Liberating Design Constraints

I was listening to a Third Floor interview with Cezar Capacle (#211) and they were talking eloquently about designing within the constraints of the systems they lived in and the constraints of the users, and the way they phrased it really resonated. The limitations of the production are just another design constraint. 

That got me really thinking about my disability as a design constraint rather than a pain in the ass limitation. Obviously my blindness puts limits on what I can do, but reframing it as a design constraint means that I think about it in the way I think about a wide variety of other design considerations, and not as an impediment. 

While I am still operating in highly visual media, one without much thought towards accessibility, I can compartmentalize those, in a way, so that my frustration is not grabbing the wheel of the design, nor is it a roadblock. My frustration can be separate, and the design can just be the design, with a set of constraints, like any work.

I realized after I wrote the above, that it is seeing disability as a feature, not a bug.

Sky and Steam Miscellany is Live!

The holdup was mostly a confidence issue, with a large dose of logistical shenanigans and waffling. I started off thinking I was going to sell physical copies online and ship them, but then realized this was probably more ambitious than it needed to be. So I stopped working on the Shopify site and switched to just PDF sales and zine exchange with interested folks. I did make one such exchange this first week! Hooray! I hope there will be many more to follow. 

At any rate, it is all happening over on dodocahedrongames.itch.io

Do The Eyes Have It?

We are all getting very used to high levels of capability and output in visual and information design in ttrpgs. Graphic design suites, even those that are free, enable large groups of people to produce things, books, pictures, cards, and other game ephemera that are, by all reports, gorgeous. Doing it really well is still hard, but doing it medium well seems easier.

Most of those tools are inaccessible to me, as are the products. There is a huge focus on art and art assets in game production, a similarly large value placed on graphic design, information design, and the user experience from a visual perspective. There is nothing wrong with this!

What I am bumping up against is the perhaps false idol of producing objects that fall into the high value categories in this space. I can produce good writing, interesting ideas, new takes, etc. Is that enough, I ask myself? Don't I need all the art, the design, the visual appeal? I'm not sure.

Hand in hand with this is the creative urge to produce pieces myself. Working with a designer or artist on corners of projects is fun, and I deeply appreciate the folks I work with, however, there is a part of my brain that questions why I would want to include elements or processes I cannot fully partake of myself. 

My solution at this point anyway is to try to produce what objects I can with what abilities I have. That pushes me into interesting territory, as the solutions I arrive at may not translate into a popular modes. I am playing to see what happens.

Odd Skills

After the last session of a Season of the game I run at my FLGS I asked the group about system preferences. We have played fantasy using Knave, then Mausritter, back to Knave, and then ITO in my steampunk hack Sky and Steam Miscellany. Bouncing genres and systems.

The answers were mixed. They generally like a roll to hit (aiming high!), stat saves, diegetic and non mechanical skill descriptions, leveling,and story over systems. Oh, and firearms. It was good feedback! 

So, I had already decided the next Season was Corny Grón, and it seems like the ITO chassis is a good fit. I thought that Craftwork framework would be a good fit as it has the skill system built in as well as levels. What tweaks seem appropriate?

One - Levels as Bonus in Combat 

Since we typically get through a handful of levels, it seems like we can eliminate proficiency and just use levels as the bonus number for a roll to hit in combat. Level two with a skill in riflery? +2! Target number is opponents dexterity. Roll high. The rest of combat, damage etc is per ITO. Done. 

Two - Other Skills

These will mostly be handled diegetically. If you have the skill in lock picking, then you are picking the locks. If a skill seems appropriate then give a bonus to a stat for a save. Otherwise saves are as ITO.

Three - Craftwork & CG

As in Salt Palace, I'll pick six crafts to match the CG backgrounds and adjust some skills to fit. The beauty of Craftwork is that it is super fast to adjust and very flexible.

Anything I am forgetting?

Moments of Creation

I ran A Fistful of Feathers by Martin Orchard for some friends last night, party of two, using Cairn, at our FLGS. It's nice because they have a private room in the back, with a big window so you still feel part of things. There were a couple moments that made me think about co-creation.

