A fun technique I like to use in my games is something I call "inside out". You can use it in anything, and IME is a really great way to pause and get a look at what characters are feeling and most importantly, how they express what they feel.

Also it's pretty simple! In the downtime of some crazy event or in the middle of something out of the ordinary, ask a player: "what is your character feeling right now?"

Feel free to be curious and ask followups...it is sort of like an in game interview.

A thing I want to talk about real quick:

A couple of years ago I was pretty sure I wouldn't design anything again, and was just playing RPGs here and there with friends.

I was tired and spent, feeling like nothing I had done mattered, and that TTRPGs had no place for me. I was going through family stuff, and dealing with a lot of stress on top of that.

So I'm at my local comic store getting gunpla and I see that Pathfinder 2e was out. I hadn't followed any of the playtest, so knew really nothing about it.

So. Last night's game...the players leveled up to 9 and then they did their first shadow walk!

Shadow walk is such a cool campaign changing spell that I felt compelled to cover the details on how the formula came to our illusionist and also how everyone experienced the walk. Our barrister monk who deals with infernal contract laws and already has her foot in infernal business felt like a rubber band pulled in two directions and suddenly let go toanap back in on itself. She uh... spent a bit of time puking.

So me and my buddy Ryven are casually building this cortex mecha game in discord, and the fun experiment in method is that, after we built a sample mech, we outlined an adventure and are building our pregen characters and mechs for that... ...the adventure is becoming the spec to which we are building the characters and mechs, but also informs what mods and rules we are going to use.

The adventure is a bit like our testing framework, where we can easily try something new and test it in the frame...

Pathfinder tonight! Excited for some new twists and turns in the story, and also interested in seeing the characters at level 9. Getting close to two years I've been running this game! It has gone from biweekly fall of plaguestone to weekly custom adventures. There are occasional pauses but we play way more weeks than not. When life is funky, it is a welcome distraction...

OK, morning writing session done, before I get my work on, I wanna talk about...balance in TTRPGs.

<throws grenade into hall, ducks> This is how I've experienced balance in play and in design, and how I've witnessed balance in gamer culture.

<takes a breath...>

A lot of what gets said about balance in TTRPGs is nonsensical bullshit IMO.

OK, a thing has been bubbling in my head re TTRPG design lately:

Narrative drive vs narrative opportunism.

First: disclaimers!

I get, uhm...really fatigued with "grand unified theories" in TTRPg design - diff games, diff brains - so I deal with lenses... If it helps you see, dope! If not, darn, but I accept that.

I wont be spending a lot of time arguing about the validity of the lens, but happy to talk about the particulars of the lens. I am OK if you don't "get it"....maybe next time!

OK, disclaimers done.

So, I talked about action and its contract of effective violence yesterday.

I wanna talk about something else that goes hand in hand with our action fantasy: tone.

Specifically I want to talk about the comedy/drama spectrum. Wrote about this:

thoughtcrimegames.net/tough-but-funn… Talking about it some more, it breaks down like this:

Whether we are moving towards comedy (more upbeat, amusing, not just jokes) or drama (more serious and consequential) is a function of character resiliency.

How easily do characters "snap back" from stress?

So many people think that good and evil are the lynchpins of classic action fantasy.

Good and evil are the fructose corn syrup of action fantasy.

Addictive, and so sweet it warps your senses to what sweet should taste like. What really makes action genres of all sorts work is this contract:

Violence can solve problems.

In RL, violence sets these terrible chains in motions and hurts far more than helps...

But in action fiction you CAN punch the right person and solve a wide array of problems.

Pathfinder game last night brought up something I think should be explicit in most games:

Death should be a choice.

By this, I mean that when you drop something to 0HP or equivalent, you can choose whether it is actually killed or not. I know PF and other games have rules for nonlethality but the truth is that most of the game (most games in general) point most of the system at lethality, which means doing a bunch of extra stuff to not kill.

But in other, more important news: I wanna talk about COMBAT.

So, I am going to talk about systems where combat is more 'atomic' and more blow-by-blow, but I think you'll easily see where the use is for systems with a more summarizing, gestalt view. Systems where we are rolling for particulars each round have cons that are well known:
- can be time-consuming
- can be complex
What I am not going to do is talk about how to minimize these things. Let's lean into strengths!

Running my girlfriend's first D&D game tonight with some friends!

Hell yeah I am going to tell you about the setting. Campaign name is "Evanishment", where the thing disappearing is magic.

It's a steampunk setting where the characters live high in the mountains above "The Dust", a mutating, lethal fog that covers most of the world's surface.

I won't be livetweeting my entire read through of PF 2e, but I need to say hell yeah for abolishing "race" in fantasy RPGs.

Race is about "what" you are. But more important for story is where you are from. It aligns better with culture and ethnicity.

Bravo, team. Thank you. You'd think that ppl could bridge the gap between the notion of race in a fantasy race and real race.

I used to think that too, until I was playing at a con and some dude started to innocently and sweetly tell me how 4e races mapped to real human ethnicities and cultures...

One day I will be talking about anime/manga/MTG/RPG/etc, but for the next little bit, y'all get "life skillz" Quinn.

With that sad, let's strap in. I was looking at the sources of my resentments and stress over the last week.

Imagine my (non-)surprise when I discovered they were almost entirely internal.

My resentments and stresses resulted by the times I didn't speak up for what I wanted, and went with the flow.