TRPG General Chat

3:25 AM

[petulant grumble] There's a Fate game I'm extremely uninterested in except that it sounds like it's got very interesting ideas about zones.

bobble

What do you mean by "zones"?

Bardic Wizard

5:43 AM

I got a 4 on the AP European history test!! No score yet for the AP world test (it says code 96, which google says means that it’s taking longer to process my test), but I’m happy with my score so far

I also got up at 4 am to check as soon as it was possible, so now I’m very very tired.

6:26 AM

@bobble Zones are what Fate uses to describe the relationships between physical spaces and the people in them, instead of a grid. When tracking spatial relationships is important to a scene, you break the location up into zones like the Bar, the Parking Lot, the Back Room, and the Alley. Zones aren't specific sizes; rather they're roughly defined as a space where two people in the same zone can easily interact with each other, for whatever value of "interact" the scene is prioritizing.

Sometimes zones are social instead of spatial, but that's much rarer, and there's other kinds of zones some games mess with. Uprising uses zones for spatial relationships and for conditions like "Undetected" simultaneously and I'm very curious what that looks like. But it's a cyberpunk dystopia game and I'm so very uninterested in that.

MikeQ

Normally in Fate, would conditions and spatial relationships be represented as Aspects?

Conditions, definitely.

Zones are ways of describing space as something with qualities and relationships, like a character. It can be the place your PC is, but it can also be On Fire or have a stress track that means the building falls down when it takes too much damage.

But using zones to describe abstract relational states that can be shared by multiple cahracters is... well, I've never seen it done in a way that made me want to emulate it.

8:28 AM

@BESW I'll have to go re-read it

@BESW worth emulating outside of the setting?

The idea of places in cyber space being a single zone is quite interesting

9:04 AM

@AncientSwordRage That's the grumble, I'm curious to know but I'm not inclined fork over $40 for a game I'm otherwise unlikely to get any use out of just to find out.

@AncientSwordRage I'm interested in any thoughts you might have. I intend to expand on the document in the future but don't have much feedback to work with.

A: Why has Community's profile picture changed?

10:12 AM

@BESW nice!!!

I haven't seen this one from you, I'm gonna go check it out later

@Medix2 I also noticed both BESW's and SevenSidedDie's avatars revert to a gravatar the other day.

@bobble Congratulations!! :D

31

Way back in the day we started salting Gravatar image URLs, but only for new users. Older users do not have a salted Gravatar URL. Today we performed a backfill so we can drop an old column Users.Email which contains an email address only used for this purpose but we didn't take into account that...

@bobble oh, this explains everything

@BESW $40 😱

@doppelgreener Traveling Librarians RPG: The Game Guide by BESW. A guide to games about building communities by sharing books.

It's probably my most manifesto-like work to date.

@AncientSwordRage I'd be very happy to pay $40 for a game that's likely to give me and my friends several sessions of joy; after all, D&D was a $100 minimum investment per edition when I was playing that, and board/card/video games frequently exceed that price point for less payoff.

But for a speculative investigation into a potentially useful page or two... maybe less so.

10:31 AM

I just read it through. This is gorgeous, and I'd love to play with it sometime.

@doppelgreener Yey! Any thoughts/comments/feedback/etc that you ever have, I'd love to get.

@BESW oh, completely

...gosh, looking at this layout is embarrassing. I think it was one of the first things I made that was entirely Adobeless and I was still very unsteady with my new workflows and tools.

@BESW I very much enjoy the way you've embedded some safety and communication principles: talk about what you want to see, what you're worried about, and get buy-in before introducing heavy topics.

There was a mechanic in Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, a Castlevania-style game, that had a library maintained by, well, Dracula basically. He let me borrow his books, and which books I picked out modified my attributes. At first I was only allowed one book, and only a small range of books. Later I could borrow more books, and from a broader range of books with unique effects I didn't have access to or stronger effects than I had access to before

That makes my goopy goblin gamer brain all excited about the prospect of, in this epic fantasy librarian setting, getting to pick up books of unique power, and getting to choose between taking them with me or leaving them with a village—and I could just keep them on my person at all time, but I'm a librarian, and the books do better when I share them.

