jburneko

[jburneko]

Haunted: The Zine Was Too Lean

So, after my epiphany put my publishing plans for Haunted on hold, something else changed my ideas about RPG texts and publishing. Ron Edwards started releasing his old games and new in an intriguing new form factor. They all featured identical cover design which was little more than a single bit of iconography and title information. The text was cut down to absolute minimal instruction with little to no examples and close to zero art. I found this "plain wrap" presentation incredibly compelling.

It basically destroyed the notion of a game as a "product." Its only value was in its raw utility. You either engaged the game (by playing it) or you get nothing out of it. It isn't pretty. It isn't fun to read. You can't imagine what play must be like. Engage or die. This was a hot concept to me.

I wanted to know what Haunted looked like in this format. So in 2023 I wrote a slim 13 page version of Haunted and took a few of them to Big Bad Con that year. I sold them for $5.00. I didn't sell many and I still have a few copies. I've been slipping them into the remaining physical copies of Unchained Mysteries as I sell off that stock. I will probably start doing that will Love Songs of the Death Goddess as well.

This version had a few untested ideas in it that followed from the removal of Needs and the addition of Disposition. It didn't bother me that they were untested because (a) I knew they would be "fine" even if they needed refinement and (b) this was clearly labeled as an "ashcan" version. No one thought they were getting a finalized game.

In mid-2024 I managed to pull together a group to play Haunted under some novel conditions. First, it was the first time I had setup a game explicitly to play it over more than one session. Second, it ended up being the first time I had ever played the murderer myself. Third, I was going to see Disposition in action.

It went great! As the murderer, I ended up successfully framing my brother for murdering our father. Unfortunately, I had a change of heart but was unable to convince law enforcement and ended up being committed for "falsely" confessing. The experience did give me some insights into why the murderer players feel trapped, although they didn't end up impacting the design.

What I did observe in that play session was that the dice weren't quite behaving as expected. Some of the more recent changes to how the core mechanic worked exposed an issue that previous iteration of the design had obscured. So, in my next post I'll get into the math.

Haunted will be released by Halloween 2025. There will be a short Kickstarter prior to that which you can follow here to be notified when it launches: Haunted on Kickstarter

[jburneko]

I, no joke, met someone who believed this unironically. To be fair, I don’t think he thought it was unethical but he legit did not see the point in fiction. He would straight up say, “I don’t know why you would want to read untrue things.” Admittedly, we were like 20 at the time so maybe he’s come around in the passing decades.

i think fiction should be abolished. if yo uwrite about a character dying you should be put on trial in real life for murder

[jburneko]

This is incredibly critical, and I wish more people understood this. The only thing an "official license" buys you is rights to a logo. It's pure marketing.

Hi there again!

Is Dungeon Bitches part of a Third Party License or similar? I imagine not due to nothing stating as such, but I wanted to check nonetheless as there isn’t a legal text on itch, DTRPG, or in the PDF I have.

I’d love to contribute content to this as I love the game’s inspirations, themes, and am delving into the dungeon of my own queer identity :3

Entirely understandable if not, however 🫡

P.S.: hate itch’s new NSFW guidelines; the page is already doing age verification guh

Short, practical answer: the game text is Creative Commons. This is stated in the credits page.

Now I will commence my impassioned rankt.

Even if this wasn't the case, you would not need my permission to use dungeon bitches in your own work.

if you were making (eg) modules/settings/expansions for the game, then stating that your product is compatible with somebody else's is legally protected (iirc this principle was first established for third party car parts). It is legal to produce - say - third party modules for Dungeons & Dragons without using any of their licenses. You can't attempt to pass yourself off as official when you do this, but you don't need a license to publish third party works.

further, it is widely understood that game mechanics are not copyrightable. Reproducing a mechanic from another game is entirely legal, without permission or a license, and without credit. So long as you do not either directly copy the text verbatim or use their IP, you can repurpose whichever mechanics you want.

