friend read through Riddle of Steel, which is mostly famous for its detailed combat system, and I'm struck by how much of a historical anomaly it is

Author commentary describes it as responding to "dnd is too gamey and easy these days (00s)" which i mostly associate with OSR takes, but, Riddle of Steel is tackling that by trying for more and more detailed and realistic rules, rather than the retrocloning or simplification that OSR takes would try; and the authors and games that tended to reference it were Forge narrativists, who were neither doing Low Fantasy nor trying for HEMA realism.

I'm reminded of Shadow of the Demon Lord doing Grime Murder Hours Fantasy at a time when that was a popular OSR aesthetic, but in a grid combat way, inspired by D&D 4e. This is a departure from both the OSR stereotype and the Riddle of Steel method, but still appealing to a desire for brutal combat and dark fantasy that all three tried to claim.

moral of the story: aesthetic will betray you, you gotta talk about rules

Ruminating on Magiamachy, my sketch for a knockoff Fate/Stay night ttrpg. It's gotta be pvp, or it just won't work, but I also want to provide some kind of alternative win condition that isn't just "play a different game now." So: When players are eliminated, they're assigned a new playbook that represents an additional threat disrupting the Magiamachy, like "the Order of Magi wants to shut down the ritual" or "yeah it's aliens." Each of these will either alter some of the fundamental rules, making cracks to allow alternative win conditions, or they'll just straight-up have defined wincons on them.

The initial rules of the Magiamachy look like there's only one way for things to end, but as those rules are broken, new possibilities appear. plus this lets players keep playing even after their character is gone

i read His Majesty the Worm! game's got plenty of buzz, you don't need my rec, but I come out of the book appreciating how much it explains how to use OSR trademarks like dungeon maps and random encounter tables. "integrate your random encounters into whatever spot on the map they show up, and swap them out with new events when the party returns to the surface" is really really helpful procedural advice, albeit one that necessitates a lot of preparation. And to its credit, it breaks down exactly what you need for that preparation really well. Once you have your city and underworld maps and their respective event tables, it gives you a ton of material to work with and dominoes for your players to knock down.

However

The dungeon creation advice itself left me a lot colder. It has a process for determining the macrostructure, but each individual floor kinda reduces to "draw maps, come up with a bunch of interesting things to happen." Even the "dungeon seeds" in the back have maps, but don't have room by room breakdowns. Which is the point, they're a starting point for inspiration, but the end result is that you still need to draw the rest of the owl when preparing things yourself.

His Majesty the Worm does a better job of showing me what a megadungeon needs than any other game I've read. It's bridging the gap between where you start and what it needs that's tricky for me.

Migrated some material from here to the Neocities, so my theory section now has three pages. Three! that's plural now. Also i've got dragons on the main page and kept tinkering with my links page, so that's fun

In a strange and hypothetical turn of events, you've found yourself running two mid-level Lancer campaigns. You're an experienced GM, you have plenty of time on your hands, you figure you're up to the challenge. You've recruited friends and familiar faces from your favorite TTRPG spaces, especially those that you know are really into the character-building side of the game. Build freaks! We know 'em and love 'em. But you're a little surprised when both groups end up with the exact set of character builds. It wasn't planned or anything, everyone just picked all the same character options as someone in the other group. Weird, but there is a silver lining: since it's the same party at both tables you figure every combat you prep can be used for both groups. What could go wrong?

First session of the campaign(s), you run a combat for Mobile Task Force Zeta-Zero-Two "Radiation Ronin," and they love every minute of it. It's a long hard fight with tough decisions to make, but they emerge victorious, and everyone talks about how much they're looking forward to the next sitrep. Feeling very pleased with yourself indeed, you put that same combat in front of the time-hopping band of rebels, Carrion Cavalcade. They hate it! By the end of the session, everyone is clearly frustrated, they're too tired to keep playing, and you're left wondering what went wrong.

Within a couple days, you've gathered something of a postmortem from the Cavalcade's players. They tell you that even though they won the fight, none of them feel like they really fulfilled the fantasy they built their characters for. The Really Big Sword player felt stuck making hacking rolls, the sniper had to ram and grapple to shut down the enemy. They weren't making any tactical errors, it was a difficult fight and they made the choices they needed to in order to win the sitrep. But they weren't playing the way they really hoped to.

Okay, that's good information, and you know enough to prepare differently for the next session. Radiation Ronin need to push their session back (someone has a cat wedding), so you even have some extra time. You set to work crafting a combat that will let every character show off their strengths and fulfill the role their players envisioned. It's not going to be an easy fight, just one where everyone can be where they want to be.

Showtime. The difference is palpable. Carrion Cavalcade pounces on every opportunity for a clever combo and fills the chat logs with their favorite moments. Everyone gets to see their mechs at their best, everyone leaves happy, you're feeling so much better about the campaign from here on out. You can't wait to run this same combat for Radiation Ronin and-

hm. that didn't go as well.

They're a quieter group, even at the best of times, but you can tell they didn't share the Cavalcade's enthusiasm. They won the fight with flying colors, triggered the same hype moment combos, but, they just weren't feeling it. They tell you the combat was fine, they enjoyed it, it just didn't have the same thrill as the first one. One of them says that things went a little "too smoothly," and things start falling into place for you.

Radiation Ronin enjoyed the first combat because they were forced to make new plans in the moment, Carrion Cavalcade didn't because they felt like they weren't getting the gameplay they had planned for.

Carrion Cavalcade enjoyed the second combat because they were able to fulfill their gameplay fantasies without a hitch, Radiation Ronin hated it because executing their ideal turn repeatedly felt boring to them.