@doppelgreener Heh, yes. The core guiding conceit of the piece is that the concepts which inform the campaign, can and should be generalized and taken on board in other parts of our lives as well.

@doppelgreener Oh, interesting. It's always fun to see what people latch onto and extrapolate by bringing their own schema.

(Aside from the phrase "epic fantasy," the document gives no indication of the supernaturalness of the imagined campaign; it uses real-life examples and language. For me, the epic fantasy is simply being a traveling librarian. But I used the phrase ambiguously, to leave room for the reader.)

10:48 AM

I noticed that!

The things in here are so broadly applicable I could just stick them into a totally ordinary modern mundane game world.

because y'know all the actual world detail is totally modern mundane world detail from our world.

I am literally describing a thing real people are doing in the world today, and giving it a framework inspired by real-life community empowerment projects.

Yeah.

And that's part of the point of the thing: it's using a game to introduce people to attitudes and actions they can take to make the world a better place. Maybe not by becoming traveling librarians, but by applying the principles and structures to their communities.

Like I said, it's very much a manifesto... and it's not a gaming manifesto.

@doppelgreener I'd be VERY fascinated to see what that 5e player is taking from my guide, because I can't imagine a traveling librarian based on my guide being folded into D&D without fundamentally altering the nature of the world they travel through.

D&D doesn't tend to think of people, or communities, or enrichment, in compatible ways.

(The very first time I ever played a PC in a D&D game, I gave him the trait that any new group of people he met, he'd ask to see their books. The very idea that every group, every town, every lair, might have some books, transformed the world as my PC walked through it. The GM and other players looked at NPCs and societies through new, humanizing eyes.)

(This was not my intent going into it, but GOSH did I learn a lot in reflection later.)

11:16 AM

"Tiny Library swaps your regular pack of playing cards for a deck of 50 micro RPGs" article by Matt Jarvis for Dicebreaker. Upcoming RPG collection Tiny Library looks to offer dozens of indie roleplaying games in a deck no bigger than a standard pack of cards.

"The Green Knight RPG turns the standout fantasy film into a familiar adventure lifted by clever gameplay" article by Linda H. Codega for Dicebreaker. Hands-on with the tabletop tie-in to this year's eye-catching Arthurian movie.

Vince Smith asks on twitter for "recs for games *THAT USE GRID MAPS* that aren't the Dragon Game or Pathfinder," and PanzerLion points out "Grids as an accessibility feature" and wonders "ow can they be implemented without going down a wargame hole of mechanics and complexities?"

Demond Does podcast Episode 59: "6Q w/James Mendez Hodes, Cultural Consultant." James Mendez Hodes is a writer, game designer and martial artist. We talk about his work as a cultural consultant, what that entails, the gaps in his martial arts training and more!

Kickstarter: A Compendium of Lesser-Known Cryptids by Zaire N Lanier. The Compendium documents the research of the Seldom Valley Cryptid Society through collected ephemera for a glimpse behind the veil.

Meguey Baker wrote a twitter thread about questions that can be the foundation of worldbuilding.

11:34 AM

@user16502425 Hi! You'll need 20+ rep to type in chat, but you're welcome to hang out until then.

@user16502425 hey there!

@BESW whats the generic name for these:

but not necessarily in a phonebox

Public bookcase

A public bookcase is a cabinet which may be freely and anonymously used for the exchange and storage of books without the formalities associated with libraries. When in public places these cabinets are of a robust and weatherproof design which are available at all times. However, cabinets installed in public or commercial buildings may be simple, unmodified book-shelves and may only be available during certain periods. == Origin == Closely allied with the BookCrossing concept, the original public bookcases were conceived as artistic acts. Very early examples are the creations of performance artist...

That?

BOOK CASE! That's the flippin' word

thanks

it's not Travelling Librarian, but it feels adjacent?