You violate IP law if you imitate the trade dress (ie distinctive logos, fonts, etc) of the source game, or if you use their original IP (eg original characters and specific fiction). If you write a third party rpg book that uses the official dnd logo, or mentions Elminster, you're violating their IP; this is illegal. However, not everything in DnD is original IP; elements like wizards, goblins etc are not, and neither are the specific mechanics to represent them.

What a license like the OGL etc gives you is the ability to use the trade dress (logos, fonts, etc) of official products, and to use their IP (elminster, faerun, vecna, etc). If you don't wan't to use the Hasbro Font and talk about Vecna, then you can publish as much (say) DnD stuff as you want, and indeed people did - for years - before the OGL.

It is polite to credit your inspirations, and helpful to people studying the medium. It is not however necessary. Some of my work has taken very obvious inspiration from the work of absolutely reprihensible people (who will continue to remain nameless) and I made a conscious choice not to credit their inspiration because they do not deserve that courtesy in my view.

And now we go from stating facts to oppinions. When I first got into design, this was all common knowledge. There was - particularly in OSR circles - an understanding that everything was intercompatible, and we would borrow and adapt mechanics and ideas from each other liberally, and this was a good thing. It made the scene creatively fertile. It was polite to shout out your inspirations, but nobody was under the impression that it was an obligation.

Over recent years, however, the dominance of the third-party-dnd-ogl-o-sphere, and other games producing similar licenses for third party products, has led people to think that this is necessary. By visibly errecting a knee-high fence, publishers have people thinking that they are not allowed to cross it.

This upsets me. You do not need a license to make third party products. You never needed a license to make third party products.

The rush of so many publishers now to create a license, generously giving permissions and attatching conditions for a use that was already permitted, strikes me as parasitic and scummy. Even when done by various designers that I otherwise respect. That this rush has resulted in many people thinking they need these licenses to operate at all makes them (pardon the channer language) frustratingly cucked by copyright.

I resent that so many successful indie publishers immediately proceed to make a custom third-party license for their game like some sort of petty landlord, taking a six-inche fence to enclose a commons everybody already had access to and hoping people will go along with it.

It's landlord shit and it increases the stranglehold that the 'IP' model of creativity has over our collective imaginations.

Everything I make is freely released for people to adapt how they see fit, and it always will be, because I personally an anti-copyright extremist. (I use Creative Commons licenses in many of my works to make this as unambigious as possible, however this is imperfect, as the current CC licenses still impose some restrictions that I disaprove of: I want my stuff entirely in the public domain, but a legal framework to do this doesn't really exist).

I am not going to create a license for my works, nor should I; I actively encourage you to shamelessly plagiarise me.

[jburneko]

I didn’t say it was effortless. I said it wasn’t particularly difficult. Bowling isn’t effortless. Poker isn’t effortless. No activity worth doing is effortless. The whole point of anything is the effort.

I didn’t use modules. I just daydreamed about some dangerous place, sketched a map, and then populated it with threats. Did that take some time? Yes. Did it take a lot of time? No. More time than other games in my collection? Probably. But that’s the nature of any hobby. You make time for it or you don’t. My wife plays tournament Bridge twice a week and practices for two hours on Saturday.

So yeah, I did things on my side of the screen. Mostly describing things and playing monsters and NPCs. It’s a pretty straightforward activity.

I have to admit, I'm a bit new to tumblr but reading between the lines of a few posts, I've been getting the impression that it's common for D&D players to think that they don't have to know the rules of their own game? I ran D&D5e for almost a decade across three long form campaigns. Half the time I didn't know what level the PCs were. There were a few I didn't even know what class they were. They would tell me what they were doing and what effect it had. I only double checked them when I didn't quite get what they were saying and I wanted to read it myself. But otherwise they could have been lying to me about what their spells and abilities did (they weren't, but they could have). That's why I don't understand why people talk about how hard it is to DM D&D. Like, I drew some maps and daydreamed some encounters on to it. The "Core" rules (basic movement, attacks of opportunity, how spell casting works, etc) are pretty simple and easy to remember. The "details" are all in the classes and stuff and the players can manage all that on their own. And of course, I can read my own monster abilities on an "as needed" basis. But yeah.... like.... if you're expecting the DM to know all your spells and abilities and how they work.... god, no. Just... no.

