Velocimancer Games

Hahahaha I don’t actually have time to do this today and yet! It’s Mechanic Monday! Today’s a conjecture on something that I don’t even know exists? It’s based on my understanding of what a program can do, and spins wildly off into hypothesis territory from there.  Anyway at my day job everyone has at least two screens.  It’s that kind of workplace.  Three is becoming the norm, I’ve seen people with five.  Which seems aggressively excessive.  And I see a weird number of people using programs that look like they’re for coding? Considering very few people here work in any capacity on anything that would involve code? But it means I’ve long flirted with the idea of playing a MUD right out in the open on my desktop.  Just fire up Darkmists or some other telnet-based text game, and who would know it wasn’t me tappity-tap-tap-tapping away on important company business (once the ASCII art intro finishes scrolling of course)? I already do some shorthand things - t...

This week's Mechanic Monday is uhhhhh a TTRPG Tuesday, totally on purpose and everything.  Yeah! I planned this. Honestly I really struggle with RPGs.  Like so many others, I grew up playing DnD, mostly with other socially- and emotionally-stunted young men.  It gave me an extremely narrow view of the hobby: first as a glimpse into a kind of sandboxy freedom that was still on the distant horizon for digital games; then later as a very bifurcated experience between juvenile wish fulfillment and a miniatures strategy wargame that occupied much more of my imagination.  There were moments of unforgettable, beautiful, hilarious storytelling, sure; but they always felt emergent, rather than a function of the game or its mechanics.  It was tremendous fun, but like I said, its scope was very limited even then, and that boxed-in understanding of what a TTRPG is and what it can do, has coloured my experience down the years.  Working recently on the John Silence RPG,...

It’s super fucken late, but I’m gonna try (day of, nothing pre-written!) to get out a M-M-Mechanic Monday! Thanks for tuning in loyal listeners, despite my radio silence last week.  It was the opening night of my theatre’s latest show, and to say that I had my hands full is putting it laughably mildly.  But that sucker’s open, time to turn my thoughts back toward game design.  Been working hard pretty much every free moment I can steal at work (where I have access to Microsoft Word, because ghetto fab baby) to work on refining the rules for Fantasy GM Squared and getting a prototype ready.  I’m gonna burn my damn eyes out, what with tryna do that ON TOP OF the massive amount of files I’m reviewing as the busy season hits at work.  But c’est la vie! I’m trying to get some mindless copy-paste-formatting stuff done here at home tonight (although it would have been better to have had the mouse and both screens for this task), and the last thing I’ve been fiddling wi...