I've just released a plot guide for Galactic 2e called Save the Galaxy!
The guide walks you through your session from character creation to the final epilogue and helps you tell fast paced, tightly plotted, single-session adventures.
Save the Galaxy starts with a quick script for creating characters and establishing the main threat / antagonist. You'll make a version of a Star Wars opening crawl that you'll read as the story begins.
The main story plays out in three acts, each of which are set in a different location. In each act you'll pick scenes from a list and advance the plot. In between acts, you'll get to know the characters better as they spend time together in hyperspace.
I was inspired to design this because I love the GMless and character focused approach of Belonging Outside Belonging games but I yearn for more plot scaffolding to help tell fast paced, single-session stories.
I've released Save the Galaxy under a CC-BY license and I'd love to see folks make guides for other types of stories for Galactic and to see this approach ported to other Belonging Outside Belonging games. I've included the .afpub file for easy remixing.
Yesterday I wrote about running an interactive ~90 person workshop on positive AI economic futures. Today I want to share some of the experience design patterns that @mmasnick and I used to ensure that it was smooth and successful.
We were able to employ a bunch of techniques that we've been exploring over the past few years and hopefully you'll find them interesting, especially if you want to run interactive events. This event was on Zoom but many of these patterns apply on any platform, or even offline.
I’ll start by talking about the overall event design and then shift to cover how we scaffolded and supported the exercises. The event was four hours, had ~90 participants, five exercises, and 5 speeches scattered throughout. A lot of moving parts!
Earlier today, @mmasnick and I had the pleasure of running a 4-hour workshop on Positive AI Economic Futures for @wef and @CHAI_Berkeley
We're thrilled with how it went – here's an overview with details on the goals, exercises, and output:
The event was part of a broader Positive AI + Economy initiative that will include reports, scenarios, and an @xprize film competition that will build on the workshop’s outputs. weforum.org/agenda/2020/10…
We had ~90 attendees, including top economists, technologists, and sci-fi authors – they were awesome and brought a ton of creativity, energy, and expertise!
I just added monetization to @StorySynth, in an experimental, bleeding-edge, not-at-all-practical-but-technically-interesting kinda way.
It’s feels kinda cyberpunk!
A quick thread 🧵
Story Synth takes advantage of the relatively new Web Monetization Protocol (WMP), which enables the easy flow of payments from a user to a website via their browser.
And by easy – I mean you can set it up with just one line of code!
I'm super interested in ways to grow the indie storytelling game market (tabletop RPGs and larps). There's an incredible design renaissance underway, with a huge influx of new designers and groundbreaking designs, but the total revenue in the indie scene seems to remain small.
For some context, 2017 figures had the RPG market at $55MM in rev and mainstream rpgs like D&D earned the vast majority. The market has likely seem major growth since, due to Actual Plays and pop culture mentions but the share of rev is likely still skewed polygon.com/2019/7/29/8934…
Storytelling games are one of the best activities a group of friends can do together – they bring people together to engage in creative play and forge lasting memories. How do we get a ton more people into the hobby? How do we send them to games that are a better fit than D&D?