[jburneko]

I have to admit, I'm a bit new to tumblr but reading between the lines of a few posts, I've been getting the impression that it's common for D&D players to think that they don't have to know the rules of their own game? I ran D&D5e for almost a decade across three long form campaigns. Half the time I didn't know what level the PCs were. There were a few I didn't even know what class they were. They would tell me what they were doing and what effect it had. I only double checked them when I didn't quite get what they were saying and I wanted to read it myself. But otherwise they could have been lying to me about what their spells and abilities did (they weren't, but they could have). That's why I don't understand why people talk about how hard it is to DM D&D. Like, I drew some maps and daydreamed some encounters on to it. The "Core" rules (basic movement, attacks of opportunity, how spell casting works, etc) are pretty simple and easy to remember. The "details" are all in the classes and stuff and the players can manage all that on their own. And of course, I can read my own monster abilities on an "as needed" basis. But yeah.... like.... if you're expecting the DM to know all your spells and abilities and how they work.... god, no. Just... no.

[jburneko]

The purpose of the original Heartbreaker essays was not to denigrate them but to mourn them. The point was that they were incredibly heartfelt passion projects that then got ground to bits by economic realities. Content that was there "because you need it to sell and RPG" and disastrous decisions like mortgaging your house for 20,000 copy print run that was just going to get mulched to avoid taxes at the end of the year. The author of those essays encourages people to play them to this very day. See: The Whole Heartbreaker Category At Adept Play. He even tried to encourage people to dust off their own heartbreaks with what he called "The Heartbreaker Redemption Project" of which Circle of Hands was his own contribution (developed from his older 'Grey Magic') The good news is that the realities of e-commerce have basically eliminated the "heartbreaking" part of these games. You can scribble your own weird fantasy game from whatever inspiration you like (even D&D!) and put it out there without forming an LLC, maxing out your credit cards and taking out a second mortgage. You can follow your bliss without oblivion, obscurity and economic ruin coming to devour you. So, yes, go make a "heartbreaker".

One idea from the Fantasy Heartbreaker articles that really resonates with me is that people should make fantasy heartbreakers. While the original author wasn't really coming from this kind of place I think it is a worthy exercise to kind of go "okay, how can I do the dungeon-crawling fantasy of D&D but better" because like even though the medium has changed and developed throughout the years I do not think that we have unlocked every single possible piece of gaming technology for the type of game that started it all.

I don't know. Throw some weird shit at the dungeon walls and see what sticks. Experiment with weird dice. Do a bunch of probability analysis in Anydice. Have a cool idea that makes you go "hey, this would make a neat D&D homebrew," STOP! That is now a thing in your upcoming fantasy heartbreaker. Keep going until you've made a full game.

[jburneko]

Haunted: The Epiphany

When I was nearing the end of writing my text, I decided to play Haunted at an online gaming event. It went pretty much as expected at this point. I posted about it here: A Tale of Two Agencies. It was a pretty well established pattern by this point that the murderer frequently reported feeling "trapped". This always seemed a bit odd to me since it's the murderer's agenda that drives play while the ghost can't do much but talk. But then a couple of things were said to me that caught my attention.

First, it was brought to my attention that with the supporting characters always coming at the murderer with Needs and Problems that the murderer spent the majority of their time just dodging consequences. Second, while I was talking to my partner about the game, she said, "It doesn't seem like the murderer has any friends." It suddenly occurred to me that all the way back when I added Needs and Problems to fix issues with supporting character motivation I had accidentally turned the game into an emotional stoning. Basically, the supporting characters just fling themselves at the murderer with these one-note issues over and over and over again.

I had, at some point along the way, added a mechanic where the murderer can gain Influence and permanently weakening the ghost by resolving the support characters' Needs and Problems. I liked this a lot for Problems but it always felt weird to me for Needs. So I decided to remove Needs and replace them with something softer and more malleable.

