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I’m Just Taking It All In: Solving problems with on the Fly Design

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If you run TTRPGs the realms of Rulings and Rules have a very evident border. You know when one or the other is being used. Rules are set in stone. Roll the D20, a 20 always crits, a 1 always fumbles. Rulings are for doing things we don’t have hard and fast Rules for. “I want to leap from the chandelier and do a diving attack onto the head of the vile wyrm”; congratulations GM you now have to do some on the fly game design to figure out what they have to roll, in what order they have to roll, whether or not the attack deals extra damage, has some blowback on the player and make it all vaguely fair and in line with the entire ruleset of the game you are all engaging with. This process can slow a game to halt if you are the kind of person who loves rules. I don’t mean that pejoratively, I love rules. Rules are necessary to make sure the things that happen are fair and unbiased. They absolve the GM from generating the consequences of their players' (often asinine) actions. They allo...
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Remember, Wild Bill Loves Me: In of Praise Abstract Concepts as Rules Text

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  “Remember. Wild Bill loves me.” This phrase plays over and over in my head when I think about how a game’s design influences the nature of the stories you can tell (the answer to your question is too often. I think about this way too often).  In Apocalypse World 2E abstract concepts like Love, Idleness and Vulnerability crop up in the rulestext. It’s kind of just thrown at you in a very matter of fact and vague way. If you go looking for a mechanical explanation of what Love allows you to do in the game, you won't find anything. This requires a shift in thinking for a lot of traditional TTRPG players. Once that shift happens, and as long as you're somewhat cognitively flexible, the skill of interpretation can make for a wonderful point of emergence in your collaborative story. Okay so where does this crop up in a game about the fall of civilization?  AW2E has a class (called a Playbook) called The Skinner. Skinners are not people who flense the meat from hides. They ar...
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Fiction First | Mechanics First: Fluff and Crunch Make Friends at the End of the World

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Welcome, you've stumbled into a deeply idiosyncratic diatribe about Crunch Vs. Fluff in TTRPGs and how the dichotomy doesn't have to be real. Things will be rambling and it may not make sense at times. Enjoy? For the last sixish months I’ve been running Apocalypse World Second Edition, a TTRPG by Meguey and Vincent D. Baker. It should be noted that I am not exceptionally attracted to apocalypse fiction nor are my players. Despite this, everyone is engaged with the genre and are carving out their own emergent stories. The Juice has been very much worth the Squeeze, and what the Baker’s have built in Apocalypse World is a very elegant juicer. So, what is Apocalypse World? Some kind of OSR game set at some end time? Well it is solidly post-apocalyptic in genre. The game absolutely cannot be used to run in another genre, and that is by design. Beyond that, a lot of people with a passing familiarity with the game would call it a “Story” or “Fiction First '' game. I find thi...
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