Both groups genuinely enjoy the mech combat gameplay of Lancer, both groups genuinely enjoy building a character out of a smorgasbord of rules-chunks, but the things they enjoy about those things are different. Do you want to explore the whole space of possibility, and it's disappointing if you can get away with doing the same thing over and over? Or are you here to experience one particular slice of play, and it's frustrating if you feel like that's being denied?

To invoke some truly incomprehensible jargon, Radiaton Ronin enjoy their frotz in a nitfol sort of way, and Carrion Cavalcade have more of a gnusto approach to their frotz. I'm not suggesting either approach is inherently superior, or "more true" to Lancer or any other combat game, but I do hope I've been able to outline the different needs of different players, and potential opportunities for expectations to become misaligned at the table.

I contributed to the Fabula Ultima Jamloween 2025! behold my will o' wisp and zeta gundam reference

I also got an article in Odysssey issue #2, a brief overview of several magical girl TTRPGs

I think I want to get posting here more regularly. Let's see if that can happen

Now and then I run into the take in ttrpg spaces that giant robot tactical combat rpg Lancer is particularly difficult to reflavor, which is interesting to me because that has not been my experience. My feeling is generally that as long as you're in giant robots, you can port the system pretty easily into other settings or write your own, and even if you're doing like, werewolves in grid combat, you're basically fine. But I don't want to just dismiss this other tendency, I want to understand what in particular poses an obstacle.

"Flavor is free" is a popular piece of TTRPG advice bordering on a truisim: if a bit of fictional description is inconsequential, you can replace it with something else (with "inconsequential" typically defined as "easy to replace," so you see how this gets circular). Its popularity can obscure that this is actually a pretty distinct reading strategy: a player who goes into a game assuming that not everything locked into the overall network of mechanics can be homebrewed into something else is going to have a very different experience than one who takes every description as part of the presented scenario.

Back to Lancer. There are a few elements of the setting very closely associated with the mechanics: The mech manufacturer factions, the licenses they provide, and the "printers" that let players repair or recreate their mechs. Major parts of the progression and resource economies have specific in-universe justifications. I think this is where my reading starts to differ: I feel like the in-universe elements exist to enable the desired gameplay, so changing the setting doesn't "matter" as long as you keep the progression and resource economy working like normal. The manufacturers can be rethemed or be completely reduced to upgrade trees without affecting "this changes my mech's numbers."

But if you're seeing the primary goal of the mechanics as expressing a specific setting's assumptions, then that just won't follow. You can't change the manufacturers without coming up with a new set of mechanics to reflect those assumptions, you can't change what the license rules represent without drastically changing the resource economy, etc. This is a much more restrictive reading, which might be part of why I disprefer it.

I have reason to believe Lancer was written with "flavor is free" and the capability to change the setting for your own table as a base assumption of the writers, closer to my own reading. But it turns out that doesn't come through to every reader. funky.

My recent rabbit hole is researching the raising sims and dating sims in the Flash era. Not just Flash games themselves (although I have found an excellent starting point there) but it's good shorthand for the period and enthusiast scene I'm investigating here.

• English Otome Games has a wealth of information collected in one place

• Longtime developers like Hanako Games and Winter Wolves have also helped me gain a better picture of the era

• ...and you can get solid results from restricting Google search results to "before September 2017"

I'm getting confident enough in my ability to identify and gather these that I might put together an Itch collection for them... but I'd need to come up with a good name for it, "character sims" is just my mental shorthand for them. "Character Sim RPGs?" "Life Sim RPGs?"

when i actually went back and read posts from Forge alumni, i started realizing that I had the wrong idea of what "narrativism" meant there. It's not actually about producing the dramatic arc of conventional fiction via play or using rules to enforce/produce genre conventions in general, it's about a specific kind of doing that.

Bankuei calls it "player characters freely make choices and actions based on human issues." Forge narrativism wants well-defined protagonists who can confront Big Questions and Important Themes, whether those Big Questions come from a systems' specific thematic anchors, or whether they emerge from characters' personal thematic anchors. This is strongly reminiscent of a specific genre, but it's the genre called literary fiction. Interest in the conventions of horror, fantasy, and other "genre fiction" was called simulationism, another term that often gets used in very different ways than the Forge's definition.

By drawing this kind of contrast between "narrativism" and "simulationism," GNS reiterated the classic divide between literary and genre fiction that's caused so much nerd resentment of "serious" literature and academic contempt for "popular" literature historically. This is helpful for understanding what was going on back there, but is nearly useless for understanding the ways the terms get used now.

For that we have to go even further back!

John H. Kim has some fascinating firsthand accounts of the RGFA usenet group, an early outpost for TTRPG theory and/or flame wars and the origin point for an earlier three-part theory of play. Not gamism, narrativism, simulationism, but gamism, dramatism, simulationism.

Mary Kuhner's description of the Threefold Model brings us much closer to the modern ttrpg discourse version of "simulationism," while "dramatism" seems to have survived under the new name "narrativism"... kind of. There's some odd assumptions about the GM's power to direct the story that don't seem to have survived transmission. If I had to speculate: vulgar narrativism combines the dramatist emphasis on Interesting Story more generally with the Forge narrativist emphasis on player-driven play. But in most cases, the boundaries between terms in common discourse seem much closer to Mary Kuhner's model than Ron Edwards'.

apparently RGFA developed this whole model to explain to a writer for Theatrix why Theatrix wasn't the game for them. Simulationism was first described by self-identified simulationists, rather than just being an appendage to the Forge narrativist theoretical project as some may assume based on other accounts.