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...

Hi it's me again! The person who writes this blog! And also, I feel comfortable betting, the person who reads this blog! I'm back this week with another hair-raising bone-rattling one quarter portion just add water of the only thing this blog does lately: Mechanic Monday! I should be easier on myself.  This blog was never meant to be for popular consumption or profit, but rather to get out, articulate, brainstorm and build on my design ideas.  And I’ve nailed that, especially with a weekly habit/ritual that I can reliably fulfill.  Red ocean blue ocean buddy.  Get good at your own thing not someone else's thing.  Anyway, I’m kind of reaching the end of this one-game-focus experiment, I’ve sketched out pretty much every element of Fantasy GM Squared at this point; this will probably be my last MM on this one, at least for a while.  Time to stop talking and start (keep) doing.  And this last one is kind of a weird meta one that I may not actually end up...

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand We’re Back (A Dinosaur Story) with another installment of nobody’s favourite Feature on the #0 Game Design Blog on Tipper Gore’s World Wide Web, Mechaniiiiiic Mondaaaaaay! This week, we’re going to take a look at - you guessed it - Fantasy GM Squared! It’s almost like I’m trying to focus on one design to the exclusion of others, in order to actually get it to the point where it can be worked on and playtested to a more meaningful degree than my previous designs! Wowzers.  What a concept.  But it’s a good challenge for me to stay locked in and innovate even when I’m not inspired to, as opposed to haring off to tinker on the latest new brainbug to infect my mind.  So I’ll keep on plunging my hands into the guts of this thing. So, what’ll it be today? More of people’s favourite bit of Fantasy: Player Acquisition.  But this time, it’s the other half of the equation - Free Agency! Free Agency Outside of the Draft, there are two ways to acquire Heroes...

Is it a Mechanic Monday if it’s on a Thursday? You bet your ass it is! It’s been a crazy busy week for me, what with work and the theatre company and [my dog] and my poor time management skills and my need to fill every hour with productivity and the smiling oppressive all-crinkling eye of Capitalism and ANYWAY.  Gonna keep work, work, working away at Fantasy GM Squared (maybe I’ll just go with square cards to double-down on that title?) because it’s got the most legs, legs, legs, marketability.  I even made a Google Form to try and harvest data on just what it is that non-gamers most like about fantasy sports, and will try and spring that on people in the coming weeks.  But today, let’s talk about a mechanic, shall we? Here it is: The Front Office! Front Office When a Hero is at the Dedicate level, and the season ends, instead of rotating them again, flip the Hero card over and place it in your Guild’s Front Office.  For the remainder of the game, that Hero, no...

Hey hey hey, it’s the start of the work week, time to prop your eyelids up with toothpicks, winch open your mouth for the caffeine spout, and numb the pain with another episode of MECHANIC MONDAY! Ha ha, light stuff, light stuff, we sure have fun here.  My wife and I cleaned recently (not exactly a KonMari but definitely some purging) and I organized or binned a bunch of old PnP stuff and old drafts of some of my previous designs.  Now, with our guest room / office finally in striking distance of being done, I am of course considering busting out more office supplies and setting up some sort of filing system for the analog manifestations of my prototypes and WIP designs.  A folder for each game, each with its own notebook, the various drafts of rules, feedback from various playtests, etc.  It might be helpful for me to keep projects from getting lost in the shuffle, or it may cause me to feel an unearned sense of completeness as designs crystallize and ossify. ...