Path to finding that term: I searched "free library," which got me to "Free Little Library" and that gave me the generic term.

11:49 AM

thanks

I tried "Community microlibrary", but that was too specific

I had the advantage of running across the "Free Little Library" project several times in the past, so I knew the kind of words to look for though I couldn't remember the specific name of the project.

nice

(Unfortunately, most of the times that the FLL crosses my timeline, it's in the context of people being Very Gross about it and getting upset that 'their' library isn't being used by the neighborhood in the exact way they'd imagined.)

To my mind, a major difference between a public bookcase and a traveling librarian is that the bookcase does not inherently build community connections.

oh dear

I'm slowly going through the TL game guide, and it occurs to me that "Librarians are neighbors, not missionaries." probably doesn't apply in many game cases, without extensive background or being flexible with developing the story as you go

a side bar helping people get over that way of thinking might be good?

That's definitely the single statement which most comprehensively eliminates D&D-like adaptations of the concept.

11:55 AM

saying smth like. "You might not know all your patrons at character creation, but work with your group to ...<advice>"

@BESW heh, yep

And I think that's a feature, and I'm not very interested in watering it down by suggesting that it could be mitigated or ignored.

noooooo, but a sidebar saying "Here's how you adapt a character to work with that"

so ... differentiating whether the character knows them vs the player

Ah, that's a good distinction.

we got there

a Fate group might be worldbuilding in game, but thats not how everygroup plays

I suspect it'd be rather system-specific, so probably not something I could accommodate in the generic guide. But definitely a major component of the librarian engine I've got percolating.

Thomas Markov

11:59 AM

@Medix2 find a dupe rpg.stackexchange.com/q/189172/62294

Almost certain you have a list for this one.

@BESW exciting

I wanna bring in inspirations from Bubblegumshoe and Lovecraftesque for that.

In particular, I'm imagining that when one librarian PC is visiting the people on their route, the other players are taking on the roles of the people being visited.

Very tempted to bring in a lot of NDNM concepts.

12:12 PM

@BESW hmmm, I'm not personally big on 'troupe' play

It's not something I have a lot of experience with yet, but I think that thematically it's very appropriate for a TL system.

I can see it making sense

12:29 PM

some parts of the guide seem to mix explanation of TLs and how to use them in games, vs. other parts that are much more explicit

maybe that's by design though

There a section that starts:

> This translates to your game table, too. Make
space around each session to talk about what
you’re hoping to see in the game, u

which looks like it's advising on/towards safety tools but it's also next to/same section as bits which are wholly in game

Thomas Markov

Downvote/delete this answer it just repeats another answer from two years ago, and unfortunately got more votes than the original.

the last section, about planning, reflection and action are the bits that probably need expanding the most, but also probably thats both harder to write, and something you've though about the most if you're make a TL engine

@AncientSwordRage Iiiinteresting.

To my eyes, each principle of play has a first paragraph about what the principle looks like in the fiction, and a second paragraph about what that looks like in terms of choices at the table.

@BESW ah ok

it's another player/character distinction I think

some of those choices at the table are made in-character

it's interesting that it's only in the last section I noticed a distinction

Yeah, I probably have a blurrier sense of that distinction than many.

@AncientSwordRage I'm definitely gonna revisit the text with that in mind.

12:43 PM

@BESW yeah... there's meta-discussion of in-game concepts ("short campaigns are about patrons finding joy..."), and then there's straight up out-of-game concepts like challenging themes for players not say, patrons or characters

Heh. That's not how my brain categorizes those at all.

To my mind, those are both "things to talk about in Session Zero."

well there's a difference to me, between "I'm fine our characters spreading challenging topics in game" and "I don't want to discuss challenging topic XYZ myself"

Medix2

@ThomasMarkov Seems like you found the one I would've used

Thomas Markov

haha which one

ah I see

Medix2

At the very least, there's no way none of the like twelve related questions shouldn't count as an answer