So your background is Outlaw, so let's assume you've been in Ganderfall village before, maybe to ...

Fence some goods?

Sure, maybe at the bar or tavern?

Well, I'll head there first. I go in and see if Betsy's around, she's who I usually talk to. And I need coffee before I do anything.

Betsy is there and welcomes you warmly, telling you the coffee is on its way.

There was a lot going on in this exchange. The player had just rolled up the character moments before, I read the brief intro from the zine, and the two players decided that they'd met on the road and had been traveling together for a day or two. So they knew each other, kind of. 

From that one word, Outlaw, the two of us, in a few words, established the relationship between the player character and the town. Deconstructing it, we were building on our common understanding of Outlaw, probably someone who ranges over a large territory, familiar with the outdoors, steals things and needs to get rid of them for cash. All of that was rapidly established.

We quickly reached in to our bag of fantasy tropes and pulled out a tavern as the spot to sell things. The player takes the initiative here and creates an NPC with a name, Betsy, and establishes the nature of the relationship with the NPC by throwing in that the tavern will have coffee and that Betsy is close enough to the player character to provide coffee at such an early hour.

The whole exchange took under 30 seconds, no dice were rolled, and there was unspoken trust that by quickly building on our ideas of the situation, we could establish a base for the adventure to proceed.

Player 2, a Cleric who rolled a lot of cooking gear, decided that they drink mushroom tea, not coffee. I think this came from their clothing roll, which was 'foreign', and it was their first choice of an odd habit to adopt. Over the course of the next two and a half hours, the mushroom tea resurfaced multiple times, with the cleric offering it to the first player, again, to their new friend Betsy, and then to a group of fairies they randomly encountered. By that point, the taste of mushroom tea had become something of a joke, as I had rolled poorly for Betsy and for the fairies in terms of their reaction to the offering. 

The centrality in the emergent narrative of the mushroom tea was inarguable. It came up in numerous conversations, and even when the pair ran out of food, became deprived, and then began taking on fatigue, player one still refused to drink the tea.

Together, the two anecdotes, or vignettes, spoke a great deal to me about trust, the endurance of improvisational moments, and the cascade of ideas that can come from single word prompts. When we play again, and if we use the same characters, I have no doubt that both Betsy and the mushroom tea will play a role. Betsy has a place in the world now, a relationship, and the mushroom tea is something that the cleric will continue to proffer as they adventure further.

ENNIE or Outie?

It's an ENNIE!

*****

For Faecraft!

2023 judges circle winners were announced along with the nominees in the various categories. Fake craft was one of five selected by the judges for an award!

Needless to say, I was very surprised and very delighted to see my wee zine bubbling up into the firmament of RPG accolades. Creating Craftwork and Faecraft was, in many ways, and act of appreciation for my players and the tables we share. Their lives and their stories wanted a mechanism to ease the telling, and so I slowly picked apart and put together a flexible system big enough for all of their tales. In some ways,  Craftwork is a how to book and Faecraft is the 'what if' or 'can I'. The answer is almost always 'yes', you can be that being you envision.

Thank you!

Link to the announcement 

odd Robots

For several decades I have been fascinated with games that directly reflect their constituent physical parts. How can mechanics and rules, systems, coexist cozily with how pieces and how can the pieces be part of the system? This started with a Lego based game and now I am noodling around with a Cairn/Mausritter variant: modular robots. This quixotic task, or at least the recent iteration, started a week or so ago.

I bought Micro Circuits, and it wasn't what I imagined it to be. Seems much more like human-in-robot-costume kind of game, which is not a bad thing, just not as deep a dive as I was looking for. What I think I was imagining was a system where the nature of being a robot allowed the characters to mechanically take on features and items from other robots or from the environment. In other words I was looking for a system where the nature of the subject matter reinforced or incorporated the mechanics, that there was synergy between the two. That was not the case, so I started working on...

C.A.I.R.N. is my operating name here... Cellular

Automatic

Independent

Regenerating

Nodes 

Still figuring out the acronym! But I think I have a nice core concept, where everything, even the individual core stats, are a modular part of the robot, and can be reconfigured.