Here's a draft cover layout for my game idea inspired by "Robotech: Invid Invasion," featuring everyone's favorite gender-nonconforming musician & revolutionary: Lancer!
I will definitely hire an artist to create a cover image that doesn't infringe on anyone's IP, if it gets that far. This is me just trying stuff out to inspire myself.
@ludopolitics There's an older RPG-presented-as-board-game called Untold: Adventures Await, from the guy behind Rory's Story Cubes. If you find a copy, it has a similar Yes/No/And/But system that the AT game was going to have. Maybe you can work out an AT hack for it!
Oh no. I think I just started a new game draft that's a heavy For The Queen hack with a lot swearing?
RAPTOR NEST (working title)
You are a real piece-of-shit who, for some reason, owns a fucking raptor — a semi-autonomous spaceplane gunship. And not because you’re a soul-contracted client soldier, bankrolled by an evil-ass gigacorp or star empire, either. No, you’re the doomed owner of a fucking FREE raptor, beholden to no one but yourself, you poor hopeless fool.
Dreamed about a Muppet film version of Hamlet called "Mupplet," where the only human is Hamlet. I assume Miss Piggy played Queen Gertrude but I have no idea who would play Ophelia. Janice from the Electric Mayhem?
That thing in games where game designers are both minor celebrities and also often among the least important people in determining what actually happens during play.
@ludopolitics maybe I’m just really unplugged on the latest GM tools, but what the fuck is a digital campaign manager tool? Like does it automatically generate dungeons for you? It would be nice if it would go out for fresh coffee and croissants the morning after, but I’m guessing that’s not a feature either.
Last few years, I've been feeling that @megueyb + @lumpley's Apocalypse World and Avery's most recent half-dozen games (since Quiet Year) -- plus everything released since -- have left me thinking a lot about "responding to a prompt" as the micro-foundation of TRPG play.
I don't know if I can fully articulate it, or put it into a clouds-and-arrows diagram. And, in the end, it's not particularly complicated or insightful. But I think it helps reframe TRPGs (and all play?) in useful ways.
Part of it is what this approach leaves out: it doesn't assume a GM, or dice, or more than 1 player, or any other of the "standard" TRPG trappings that often come with some RPG theories and perspectives.
It also doesn't specify much about what can be a prompt (anything can be a prompt) or how people respond to any given prompt (they can respond in countless different ways). But it allows for snowballing in the sense that one player's response is often a prompt that invokes additional responses.
It's also, I think, broadly inclusive of everything that TRPGs have become and will continue to expand to be, at least for a while. And it works as a framework to bridge TRPGs and other types of games, since it's possible to view all play as responding to prompts.
It also doesn't necessarily require that accurate or deep communication is happening between different players, or between players and game materials. That can happen, but it's not required or assumed.
I feel like the hardest part about making a game about minor nature gods is figuring out the setting. If you set it in the real world, then you bring all that baggage along. If you set it in a fantasy world, then you have to convey both the fictional setting and the spirit world of that fictional setting to the players. Maybe I can just have the players invent the world themselves?
@nickwedig@linnaeus@ludopolitics To go along with an answer to a different thread you can have the broader setting painted in broad strokes and the actual setting — as in the locale the PCs interact with — created more collaboratively.
My next personal game-design project looks like it'll be re-theming, redesigning, and repairing a 1962 Gottlieb pinball machine. It's gonna be a lot of work to produce 1 single copy, likely the only version of the game that will ever exist. But it'll be magical.
I bought this machine from Pinball PA and have chatted a bunch with the folks at Pinball Perfection, so I have just enough sense of what I'm doing to be dangerous. I'm also teaming up with my colleague who runs the Physical Computing Lab at CMU, which makes it slightly less dangerous but also slightly more likely that we might cheat and put an Arduino in it if we can't figure some things out. Hopefully not!
@ludopolitics@nickwedig Hey J, I worked on another Cover Girl a few years ago when I was a senior tech at PAPA; thought this was the same game for a minute but nah, mine had less paint on the bisected centre target. :)
I'll bet dollars to donuts this thing is either still on its original power cable or on a lamp-cord replacement and IIRC there's line voltage on the coin door on this one, so for safety do be sure to run your ground from the xformer frame all around anything metal the player can touch. They didn't ground anything back then. :P Also a standard computer-style C13 cable with the end cut off is often cheaper than buying three-conductor wire and making your own. :) Any questions just give us a shout!