I added the concept of Disposition. Disposition is the supporting character's general attitude toward the murderer. There are five Dispositions: Advocate, Friendly, Undecided, Unfriendly and Adversary. Any supporting character in the murderer's social circle gets a randomly rolled Disposition during setup. All new supporting characters including those initially in the ghost's social circle get a Disposition assigned to them at the end of their first scene with the murderer.

More importantly, Disposition can change. At the end of any scene, a supporting character player can alter their current character's Disposition up or down one step. This makes the supporting cast much more dynamic and makes their relationships with the murderer more complex. So, now, a supporting character might have a Problem but also be Friendly toward the murderer. They're much less likely to just go flinging their Problem at the murderer like a rock.

I suddenly realized I needed to stop finalizing my text. This was a pretty big change and I needed to see it in action. A few other other things would happen between then and now that would continue to alter the development of Haunted. I'll tell you more about those next time.

Haunted will be released by Halloween 2025. There will be a short Kickstarter prior to that which you can follow here to be notified when it launches: Haunted on Kickstarter

[jburneko]

One of the great disservices the original writers of RPG texts did was call their books "guidelines". You see, those people were quite used to playing in a culture with a referee/adjudicator player making judgment calls when novel situations in play arose. What those adjudicator players would do is look to the rules of the game and work out some way to resolve the novel situation in alignment with those rules. Worse case, they'd make a call like, "Okay that works on 1 or 2 on a d6". Sometimes they would record these calls and build up an "odds table" over time.

It was also not that unusual for people to replace rules components of the games if they didn't like them. "We don't like the way armor is handled. We do this other thing instead." These were, of course, carefully considered changes and easily communicated to new players.

This kind of adhoc and bespoke game design was normal and perfectly fine. This is the play culture those old texts were speaking to when they referred to themselves as "guidelines." Unfortunately, the word "guideline" is very soft and squishy and eventually would be co-opted by people who would elevate the GM to God-King Emperor who could do anything at anytime for any reason or no reason at all. So now, the rules didn't matter in any capacity because the GM was now your host and entertainer for the evening and would just shape everything "for the story" or the "rule of cool" or "for the lolz" or whatever. What was once a carefully considered art of adjudication and bespoke design became a culture of adult story time. Because, after all, the rules are only "guidelines".

The word I wish those old texts had used was "framework". Frameworks are meant to be built upon and extended but still form a rigid foundation. And yeah, you can even change the framework itself if you must but at least you know you're doing something really fundamental when you do. You don't just arbitrarily ignore "frameworks" you have to work within them. They establish a paradigm of thought and then invite you expound on it.

It's not possible for mechanics to "get in the way of the story" in a TTRPG. Whatever outcome the mechanics natively produce *is* the story. There can be a mismatch between the story you want the game to produce and the story the mechanics naturally gravitate towards producing, in which case you should consider playing a different game that actually wants to produce the story you want to experience, but "mechanics getting in the way of the story" is not a thing.

[jburneko]

Go easy on itch.io, go after the titans stepping on them instead.

Plan of Action and Complaint Template Regarding Adult Content Being Delisted from Itchio

Alright so as y’all may or may not know, credit card companies and other payment facilitators have put pressure on digital storefronts such as Steam and Itch.io to remove “adult content” recently largely due to lobbying by fringe radical organizations. It would be bad enough if it just affected actual porn, but you know to these people “porn” means “anything that even mentions a homosexual.” Several of my team’s projects including mini-expansions to Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy “The Fanservice Files” and “The XXX-Files,” as well as team artist @chaospyromancy’s personal side project “A Squad of Drow” have been delisted from itch.io as of last night though they are still available by direct link or from our main account page and you can still pay us for them for now but there is no telling how long they'll actually stay up. Many others have had their projects completely delisted or outright removed, and are having payments withheld from them. If you don't want to see us and other creators pushed under by this crap, you need to do something about it.

