Dispatches from Nowhere

Posts

What if old school gaming is just a personal perspective? Here comes mine!

What if old school gaming is just a personal perspective? Here comes mine! Hello again, I got myself thinking a lot about this theme and came up with some conclusions. Having in mind that I don’t live in a “first world” country, I’m not a late 70s grognard, but I’m (or I’m getting) old. I think that all old school gaming experience or at least first RPGS experiences can be valid and maybe should be discussed. This came to my mind because my son told me (and for this I’m very proud) that he is playing RPGs at school during breaks. I, of course, asked him about the system and got the best answer I could imagine. He said: “we are “flipping” a erase, one side is yes and the other is no. And that’s all the outcome we need”. Besides being very proud, it filled me with hope to share a lifetime hobby with him (we are not playing oftenly), in addition a nostalgia and good memories came immediately to my mind. This immediately transported me to my teenage school years, and

Terrible Fun

blog post terrible fun I’m not playing a lot of TTRPGs games, it has been a while since I’ve run a proper game. Did some solo dungeon crawls lately, felt good, but mostly I know and even more important I want to play more RPGs. I don’t know why I started the post with this vent, probably because I’m not using the topic of this post very often lately, but hear me out, this can make sense. When I was playing more, mostly with my brother and close friends we had a pact, a zero section “contract”, that was named in portuguese by Prosaiko as: “zoeira terrivel”, I did spent some time trying to think about a good translation but came with the not best one which is: terrible fun. The world was terrible for the miserable, unfortunate PCs. We mostly played OSR fantasy and horror games/settings and I guess these are meant to not be welcoming places or settings. Mostly it was not a fun place to be, jokes, playing around would not make real sense facing imminent death, of cou

Relax and enjoy the crawl: how CSI-esque behavior by the players can spoil the dungeon crawl experience

Relax and enjoy the crawl: how CSI-esque behavior by the players can spoil the dungeon crawl experience If there’s something that I don’t like anymore, over the years of playing and running OSR/OS games (and I don’t know if I ever liked it) is: the fear of exploration due to traps and surprises during the dungeon crawling. When players understand the playstyle and how ten foot pole exploration works, it can often cause the real focus of exploration in the dungeon crawl to be lost. Of course, this is all according to my experience and opinion. What I think is best about the dungeon crawl is the exploration experience itself. And by exploration I mean: looking at how and why this structure exists geologically, architectonically, socially and how it was organized around that. When someone wants to visit/explore, even as a tourist, a new (possibly dangerous) place, something like the history of the place and its origin and even a contemplation of the environment to

Stacked Tower - Wizard Tower Generator for MiniBX

Stacked Tower This is a tool to generate a wizard tower by stacking dice, it can be played in a solo mode or with a group of players. For this, traditional dice sets (d4, d6, d8, d12 and d20) must be used, and each die will generate a specific tower room. The type or number of faces of the die will represent the type of room( d4 - the wizard’s chamber, d6 - sample deposit, d8 - the observatory, d12 - the library, d20 - laboratory), and the roll itself will determine the content of the room. The Stacking Mechanic. The dice should be stacked in any order (except for the d4, which I think should be the last one to be stacked, as I couldn’t think of a way to stack other dice on top of this particular one.) The players should take turns at stacking the dice. Touching only the die that will be stacked. If the dice pile falls, the tower collapses. This should represent the thrill of exploring a ruined but still active tower. Players can spend 1 save (only o

Game Design Choices fo MiniBX Hello friends, as you people probably noticed, I’m running an itch funding for my new game MiniBX here . It is an attempt to make this game, already released in Portuguese, a real thing in English as well. I ran the playtest, or the first play of it, with my kids, and also in a Neverland mini campaign with close friends. It ran well and, of course, some adjustments were made during the sessions, so the English version is a bit different from the Portuguese one. I can’t lie that it has been some time since I engaged in a big campaign of this game, or played several sessions, so I kinda forgot what my design choices were. But, the recent reviews of the game made me remember that it is kind of a cool game with some interesting design choices. So I will try to write about the most important design choices here. Of course this is an attempt to get this game funded and all its awesome stretch goals, so if you like this idea back it, it w

The Lock and Key Dungeons

I was recently trying to make a dungeon for a module I was writing, but I wasn't happy with the initial dungeon at all. From the suggestion of one of the editors I decided to redo it, which brought me this thought about how to make a dungeon with puzzles related to the narrative/exploration and having it be tied to the story in a meaningful way. Initially the idea is very simple, we would have a key that would open a door or a location in a dungeon. But in fact, both the key and the lock would be metaphors. The meaning of these metaphors could reframe this simple concept. There would then be some categories, which I will try to explore below. Some examples of keys: Lore, Power, Exploration, Interaction/Alliances , but they are vast. All these "keys" would then open "locks" of places in the dungeon to be explored, in the broadest sense of the word, and all of them would also be attached to the meaning of it’s key. The Lore Key Lore itself can open hidden or loc