The snail mail approach actually sounds rather appealing? Mmmh...
Sweevie
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FU•TU•RI•TY is a trip! Get a couple of friends together, let yourselves inspire each others' imaginations and go buck wild! This game is incredibly good for reincorporating stuff that's already been mentioned, laid out or established.
A beautiful game that quickly has you spanning times and worlds with very personal stories.
While still under development, Songs for the Dusk is already chock full of inspiration!
It catapults Forged in the Dark games into an entirely new direction of community building and exploring and struggling for a future with a hopeful outlook.
The Playbooks are full of contacts you want to meet, stuff you want to come into play and prompts and abilities you to see in action! And their implementation, printed, for Roll20, or as Character Keepers/formatted spreadsheets do a great job of making play with them easy.
A surprisingly tactile game of reflection and discovery. Small physical interactions with "just" a piece of paper can be both impactful and satisfying!
I look forward to being able to properly meet up with people again to play this in part because of how much this game is in response to our current situation.
Knowing You is a game that lets you explore the ending of a relationship. A subject as common as it is rare to be experienced in such an earnest and gentle way.
I highly recommend to take that deep breath required and go for the leap and invite someone to be vulnerable with.
You will end up with a heavy but very warm and full heart <3
I think they have more things in common than they have differences. At they end, you also have a story, i.e. a linear series of events, you can tell each other after the fact.
I feel most of what David Perry describes above also applies to other games that are about "playing to find out what happens". Very few that I know are about playing out a prescribed story.
For example, if I were to write a PbtA OSR game, I would say the MC section should have something like this:
Agenda:
- to engage in creative problem solving.
- to keep the future unpredictable.
Principles:
- Employ and reward player ingenuity.
- Try to be impartial in your judgement.
Malandros—other tight knit communities in tumultuous times with that attention to detail and focus, please!
The elegance that can be found at the core of Cthulhu Dark applied to something different than cosmic horror (there is also a free version of the two page of rules that game has but CN for use of ableist terminology that's changed in the official release).
Super selfishly I'd like some people to do the mind-boggling work of writing new sets of lifepaths and re-working the skills and traits lists of Burning Wheel to match. With, as applicable, a new emotional attribute here or there. Just to center the entire game differently (tbh, I don't know if this is possible). Also, the game could use another social minigame next to the Duel of Wits.
I also need to play some more Good Society but I feel like the core of it could very well be applied to different literary inspired works and their associated societies? Like, I've read people drifting it in the direction of Tolstoy and I can imagine stuff that goes more into the magical realism way of Gabriel García Márquez, for example.
Yeah, Summer Job from Off the Table is doing this hack where you play the Mistaken as the protagonists, right?
So this reframes it to be about losing apathy/disdain and growing attached at the same time as you grow in power to fight the Knights of Polaris. It's got mechanical adjustments to reflect this shift in perspective. I'm very interested to seeing it play it out, it's not going to be any less tragic, though.
But yeah, I love the conflict negotiation system and I've been wanting to get to play it, as well. But also, a game that I feel I would want to feel really comfortable with all the players around the table.
Also, hi, I'm that mystery individual XD ... I'm currently wrestling with what terms to settle on and how I can use them to convey a working abstraction of creating a cosmology without making sweeping generalizations. And how to do that in a way that is still well graspable as a game text.
The main underlying difference (on a game level) is that it will have three perspectives you take on instead of two. So, next to the perspective of the players (who want to introduce interesting content/conflict/questions) and the perspective of the forces/deities/entities/impulses that are active in the cosmos you draw, you will also take the perspective of non-descript folks of that faith/worldview that have opinions, takes and interpretations on the cosmology they follow.
Once I've solved the above to a sufficient degree, this will definitely need playtesting and already before that I also need to figure out how and where I need consultation. Because the topic as a whole touches on many sensitivities that I might only be able to guess at, in the best of cases.
Well, the Gauntlet forums that opened like three days before these here XD
But it's all a weird throwback to late 90s/early 00s, tbh. All the more so with the same typical silly and unnecessary and childish drama that's cropped up, already.
What I notice most is how ways of communication have changed. I think what I miss in forums are reactions; a like or <3 is not quite enough but I also am more sensitive to a posting a reply with some semblance of content and not just a "this. so much this" or something.
But I'm glad there are now places to have persistent and public discussions/longer takes; I never really got into being active on G+ and while Discords/Slacks are good and important, I'm glad this aspect is being covered.
And to be clear: I think it's a good thing to have multiple such places and not just one central location. Ideally they have strong overlaps. I strongly hope we take an open minded approach to each other, learn of each other and not fall into us vs them camps.
The big question I have is how the values of those more private/closed communities that these have sprung out of get to be propagated and lived in these public spaces. I'm excited for this, here, especially because who has taken the lead for this space that is tied so closely to creators' ways to distribute their stuff.
To tack on to what @strasa said, you can view Blades in the Dark's core resolution mechanic as a on the fly custom move generator with the back and forth about position and effect.
And I also would not discount how heavy of an influence I feel Burning Wheel has been on Blades and thus subsequent FitD games. Its got the core of reflecting on "beliefs" as a major drive, two of the three xp triggers for characters are about that tension.
It is much less obvious than the more appearance-leaning bits like playbooks, which I feel are very much smoke and mirrors for accessibility's sake (like, nothing actually breaks if you mix and match different xp triggers, special abilities, items, contacts, gather info questions... it would just be a lot to take in if it came presented in that modular way).
Then there is also the thing where most PbtA games tend to revolve around 8-12 session campaigns and FitD easily goes for 20+. One is not better than the other but its a major difference in my mind.
The games that I enjoy to watch, play in and run myself are focused on the players first, the game second and then the audience some distant third.
The fun about streamed games is the aspect of sharing and learning from each other. That doesn't take an audience of many.
I've found everyone is a little more 'on' when it is a streamed game, on average, and that is a thing I do like, as well. We get together for 2-3h of a focused activity. That doesn't mean it can't be chill or that it has to be all about the extroverted acting performance towards an audience. My current streamed game of Monsterhearts 2 is like that and the game is a brilliant experience.
And personally, I don't care much for over-emoting/riffing for an audience while over-emoting because you are muted on cam and you are cheering your fellow player on is just so much fun (to watch)! It's a big difference and the game being played factors hugely into this.