People affected by this far outnumber the people who lobbied to make it happen. These organizations are very vocal but also relatively small and very fringe, and since it is a policy decision that was created by complaints it may be able to be destroyed by complaints.

Here are the phone numbers of these companies and an email address I was able to find. We need to blow their phones off the wall and fill their inboxes with customer complaints.

Mastercard (US): 1-800-627-8372 Mastercard (Int.): +1-636-722-7111 Visa (US + Can): 1 800 847 2911 Visa (AUS): 1 800 125 440 PayPal(UK): +44-0203-901-7000

Paypal (US) 1 888 221 1161

For investor relations:

914-249-4565 (Mastercard) 650 432 7644 (visa)

Visa Email Address: askvisa@visa.com

Mastercard Contact Form: https://b2b.mastercard.com/contact-us/

Saying stuff like “sex work is real work” and “this affects black trans women,” while true, is not the kind of thing that is going to tug at the heartstrings of lib-conservative CEOs and board members and their PR teams. They’re mercenary. You need to tell them how this is going to hurt their wallets and make their customers very unhappy.

If feasible, you need to get your moms and dads on this too, and get them to get their friends on it, etc.

40-60-year old middle class white people high credit scores and stuff will have more sway with these corporations than any young adult trans person.

My team has put together a template for your phone calls and emails. Take the template and delete the [bracketed parts] that don’t apply to you.

“My name is [_____], and I’m contacting you about your recent decision to alter your user policies regarding adult content and thereby putting pressure on digital storefronts like itch.io and Steam to hide and remove adult content. By doing so, you're cutting off a significant revenue stream, [and as someone with financial investment in your company, this has me extremely concerned]

[I both buy and sell that blocked content, so this is directly interfering in my finances, and I will seek compensation.]

Products I paid for are no longer available to me, [and people are buying my products without the money going to me because of your interference with the payment processing.]

If you don’t want to lose customers and face potential legal trouble, these policies which pressure itch.io, Steam, and other digital storefronts need to be reversed.

You have changed these policies because of Collective Shout, a radical group from Australia that sent only a mere 1000 calls to destroy a significant revenue stream on your part and to interfere with my finances. This decision literally affects millions of people and millions of dollars, and so I expect a prompt response on reversing these policy changes and removing the pressure on itch.io and Steam to ban adult content on their sites. [As a cardholder, I worry that these new policies are responding to a vocal minority of customers, and I’m left doubting the reliability, versatility, and integrity of your services. I use these services to securely and conveniently make the transactions I see fit, and it’s disappointing to see legitimate, legal transactions be excluded.]

[I am furious that an American company would bend so easily to a lobbying group from a foreign country.]”

There is also a petition you can sign here.

[jburneko]

I've been thinking about the module discourse since it cropped up a few weeks ago. I'm obviously not anti-module, although I prefer to call them scenarios. There's one included with both Dungeons & Dilemmas as well as Unchained Mysteries. I just published Love Songs of the Death Goddess for The Black Sword Hack. Hell, there's THREE sample scenarios in Necropolis. So, I'm no enemy of pre-written adventure content.

And yet... something's been bothering me ever since the whole thing cropped up. So, I'm going to break down some nuance.

For starters, there are some games where it's nonsensical to use a pre-written scenario. I can think of three types of these games.

The first is purely GMless games like Dirty Secrets where the setup procedures are part of the game and almost all the interactions are just among the players.

The second are games that have a GM, but they're working from almost nothing from the start and the game procedures feed them material to synthesize as we play. I point to Ten Candles as an example.

The third has the GM do quite a bit of pre-play preparation but it's all built on substantial player-authored material done during character creation. I point to Sorcerer (Demons, The Diagram and Kicker are all provided by the players) and Burning Wheel (Beliefs and Instincts are created by the players).* *A caveat on that third category is that there do exist pre-written scenarios for those games, but they usually ALSO provide you the PCs to play them with because they're intrinsically connected and can't be separated.

