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SymbolicCity

@SymbolicCity@dice.camp

Indie TTRPG designer: Follow the Bones, Brave Spartan, Last Dispatch, What Fiend Stalks the Night? Talks often about game design, hobbyist community, and the philosophy of play. Boosts genre art for inspiration, but only if it has alt text.

#nobridge #nobot

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

EvlynMoreau , to random
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Coffee shop time baby!!!
DRAWING TIME!
Oh yeah :D

SymbolicCity ,
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@EvlynMoreau I dig it!

bwebster , to random
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I think I have about 1-2 sessions left in my mini-campaign, and I’m excited to start the next thing after that, whatever it ends up being. I like a lot about Cairn, but the focus on equipment is really starting to grate on me. It’s possibly one of the least interesting things about TTRPGs for me, but you can’t not care about it in Cairn. I’ve also struggled with the lack of guidance around advancement, but that might just be a me thing. Hoping the 2e wardens guide has more advice there.

SymbolicCity ,
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@bwebster Advancement is a recurring topic on the Cairn discord, and the answer is that there's no real mechanical advancement in the game. Better equipment can make your characters more powerful, but most other changes are narrative.

SymbolicCity ,
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@bwebster It's definitely designed to streamline playing a lot of old school modules, but people (including the creator) do use it for more extended narrative type campaigns. The trick, I think, is to focus on giving the players interesting choices and getting in the habit of saying yes to anything reasonable that they decide, and looking at Cairn itself as a set of rules to fall back on whenever there's a clear risk.

SymbolicCity , to random
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Coming up with 216 historically appropriate names is just one of the many exciting challenges you'll face as a TTRPG designer.

SymbolicCity , to random
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"Alright, I should have all the public domain art I need for a while," he said, laughably.

SymbolicCity , to random
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"A low-prep, rules-lite RPG" just rolls off of me now. I don't even hear it. It should speak to my preferences, but so many games are making those claims that it does nothing to draw my attention.

Tell me what sets your game apart, what's cool about your setting, what sort of adventures it's built to do really well. If you're not sure how to pitch it that way, then maybe spend a little more time with it. Having a clear vision beyond low-prep, rules-light is a big, big draw.

hawksquill , to random
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I have to keep reminding myself that when I see "distro" on here, it's almost always going to be a Linux thing and not a zine thing.

SymbolicCity ,
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@hawksquill You can shift that balance by muting some Linux-adjacent terms and following the and hashtags.

sage , to random
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Mod supervision input requested:

In a recent case I gave a user a warning (which is a thing in Mastodon, it records the strike in the mod interface and leaves a note for future mod action) but left the reported posts up, since it seemed like the harm was already done—deleting the posts didn't seem to mitigate harm, but might have lead to misunderstanding since the outside-the-rules posts couldn't been seen.

Is this a good approach, or should we err on the side of taking them down?

SymbolicCity ,
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@sage I'd probably err on the side of taking it down, though it probably depends on the rule that was violated. It's not always easy to assess whether a post is done doing harm, and if there's a rule to violate, it's likely there to prevent ongoing harm, right?

sage , to random
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Based on the information below, both of these instances have been blocked from dice.camp.

https://social.growyourown.services/@homegrown/112604623541524800

SymbolicCity ,
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@sage It's not clear to me that they're actually federating via ActivityPub, so blocking them in Mastodon may not be enough to keep them out. If you can disallow them on the http server, that'll be better protection.

SymbolicCity , to random
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Dropped just shy of 10GB of TTRPG PDFs onto a flash drive so I can free up some space on my hard drive.

SymbolicCity OP ,
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Granted, I have a lot of digital editions of TTRPGs, but even so, most of us could be doing a much better job of compressing our images.

victorgijsbers , to random
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I feel a disconnect from 'fandom'. Like, I just don't get it.

I understand loving a particular book or movie. But I find it extremely hard to understand why, if one loves a particular book/movie, one would want more stories (even by other authors or in totally diferent media) set in 'the same universe', or why one would want to set one's own creative writing in that 'universe', and so on.

I'm re-reading and loving Le Guin's Earthsea series, but I'm not eager for an Earthsea game/movie etc.

SymbolicCity ,
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@victorgijsbers I think it makes more sense if you view fiction primarily as a form of escapism. If you view a book as a meaningful work of art, then you may be more prone to see additions to that work as potential corruptions of, or retractions from, what made meaningful to you in the first place. But if the point is to escape into a preferred reality, then there can never be enough of that world to satisfy you.

Tim_Eagon , to random
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This morning, as I was laying on the couch watching my son draw, I was reading a review of an adventure by Bryce Lynch. While criticizing florid prose, he wrote "Adventure writing is technical writing and has a different set of rules for how to present information." I'm inclined to agree with this statement, even though I've never really thought about it in those terms. Thoughts?

SymbolicCity ,
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@Tim_Eagon Yes, but also, depicting the world is part of the GM's role, and evocative writing can, if done right, be a technical aid to that task.

ulysses , to random
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Played Penny Black today. It’s a quick tile drafting game where you place stamps in your album in ways that meet your objectives. I made the mistake of picking objectives that had mutually exclusive conditions. Oops. Oh well.

