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What the referee does in an OSR game, and what a game is

Prepare a scenario for play, using whatever tools are standard Frame scenes, including describing locations and marking the passage of time Tell other players whatever their characters would know Play their characters, on and off screen Adjudicate task resolution Make models And that’s it, literally nothing else. “Game” here doesn’t just mean published rules text, though it does also mean that. Mostly though it means whatever set of techniques, distributions of authority, constraints on authority, and resolution procedures your play group in fact uses. Following are some possible parts of a game that might not be in any rules text. They’re in the game if the play group does them. Write a little two-sentence bio. Make two characters at once, because one will likely die soon. Since your character died, do you want to play that guard until the end of session? Feel free to add details about [this place], your character is from there. Nat 20, nice! Tell me how you do it. We’re playing...
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Finding the fun: reward cycles

Since the Forge has lost some currency in popular RPG discourse, we don’t much talk about its theoretical fruits. In the following blog post, I’ll recover the Forgie notion of "reward cycle", with copious examples, mostly from actual play, disambiguating it from other concepts and showing how it sometimes works in play or goes astray. In the Forgie concept of games, a game is an instrument that a skilled play group uses to focus its play. We play games, not the other way around. I've written this blog post  to show how a skilled play group relates to a good game. I'm not writing for designers, though I do offer some tips for design, but for anybody interested in the phenomenology of play. Collective affective response and skilled play Group RPGs are social games. When I play well, I get a collective affective response. When things are going well, creatively, I can literally see it on the face of everyone playing. We’re all leaning in. (Note that “things going well, cr...
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Goofy Sorcerer pitch: Sorcerer: King of Games

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One-sheet pitch Inspiration: Yu-Gi-Oh! the cartoon Look & Feel: Early 2000s children's cartoon from Japan. Expect inexplicable hair. Also expect guns; this ain't 4Kids. Premise: What kind of person will you grow up to be, and how will a children's card game play into that? Humanity: The power of friendship Humanity gain: Being a good, honest person, who supports your friends Humanity loss: Cheating, betraying friends, being mean Humanity 0: Turn into Kaiba circa episode 1, a selfish jerk who'd put an old man in a hospital to get a rare card. Naturally you can keep playing at 0 Humanity, but you're subject to sorcerous rituals, the GM can hose you with karmic retribution, and, if you're using a Millennium Artifact, you turn into the demon of the artifact. Lore: Insight into the heart of the cards and the game's ancient origins in Egypt and Atlantis Demons: Egyptian and Atlantean spirits bound to playing cards. Past that, go wild! Seriously, look up Yu-Gi-...
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Talking about dead people, a game (v0.1)

Agree on a name and age. Everybody plays somebody in a conversation about the dead person. You don't have to say outright what your relationship with the dead person was. Take turns talking about the dead person. Before you talk about them, think of a topic or statement and make a prediction about a draw from a deck of cards. Draw a card. If it's within the prediction, the statement is true or the topic applies. Otherwise, it definitely doesn't. A turn can be very short. It needn't discuss the dead person directly. Others can interject with small details, ask or answer questions, or otherwise speak, during your turn. Stop whenever. 
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Godzillas: Shin Godzilla (2016) and Godzilla Minus One (2022)

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Watched those two movies this week. Never saw any of the Godzilla movies before. Damn this post would be better with pictures but it's low-effort late-night blogging and you get what you pay for. In Shin Godzilla, the monster just walks. People say this a couple times through the movie, and it's a great line, so it's worth repeating. The monster did all that... and it just walks. It doesn't want anything. It isn't angry and it doesn't hate you. It's not trying to hurt you. It just walks. That's a fantastic(al), alien portrayal of a monster. Monster as natural disaster. (Everybody else has already made the comparisons with the tsunami and nuclear incident, which is intentional, but none of the reviews on wikipedia talk about how the monster just walks.) (Ok it smacks people and shoots lasers when somebody is attacking it, but that barely counts.) Still from Shin Godzilla; the monster's first form, adorkable! I love how fishy it looks The monster is to...
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Apocalypse World does not have hard and soft moves

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The PbtA community regularly refers to a distinction between "hard" and "soft" moves,. But this distinction is foreign to the game Apocalypse World itself, and should not be backported to it. You can run an internet search to see people trying to establish this distinction in that game. My reference edition here is Apocalypse World 1e (2010), because it's available for free . Cover of AW 1e We find our first reference to the hardness of a move on page 117: Generally, limit yourself to a move that'll (a) set you up for a future harder move, and (b) give the players' characters some opportunity to act and react. A start to the action, not its conclusion. However, when a player's character hands you the perfect opportunity on a golden plate, make as hard and direct a move as you like. It's not the meaner the better, although mean is often good. Best is: make it irrevocable. When a player's character make a move and the player misses the roll, th...
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Reading some early Alan Moore, part 1: V for Vendetta

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Recently I have been reading a lot of comics, including a lot of Alan Moore (V for Vendetta, Swamp Thing, Miracleman, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, Watchmen, From Hell). A mixed bag, but he constantly opens up interesting topics. In this series of posts I'm going to go through each of his writings that I have read, in publication order. I'm particularly interested in Moore's treatment of race, sex, gender, and authority. I'll try to talk about art as I go, but I'm not well-educated on the topic. Consequently I'll be giving the artist short shrift, and probably assigning Moore too much responsibility in plotting and conceptualizing the comic.  V for Vendetta I first read this as a child, without any strong preconceptions for what comics "are like" or "should be". Therefore its innovative formal qualities were totally lost on me. I had no idea that comics didn't usually feature changed page orientations or musical interludes, a...
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