So that just leaves games where the scenario is both prepared in advanced and is relatively independent of the player characters. I will admit that the amount of work necessary to prepare these games is a pretty vast realm. Some games simply require more than others. However, a central point of Unchained Mysteries is that the work necessary to prepare a scenario for your own use and the work necessary to prepare a scenario for someone else to use (yet alone turn into a salable product) is VASTLY different. So let me make this clear: If you are putting in the work to make your scenario usable by someone else when it will only be used by you, YOU ARE DOING TOO MUCH WORK. At the end of Unchained Mysteries I include a fairly detailed scenario titled Dead Celebrities Sell More Tabloids. I tried to make it clear that the scenario as presented there is only presented that way so it can be effectively used by someone else. At the end of the scenario is a two-page spread of bullet points and I tried to explain that when I originally ran the scenario those two pages are all I had. The game lasted six sessions.

The same is true for Love Songs of the Death Goddess. I first wrote that scenario to be played at Big Bad Con. I had about three pages of notes. I didn't even bother drawing the maps. I drew them right there in the session as it was necessary. I just finished running a game about some serial murders in historical France. Here are my prep notes in their entirety. The whole scenario took me about ten minutes to dream up and about twenty minutes to write down. After initial prep, I only added one NPC (after the first session) and struck out another NPC when they were murdered. The game took about five sessions to complete.

"You must be an amazing improviser!"

No. Stop.

"Improv" is the art of spinning something from nothing, usually using a set of techniques that involve rapidly developing material between two or more individuals. It also usually assumes that the primary purpose is to entertain an audience, so there's a kind of rhythm or cadence to the whole thing. I do not do "improv" nor am I improvising.

I am speaking truth from prep.

Vincent Baker touches on this in Apocalypse World. Everyone gets all bent out of shape over "Play to find out" and "Sometimes, disclaim decision making" and somehow people think this means that AW is some kind of writer's room collaborative storytelling exercise. Everyone forgets, "Say what your prep demands." AW is pretty prep intensive when you dig into it.

Basically, the details of my scenario exist in three forms, each built on top of each other. The first is what I write down, which is pretty much the minimal foundation for play (see my link above).

The second are the concrete details I have in my head that are so fundamental to the scenario I'm either not going to forget them, or they will be quickly evoked by glancing at what I did write down. For example, I almost never write down personality, description or motives of my NPCs. Why would I? They're my NPCs! They're so intrinsic to the scenario that I'm not going to forget what they want or how they behave. (I will do varying amounts of Stat work depending on the game. Story Engine, the game I used for the link above, requires giving NPCs descriptors which have a specific mechanical function).

The third are the details that come out in play. Inevitably the players will do something or ask about something that isn't immediately available from the first two layers. However! I'm not "improvising" those details. I'm intuitively deriving them from the known content of what I prepared (and whatever else may have arisen in play). This is what I mean by "speaking truth from prep."

Usually, any missing details are easy to fill in on an as needed basis by just taking a minute to think a little critically about what you already have. Sometimes I even say, "Give me a minute to think about that." Hell, if it's something major I'll even stop the session, "I think we should pause here, I have some things to consider." And sometimes I'll even have to revise something I said before, if it hasn't become critically woven into the facts of play yet, "I know I said the shooting happened in the morning, but on reflection I think it was probably more like early afternoon." You see, when you jettison the idea that the GM has to be a flawless font of knowledge or a perfect performer or that there's some kind of hidden meaning buried in everything they say, then just an ounce of preparation can yield a pound of play.

When I went to write down Dead Celebrities Sell More Tabloids or Love Songs for the Death Goddess to be used by others, details from all three of these layers got written down (and even fleshed out a tad more). They have to be. You're not me. You didn't dream up the scenario and you don't know my truth. I HAVE to communicate that to you in the text. And even then, you probably still have to fill in a lot with your own truth.

And that's actually why I don't think modules are an effective method for teaching people how to prepare for a game. They present a false impression of the amount of detail and work necessary. And in some ways just create a different kind of work (you have to understand and internalize this text).

