GM Anxiety and the West Marches
It should be no secret to anyone who's been following what I do lately that I think of GMing as craft. What I mean by that is enough for its own blog post (and also a podcast).
A lot of the talk about the social dynamics of GMing focus on power imbalances, and the outsized influence and control a GM can exert. I agree to an extent, but for reasons that also lie outside the scope of this post, I believe that this imbalance is not as necessarily or intrinsically problematic as some would contend. I also think it can make for a very rich game, and affords qualities of play that cannot be readily achieved through more balanced distributions of narrative control. Again, though, that's another post.
There is also a flipside to the social power arguments that I find absent, or at least underexplored, which is the vulnerability and social pressure attached to GMing. Admittedly, more balanced power dynamics offset this. However, proceeding from the assumption that assymmetry can be desirable, I find a more robust engagement with the subject lacking. These matter have become pronounced of late in my experiences running my home game, which has recently transitioned to a West Marches-style format. In this post I'm going to identify what I consider some significant blind spots in the ways we tend to talk about running this kind of game, especially when it comes to its experiential dimensions. Moving forward, I'll be devoting some thought to how I've been managing these issues in my campaign of late.
Social Procedures
I've been running OSE a bunch lately and decided it might be helpful for my players if there's a codified version of the way I run social encounters for them to consult.* Since I wrote them up anyway, I thought I'd share them here. Link immediately below, brief design notes after the jump.
Text to Table episode 2: Nate Lumpkin -- Statting Gods and Dating Goblins
The second episode of my podcast is online! Go listen to it!
Background Music in Online Games: The Sequel
A lot us are doing a lot more online gaming these days. For the last year, I've been living an hour's drive my from my nearest friend, and two or more hours from the vast majority of people I've traditionally gamed with in person. So I've been online for a while now. This isn't my first time moving my gaming online - it also happened the year I was living in France for the 2014-15 school year - and of course there's been the occasional online game on G+ (R.I.P.) and Discord. All this to say I have quite a bit of experience with these things.
Through all that experience, one problem that remains fucking intractable is that of piping in background music. This has never been especially hard to do in person; I open up my laptop and pull up a song or video. But for some reason, while simulating every other aspect of a TTRPG session is getting increasingly easy and convenient, music remains a singular challenge. I more or less solved the issue in 2015. The advice in that post still works, more or less. I checked yesterday, and while it's a bit dated and some links might need updating, if you squint a little the instructions will do now what they did then.
So why am I writing this post? Well, the computational landscape has changed significantly since 2015. I no longer use Skype, because I find it intolerable, and Hangouts has been slowly torn to pieces and will finally be laid to rest in June. There are other options for online gaming, and they are very good options, but music remains a problem. In this post I'm going to break down what it takes to get music right in an online gaming session, and I'm going to provide an overview of every conferencing tool of which I am aware. As you'll see, while many of these are okay, or at least workable, most solutions available now are unnecessarily kludgy, awkward to coordinate with players, and/or rely on bad or dying software. The other point of this post is to lay out the problem clearly, in the hopes that someone equiped with that information might have a better solution.
New podcast: Text to Table
Graded success for roll-under d20
This is a sort of half-baked add-on inspired by Call of Cthulhu 7e's graded difficulty system for roll-under d100 resolution. It assumes 3d6-based ability generation a la BX, and uses the same modifier scale, albeit towards a different end.
I'm opening a Discord server
Alright folks, I've been hanging around Discord a while and thinking about what kind of server I'd like to be in, and I think it's time I made it happen. Link after the jump.
Boosting the signal: "Transgender representation in OSR cyberpunk games," by Evlyn M
First, if you're somehow reading my blog and aren't already following Evlyn M at Le Chaudron Chromatique, you should be. Her artwork is some of the most beautiful and original on the RPG scene right now, her writing is bursting with fresh ideas, and her work ethic is enviable and inspiring.
The Recursive Encounter Calculator: for checking encounters over many turns
Peter's recent post on the enduring difficulty of running travel in RPGs has motivated me to make a little tool I'd been thinking about for a while. It is not a complete solution to his problem, but I hope it can at be helpful to a few GMs out there. I'll explain further, but first, the tool:
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