Because x cover

SymbolicCity ,
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@ulysses I've heard really good things about Penny Black. Did you enjoy it otherwise?

SymbolicCity ,
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@ulysses That's a good game to have in your up your sleeve. Thanks.

SymbolicCity , to random
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I've been chopping up some public domain art, collaging it together into art, somewhat similar to Johan Nohr's design on Into the Odd: Remastered, though not as colorful. A little more home printable, a little less Raygun Magazine. And I'm really happy with the results so far, so this will almost certainly be the art style for my nearly-finished game.

SymbolicCity OP ,
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This one tableau I just slotted into the layout just absolutely slaps. I'll try to remember to share some art when I'm a little closer to pressing publish on itch.

SymbolicCity OP ,
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@Glupinickname Won't be long now!

ludopolitics , to random
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Messing around with another possible publishing logo, inspired by abstract art and brutalism. This is mostly just the concept, not a polished version.

SymbolicCity ,
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@ludopolitics I like that one a lot. I've been thinking along similar lines for a new logo for myself. Different enough that there wouldn't be much confusion, though.

SymbolicCity , to random
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Love to see it: https://lonespelunker.itch.io/welcome-aboard-captain/devlog/745596/replacing-all-ai-art-with-human-drawn-art-in-welcome-aboard-captain

SymbolicCity , to random
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Anecdotally, it looks to me like the corner of the fediverse boosts and favs less often than your average, engaged account. Replies less, too, maybe. I'm not just talking about my posts. Most of the boosts I see via this account are about other topics—politics, as often as not. Maybe we got too accustomed to letting an algorithm do the work for us, but that's not how conversation spreads in the fediverse. I don't see how TTRPG fedi can grow if we don't cheer one another on more.

SymbolicCity OP ,
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@AndreasDavour @Glupinickname @SJohnRoss There are certainly assholes in the fediverse, but domain blocking and good moderation make it easier to quarantine them off in their own dark corners.

Of course, that experience varies by home server. mastodon.social isn't as proactive about moderation and defederation as other servers, so accounts there may be more prone to see the worst of the network.

SymbolicCity OP ,
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@SJohnRoss @AndreasDavour @Glupinickname I think there are still people who come here with a hustle mindset, but they don't seem to pour as much energy into it here as in commercial platforms, so their accounts get quiet pretty quickly.

In general, I'd say a community-first approach works better here anyway. That is, if 95% of your posts are just interacting with other people about games, then the 5% you spend hyping your own work will get more attention than if you blasted promos nonstop.

SymbolicCity OP ,
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@zdl @kyonshi I have D&D stuff pretty thoroughly muted, so I see virtually none of that, though I know it's a big part of the TTRPG discussion going on here. And maybe the D&D crowd is more liberal with its boosts and likes—I'm really focused primarily on the indie crowd. Which is really the segment of the hobby that needs mutual support and attention, anyway.

SymbolicCity , to random
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The Bump in the Dark Revised Edition campaign has blown past its base goal, and the only stretch goal left is one that I recommend all campaign include: A bigger pay share for contributers: https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/jex-thomas/bump-in-the-dark-revised-edition

The basic pitch is monster hunting in a mysterious Rust Belt town, but the case I'd make for it is that it has a really distinct setting and specific sense of the world it wants to build—qualities that are lacking in far too many games. Check it out.

SymbolicCity , to random
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On the whole, I think it would be better for the indie TTRPG community if we were to consolidate our discussion spaces a great deal, rather than have each and every creator take on the additional burden of maintaining five different online spaces. We've grown really attuned to the idea that GMs shouldn't take on every task required to organize a regular game night, but somehow that premise hasn't made it over to the broader context.
[Originally posted in a discord.]

SymbolicCity OP ,
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@MoltenSulfur I think dice.camp has a lot going for it as a meeting point for people in the hobby, not least of which is that it's an open platform. And I think a lot of what's keeping it from taking off is cultural. A lot of what we learned from Twitter doesn't work here, but we haven't really adapted to the different environment.

SymbolicCity OP ,
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@jexjthomas I don't know if you're on it, but there's The Cauldron: https://discourse.rpgcauldron.com/

That's the forum version of the NSR discord. I wish more of the discussion that takes place on Discord took place there, since that would make it a) more visible, and b) better archived.

TanaPigeonWMG , to random
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Let's create some solo inspiration! Please describe the setting of your current game, and explain why the setting is so good for a solo adventure. For myself: I'm playing a campaign based off of a television show. The advantage to that, I can draw on a ton of lore for adventure context right from the beginning and use exactly the material that interests me most.

SymbolicCity ,
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@TanaPigeonWMG The only solo gaming I've been doing lately is playtesting my nearly finished game set in a weird west pocket universe, which lets me have fun deforming the tropes of wild west fiction while consistently surprising myself with the turns the game takes.

Sylvhem , to random
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Wait a minute @helveticablanc! You illustrated a Magic card??!

