model but really shouldn't be taken all that seriously. Now you've tried to wedge two styles of game play that are not actually related...

@PhoneLobster, Upon reflection, I have decided that it is worthwhile for me to respond to some of the objections you've raised in the "context" thread, but for several reasons I've decided that I'd rather do it here than there. [*]I think there's a good chance that any back-and-forth betwe...

Leveling Up There are basically three things that can happen when you level up: [*]You unlock access to new content (+Scope)[*]You unlock new ways to interact with old content (+Permanence)[*]You bypass, erase, or obsolete old content (-Scope, -Permanence) Depending on how hard you pressed each of ...

After going back and rereading Orion's posts with "high/low context" in place of "embedding"... at least things finally make sense now. Up until now I've barely understood what the fuck anyone is rambling about. I still don't really get it, though... don't the vast majority of p...

I think my root question is: how do you design embedded campaigns if you plan for players' capabilities to grow in scope drastically? It depends on whether your players are builders or solvers. Uh, let me back up a bit. Scope vs. Permanence: Solvers and Builders Okay so the role of context in a giv...

Quick hits posting from phone. I should've titled this "high context gaming and low context gaming" instead of "embedding." I have been using "embedded" to mean "context dependent and/or context altering." I have used "fully embedded in an unprincipled in...

Okay, so, toy model here, but let's imagine a "small sandbox" game where the party repeatedly gets to choose which of two adventures they want to do. If was assume for the moment that the adventures themselves are linear railroads then for our thought experiment, the "game history&quo...

Have some more cryptic bullet points. I'll try to unpack them for y'all later. [*]It might look like I've just slapped an arbitrary label on a bunch of unrelated concepts and that all these types of "embedding" have nothing to do with each other.[*]However, it turns out that there are deep...

Interactions : The key questions this time are “will anything from outside this module affect the players while they run through it?” “does this module project force or advance an agenda?” and “will anything from this module turn up again later?” Our example scenarios will be “dungeon on a desert i...

Rewards: Our example scenarios this time will be “iron mine overrun with giant spiders” and “elf prince kidnapped by cultists.” There might occasionally be extra or unusual rewards “unlocked” by some contextual interaction, but for the most part the rewards of a module are usually baked in. The mai...

The other day I was on an RPG discord and I started talking about “embedding,” which is the name I've assigned to a certain axis along which I like to classify different RPG playstyles. People asked me some questions about it and eventually suggested that I should write it up for my blog. I haven't ...

I've recently accepted that 5th edition is here to stay and it the edition I'm most likely to be playing in the foreseeable future, so I've been hoping we would start seeing some 5e content on the Den. Thank you for your contribution. This class has a lot going for it in the flavor department. I hav...

Covenant himself actually screwed up the Ward sequence in The Illearth War, second book of the first trilogy. Also, I'm shocked that that was more memorable than the color-coded magic dog creatures that amplified their spellcasting by assembling in wedge formations.