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I had a discussion with a friend and game designer about a new mechanic for Constellation Cards, which replaces the vague and nebulous “challenge” concept. It’s intended to be a very simple framing for how to handle success vs. failure in any RPG, but the discussion brought up other topics I want to hash out as well.
Friday didn’t happen (for me - I slept through it due to lack of sleep over the last two days), and Sunday Mechatron canceled for real-life reasons. But that left Henshin, the sci-fi Fate game, and Sentinels Comics.
Ski lodge supervillains and Star Wars heists dominated this week’s gaming. Let’s find out what happened and what I thought about it.
Since I know the Sunday Mechatron game isn’t happening, I’m getting this done a day early. This was a week for superhero gaming.
This is a weekly recap of the games I’m in, or games that were talked about. Here’s where this week took me.
I’m going to try writing weekly recaps of the games I’m in, or games that were talked about, and see if that helps organize my thoughts about gaming in general. Let’s start with this week.
It’s sometimes hard for me to find roleplaying games that satisfy the particular goals I have. And I sometimes describe those goals as “moving into a game”, as opposed to what I describe many players as doing, which is “perform themselves”. What do I mean by that, and how do games serve these different goals?
For the Queen is a collaborative card-driven game about the retinue of a certain Queen, and how they feel about her, each other, and themselves. The gist of the game is that while the Queen can be kind, she is also capable of some pretty awful acts, and it’s about your relationship with a person with power over you.
Sounds like Doctor Who to me! So what did I do with it?
I’ve started working on a VTT (Virtual Tabletop), called Lacuna. The goal is to create a self-hostable, open source platform for TTRPG players. Let’s talk about what that will take, and where I am on it.
The premise of a base-building game is that you’ve got a world full of resources, and you want to build up infrastructure to harness those resources and/or achieve objectives. If you’ve played Minecraft, you get the idea.
I’ve played a few such games recently. So what do they do that I like, and what would my ideal base-building game look like?