SymbolicCity ,
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@Sylvhem @helveticablanc I'd be much more inclined to play if the entire game looked like this.

SymbolicCity ,
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@helveticablanc @Sylvhem Or we could just design you a game.

SymbolicCity , to random
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Realized I had the wrong license for a font I was using as the body text in my WIP, which sent me on a search for a comparable font that wouldn't require totally reworking the layout. Ended up being only about a half hour of work, but it could have been muuuch worse.

Two takeaways:

  1. List your fonts in your colophon. People like knowing, and it forces you to pay attention so you don't end up making costly mistakes.

  2. Structure your document around styles so changes cascade elegantly.

SymbolicCity , to random
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I haven't tried Pirate Borg yet, but zines like this one make me itchy to start: https://lemos.itch.io/forlorn-encounters

SymbolicCity , to random
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Laying out my upcoming game, and with space for spot art, it's clocking in at 40 pages.

SymbolicCity OP ,
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Just took inventory. Looks like I need about 19 pieces of art for this. Not a ton for a 40 page zine, but I'm really vibing on minimalist art direction lately. And 19 pieces is a lot for a non-artist like myself.

SymbolicCity , to random
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Writing examples of play is the hardest part of making a TTRPG, except for every other part.

SymbolicCity OP ,
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@JimmyShelter Sometimes I skip them, but sometimes I find them immensely useful, in ways that I don't always expect. The example in Into the Odd: Remastered, for example, did a lot to shape how I understand that game.

SymbolicCity , to random
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People are asking a lot of questions about my "Convert Characters, Not Adventures" t-shirt that are already answered by my "Convert Characters, Not Adventures" t-shirt.

seedling , to random
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Rewatched Mad Max Fury Road today and there is one thing that is OSR about it and that is that they have a very limited inventory that results in finding ways to solve problems using the exact same tools over and over again, e.g. the bolt cutters, the car doors

SymbolicCity ,
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@seedling "When you invoke Chekhov's gun…"

bedirthan , to random
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New theory: A backstory should fit inside of a single post to a text based social platform.

SymbolicCity ,
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@bedirthan Don't tell that to George Miller.

SymbolicCity , to random
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One setting premise that's mostly indirectly expressed in is that most of the tech available to players is a near-future extrapolation of modern industrial (as opposed to consumer) tech. This is particularly clear with the ships, which look more like oil derricks than X-wings, and are presented almost entirely in terms of functionality. And I wonder if maybe it wouldn't have been better to set that expectation more explicitly in the players guide, to say "this is part of the game."

SymbolicCity OP ,
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A lot of my thinking lately has revolved around "setting principles"—rules about the setting, basically, that take the place of extensive lore, but establish guardrails for elaborating on a basic concept, so that players and GMs have a solid, mutually available framework on which to build their own version of the world.

SymbolicCity , to random
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Finished Abhorsen last night. Nix writes great prose, his worldbuilding is superlative, and his characters are beautifully drawn, but it all falls apart at bit at the level of plot. His villains feel very perfunctory and sketched in (Orannis is just an orb that wants to destroy with no apparent motive) and the books are structured around increasingly abstract, world-ending threats that are more pyrotechnic than personal. The books are good as fantasy goes, but they could be so much better.

SymbolicCity OP ,
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The thing that frustrates me most about the Old Kingdom trilogy is that it sets up a really fascinating dichotomy between modern Ancelstierre and the magical Old Kingdom, but builds its plots around something else entirely. Ancelstierre clearly has its own politics and problems, but ends up being just a backdrop for big set pieces. I can't help but think that the stories would feel more urgent and meaningful if they grappled more with the wall between past and present than the river into death.

SymbolicCity OP ,
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I'll probably get around to reading some of the other Old Kingdom books at some point. There is, as I started out saying, much to admire in them, especially in a genre that's vastly more noise than signal. It's just disappointing to see a book get so close to greatness, but falling short on a few essential elements.

JimmyShelter , to random
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Once in every while my thoughts return to making a game based on Jack Vance's science fiction novels.

But then I also start to wonder how big the audience is of people liking those books and not liking the existing Gaean Reach game. It might be there is just an audience of 1.

SymbolicCity ,
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@JimmyShelter Do people even have to know the source material? Maybe your task isn't to fill the demand for a Vancian sci-fi book. Maybe your task is to introduce a new generation to Vancian sci-fi.

SymbolicCity , to random
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A thing I really appreciate about Snow's games is that, of the half dozen or so that I own as PDFs, the largest clocks in at 12.6 MB. And they're really beautifully designed! I've got rules-lite games from other designers that are 10x as bit-heavy as that.

SymbolicCity , to random
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Jay Dragon says: "Ultimately, in D&D, there's a big cage around combat, and a wide-open field around social interactions."
https://possumcreek.medium.com/rules-are-a-cage-and-im-a-puppygirl-69e8d569b2b6 (forgive the Medium link)

Another way to look at that, using their own terms, is that D&D makes a game of combat and pushes social interactions off onto make-believe. Which is fine—that, too, is a design choice—but it's a distinction presented to people who are ostensibly interested in playing a game, interested in playing within a cage.

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