I grew up in Suzhou, China, which had a population of about 6 million people when I was living there and has only grown since then. I considered it to be a small city in comparison to Shanghai, which was roughly an hour away and had a population of 25 million and better public transportation. … urban depthcrawl
On January 1st, Idle Cartulary over at Playful Void threw down the gauntlet by challenging everyone to make a dungeon zine. Everyone should make a dungeon, at least once. Everyone should get in touch with the hands-on craft of something physical like a zine. Everyone should get a little messy with it. I took this … dungeons (where do i start?)
Let’s take the fact that System Matters is given. How do we determine whether a specific system is a good or bad fit? What are games, actually? The good news is that people have been giving this a lot of thought for a long time. The bad news is that there are no clear definitions. … system anatomy: theory 103
In July 1999, Ron Edwards posted an essay called “System Does Matter”. A copy of this essay is available on the now-defunct forums of The Forge, which was a community of people interested in publishing their own RPGs. A large percentage of all ttrpg discussion and discourse can be traced back to this fundamental concept. … system matters: theory 102
Jargon is necessary to have deeper conversations from an academic perspective. In order to build upon ideas, we develop a shorthand to refer to foundational concepts. I don’t want to assume that any readers of this blog are already familiar with pre-existing jargon, so I’m going to explain foundational concepts as they come up. rules … rules elide: theory 101
