Washed out to sea

The Gremlin Game Designer’s Creed
Rules are toys, and the process of rules-mediated play consists of smashing their faces together like little girls making their Barbies make out. Unless a rules module is explicitly intended to be enacted solo, it should present a generous surface area for other rules to bite into. The most elegantly self-contained piece of rules design is, collaboratively speaking, also the most useless.

The principal function of “player characters” as discrete collections of mechanical traits is to furnish each player with an assemblage of shiny things to show off to other players. Mechanical abstraction is well and good, but if you abstract away the act of curating one’s collection of shinies, player engagement will suffer.

The GM, if present, is a fellow player. Ensure that they have their own toys and shinies to play with. The failure of a game to provide these is often a major contributor to why nobody wants to run it!

The most effective way of encouraging players to do what you want is to make a number go up. This applies to both to rewards and to misfortunes; a number counting up to disaster a much more visceral motivator than a number counting down to zero.

Crunch is good. The defining feature of tabletop roleplaying is that rules produce stories. The act of interpreting the outputs of the rules and the act of telling the game’s story are the same activity. Be mindful of what kinds of stories your rules want to tell; you may find that their opinion on the matter differs from your own!

Actually assembling your game’s rules is as much a process of discovery as it is of invention. In the course of designing and playtesting, you may find that your own game has rules that you didn’t know about. Where did they come from? It is a mystery.

Randomised outcomes should be made mandatory with care and restraint; randomised outcomes should be made available with delirious abandon. As far as is practicable, players should always have the option of asking the dice what unhinged bullshit should happen next. Corollary: lookup tables are your friend.

Players don’t need your permission to depart from the rules as written; granting it is arrogant. By the same token, however, it should never be unclear to players whether they’re departing from the rules as written. Let the thought process behind what you’re writing hang out for all the world to see; folks will be rummaging in the game’s guts anyway, so give them easy access.

If your game has a default setting, explain it as little as possible, but always let the rules and presentation reflect it. Seeing an entry for “poorly made dwarf” in a table of player character backgrounds will fire a group’s imagination more strongly in three words than a chapter stuffed with worldbuilding lore could in ten thousand.

You don’t need to be good at naming things as long as you’re good at puns. Wordplay, alliteration and rhyme may also serve in this capacity, as, in a pinch, may a well placed dick joke.

gayturians:

shuttershocky:
shuttershocky:
David Cage you fucking hack
David Cage citing the work of David Cage as an inspiration that changed his life is classic David Cage.
i made collages of my favorite comments yesterday

(via jundikaryuu)

witchsfists:

0kkvlt:
belladonnafey:
belladonnafey:
belladonnafey:
meatmobile:
halfricanloveyou:
kaijuno:
that looks like a condom and the fact that everyone in the notes is saying “the orb” proves that no one on this website fucks
the fuck kinda bouncy-ball ass condoms are you using
the fact that someone thinks that looks like a condom is proof that no one on this website fucks
ok y’all it’s LITERALLY taken from the “wizard pondering his orb” image
it’s an orb.
ok not to beat a dead horse but i found the ORIGINAL image and it’s cover art from a lotr themed ttrpg.
so
No it isn’t that’s from 1993 you fucking poseur, it’s from A SPY IN ISENGARD published in 1988 I’m SICK and TIRED of you people getting it WRONG

5 reblog additions later and this post is still best summarized by “no one on this website fucks”

(via jundikaryuu)

sunflowerbutch:

50k note tumblr post: i call my girl Cran cause she’s Berries
tiktok voice overlay on top of a slideshow of popular tumblr posts: i call my girl Cran cause she’s Berries
redbubble tshirt that somebody made of the tumblr post: i call my girl Cran cause she’s Berries
screenshot on twitter that somebody captioned “who else misses tumblr”: i call my girl Cran cause she’s Berries
another tiktok but this time it’s an influencer with 100k followers: i call my girl Cran cause she’s Berries
that influencer on the jimmy kimmel show a month later: yeah jimmy it’s hard to say where my inspiration comes from. i just… i think when i wrote the line “i call my girl Cran cause she’s Berries” it was just sort of a spur-of-the-moment thing, but it turned out to be something that everyone can relate to, which is really heart-warming. it’s one of those things that, like, reminds me that i can uplift people and be a voice for them. yeah i do have a new makeup line coming out, “Cran and Bloom,” which was inspired by my now-famous tiktok
mcdonald’s: we’re introducing the new Cran Meal with Berries Sauce

(via queenwithoutaface)

roach-works:

meanderingorange:
gallusrostromegalus:
katy-l-wood:
A BEAR ATE MY BEST HUMMINGBIRD FEEDER.
Rude.
Someone tell that bear he’s not supposed to eat that with the skin on.
I live in South Africa. And if you live in South Africa and you have any contact with people from the US or Canada you might have run into a question about wildlife like lions and elephants roaming our streets. Most South Africans get pretty offended by questions like this. We are a civilized country, our large and dangerous wildlife gets contained in properly fenced parks.
I use to get offended by this until I visited a few places in Canada and realized that the reason why you ask is that some of your large and dangerous wildlife does simply roam the countryside and sometimes make excursions into town.
This honestly blew my mind. What do you mean, you have bears just walking around? What the hell?
north americans don’t all encounter deadly megafauna on our porches and front lawns but it happens often enough that we all think this is a reasonable amount of gigantic animal to happen to your house. so when we think of africa we kinda imagine it like this:
like. if we had elephants here. this is what we would be putting up with on the regular. what do you mean you guys are more sensible than us.