March 2024 – Roll to Doubt

Blog Scraps 6

Thoughts that didn’t feel like complete blogposts. On easy gonzo settings and having non-humans and wizards as only character types.

Adventure Writing as Craft Practice

In my previous craft post, I included a paragraph about adventure writing. There’s posts about why writing adventures is more interesting than systems (here for example), but if someone’s joy is ruleset tinkering, they should do it. Today I just want to develop why I see adventure writing as an important part of the craft.

Consider, for a moment, you want to take fiction writing as a hobby.

Video-Game Mechanics In Your Campaign

Now and again people discuss how to bring elements from video-games to TTRPGs. There’s a lot that is easy to bring: lore, item descriptions, monsters, maps. The same you could bring from a book. But they usually talk about translating mechanics (that work due to the nature of video-game button input and the calculations behind programming), or some undefined mood that comes from the entire presentation of a video-game, possible through the limited input and static design of that medium.

The famous “how to do Dark Souls combat in a TTRPG?” question. After thinking a bit, I can settle the issue.

Much like early RPG campaigns employed rules from all over including board games (following FKR principles), you can use video-games as resolution methods for your campaign.

Want Dark Souls combat? When a combat starts in the campaign, turn on the game and beat a boss. Downtime? Use any management game for a season and check the results. Domain game? Civilization. Mass combat? Choose your favorite RTS map. The list goes on.

Tags: FKR

RPGs as Craft

A craft is “a pastime (…) that requires particular skills and knowledge of practiced work”. The whole of craft also includes perceiving what the untrained observer wouldn’t, becoming yourself a trained observer of others, experiencing tools and materials to grasp their practical interrelationships, and engaging in collective understanding. Having enjoyed Jenx’s series on RPGs as hobby, I want to talk RPGs as craft.

Blackbox Gaming

Blackbox (AKA HUDless) gaming is when the players are unaware of any mechanical tool used to establish and provide resolution to situations and conflicts. They may roll dice but aren’t informed of what the roll means or its mathematical logic – besides obvious intuition like “rolling high is good” – and in some cases have a diceless experience as the referee rolls everything. They might be privy to a few. The player’s sheet includes information like name, backstory, noticeable traits (“good at climbing”) and inventory, but not references to any procedures. Players negotiate what they want to do and how they do it only through the fiction, and the referee narrates the result.

The Gothic Film in OD&D

Whether due to Appendix N being the popular mélange of fiction considered key to understanding old D&D’s genre emulation or other reasons, discussion of the 1974 rules seems to bypass their debt to gothic movie cycles a lot. It’s one thing to recognize OD&D’s origins in the Blackmoor campaign and give passing note to the cheesy horror movies Arneson watched on a given weekend (very likely The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle). Quite another to read the booklets as a document that emerges in that period of gothic revival in popular film, between the ascension of Hammer, Dark Shadows and others.

Gothic old D&D has been practiced, from Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque to Ghostly Affair and many others. I’m interested in seeing how much of the writing in the original booklets evokes those movies by themselves, if briefly as I prepare a campaign around it.