I'm not saying don't write modules! Modules are fun! They're fun to write! They're fun to share! They're fun to use! But I think of them like lab reports. They're a cleaned up concrete documentation of a process that was likely far more touch-and-go in application. And are often most useful to people doing the same kind of lab work.

If you're interested in honing your quick-draw scenario creation and "truth speaking" GMing skills I would recommend looking at either Trollbabe, Circle of Hands or Fantasy For Real depending on your taste in fantasy. All three have explicit (and different) scenario preparation processes. Fantasy For Real, in particular, was written specifically with neophyte GMs in mind.

The more I think on it, and I know this greatly differs from what people have come to expect in recent years, but to me a TTRPG with no adventure modules is like booting up a video game and finding out the devs didn’t make any levels. Like I wanted to play this but I guess we’ll have to wait until someone in the group, who may have never played the game before, spends a not-insignificant amount of their free time in the level-editor throwing something together for us to play.

[jburneko]

It's amazing how many RPG "design problems" go away when you assume that the game is going to be played by curious adults who care about each other and have all their own tools (yes, even the neurodivergent ones) for managing their social context.

[jburneko]

Haunted: The Book Was Too Long

Between 2011 and 2020 I had played numerous Haunted games and made numerous tweaks to its rules. Nothing I did seemed to solve the problem of the murderer either dying, going mad or ending up in prison most of the time. I had begun to accept that maybe that's just how the game functioned. Those endings aren't necessarily unsatisfying. I just had hoped that I'd see at least one or two "he got away with it" stories in that time. So, I decided it was time to turn toward publishing it.

Many things had started to inform Haunted's form factor. Apocalypse World had gained a lot of cultural ground. I had experimented with presenting The Ghost, The Murderer and The Supporting Character in a "playbook" format with explicit principles to play those roles well and a rules summary from each role's perspective.

I had also started taking the courses offered at Adept Play The content of those courses would end up shaping Haunted's future more than I knew at the time. One thing I took away from those courses is that having too many places in a design where things are left to open collaboration or "group consensus" leads to murky play. It's instead much stronger to assign clear authorities over select game content and then assume the group is a bunch of functioning adults who are capable of having a conversation and that the person with the appointed authority isn't going to act like a dictatorial monster. If you're interested in this subject, I recommend this recorded workshop: In/Over

I went through the haunted rules and any place where I had "the group" make a decision I clearly appointed a specific player for making the decision and clarified any constraints on their choices. The ghost selects the setting. The murderer frames scenes unless specifically yielding to a supporting character player. The supporting character players makes certain alterations to the characters they're current playing. The murderer decides when the game ends.

Another take away from those classes was that a book can not be an instruction manual, a teaching guide and reference text all at the same time. So, I decided to divide Haunted's text into three parts. The first part was raw instruction with a detailed running example of each and every step of play. The second section was the teaching guide comprised of a set of deep dive essays on each role in the game including a section for whoever was facilitating the game. And the last section was a set of bullet point reference material for the rules. This is where my "playbooks" went, as well as a couple of "quick start" setups for play.

The resulting text was rather long and I even had an editing pass done on it by a friend of mine. I was convinced I was going to publish Haunted near the end of 2021. And then I had an epiphany and I decided to junk it. I'll tell you all about that in my next post.

Haunted will be released by Halloween 2025. There will be a short Kickstarter prior to that which you can follow here to be notified when it launches: Haunted on Kickstarter

[jburneko]

I have a lot of respect for the people behind Eureka RPG. They have their heads screwed on right about how play operates. (There's one or two places where I think perhaps they're overcompensating for some problems with wider RPG culture, but whatever, those are minor).

If you were to ask me why I play RPGs I'm actually going to talk a lot about story and characters. I'm in it "for the story" but I realized that I don't think I mean the same thing as other people who say the same thing.

Here's my hottest take: I think mass media has really fucked up our ability think about, enjoy and even create stories. Mass media has one purpose: keep you hooked for the next thing.

How much of television fandom is all about speculating about the future? The next episode? The season arc? Predicting "the twists". Identifying "the big bad". Like when was the last time a television fan just went on about one great scene or moment in the episode they just watched. Franchise movies are exactly the same now. The exist primarily to setup the next one, or the spin off. They've imported serial media fandom into the cinema. Novels aren't much better. Go read Big Fiction by Dan Sinykin if you want to understand the homogenization and commodification of literature.

The point is, we've adopted and overly structuralist idea about storytelling. "Acts", "Genre" "Tropes" "Beats" "Reveals" these are all structural assumptions that we assume "must be" arranged in a particular way or it isn't really a story.

We've trained ourselves to look for story everywhere but the present moment. We look forward, "Where is this going?" We look backward, "What is the lore?" We look at the container, "What genre is this?" We conform to expectations instilled by our consumerist culture. Our minds are never on what we are doing.

You don't need to "architect" or "manage" a story if (a) what is happening right now is compelling in an identifiably authentic human terms and (b) the next moment is constructed from the consequences of the current moment.

A scene/encounter/obstacle/whatever-you-want-to-call it can be incredibly dynamic but it's all just sound and fury if the next scene/encounter/obstacle/whatever-you-want-to-call it is fixed in content. If we're just moving from fixed-encounter-to-fixed encounter (even if there's some branching in there) it doesn't matter how dynamic the individual encounters are, they're just performative.

The game must exist and be played in "the now" and the future must be contingent on the outcome of "the now". If each "now" is compelling and follows from the previous "now" the result is a story. That's why rules can never "get in the way of the story". Rules simply constrain the textural dynamics of play.

When the situation is compelling, all possible outcomes of that situation are also compelling. And if that's not the case then here's my hotter take: I suspect that you're dealing with shallow trope-y content that derives most of its value from its conformity to anticipations and expectations. If the rules undermine those expectations then the content is "ruined".

I don't care if our story is a structural mess from a consumer product perspective. We're folk artists, not a corporate mass media writers room.

everyone has somehow got it in their head that the purpose of a TTRPG is to produce a conventionally satisfying novel-like narrative instead of being a game

[jburneko]

Natasha Lyonne is a comedic national treasure. Natasha Lyonne doing distaff Colombo in Poker Face is a gift we do not deserve, and yet, there it is. Enjoy it while you can.

Poker Face really feels like the sort of show that people on this website would go crazy for and yet I feel like no one on here cares about it, like Natasha Lyonne as a Colombo-style nomadic detective with a borderline supernatural ability to tell when someone’s lying who calls herself a “grown ass man” and “just some guy”, a murder of the week style plot and weekly episode releases as opposed to the entire season dropping at once, created by the same guy who made Knives Out and potentially even takes place in the same universe considering the main character appeared in Glass Onion, and a colorful, 70s aesthetic YALL GOTTA GET ON THIS SHIT

[jburneko]

Bloodthorn Press Back Stock

I have put the remaining print copies of Love Songs of the Death Goddess on sale here: Bloodthorn Press Store: Love Songs of the Death Goddess

Also, I do still have a few print copies of Unchained Mysteries left: Bloodthorn Press Store: Unchained Mysteries

[jburneko]

This is weirdly relevant to something I'm planning on writing about concerning my game Haunted. If you've been reading my posts about it, you'll notice I keep bringing up this issue of how 99% of Haunted games end badly, like really badly, for the murderer. It took me a while to realize it wasn't (entirely) about the game's design. It was about the people playing it. I think it would be wise for all of us to consider these questions, but more importantly what it means to enact the answers in practice.

Questions I think to myself a lot when confronted with certain kinds of Online Posting:

Do you want a better world, or do you want revenge on those you think aren’t doing enough to improve it?

Do you want a more just world, or do you want to see bad people suffer merciless punishment?

Do you want a less oppressive world, or do you want the reins of power for yourself?

Do you want to do the right thing, or do you want to feel righteous?

[jburneko]

Everyone has gotta stop treating TTRPGs like there's this dial between "rules" and/or "combat" and "narrative" and/or "roleplaying" and as one goes up the other must go down.