give me less

 give me less

Oda Sønderland says the black hole of the eye pulls in the eternal light of a stage and that's a lot more than what I can say for most of u

 

i dont know. i was talking to Havoc and NBateman about mine own pyrrhic weaselry and thinking about how i should do a second edition and cut the motifs (signature items that tied to character advancement and also swords without master tones) because what was that really about anyway. but then i was rereading vulnavia's assassin and was really struck this time by the starting items (palate of oil paints in shades of lead and arsenic! pathetically pretty eyes and a face to match!!!)

 

also, these: fruitful void (whateverthefuck) and rules elide (sorry jared)

all above are kinda fakey/kinda true because they're real and that's usually proof positive.

but at the end of the day here's what you can suck on

your players only ever really need like a few things from your game. I won't say how many exactly. not more than each player can hold with both hands, certainly. that's probably like one thing. idk, maybe they've got big hands. maybe they feel bad about them. don't! their hands are beautiful. i'd take em!

you want me to make a bird in the hand joke about Jana Heidersdorf soooooo bad it makes you look stupid it makes u look like ur gonna piss ur pants

but really! you're only going to remember what you can hold in your hand, and you're only going to use what you remember. writing some fucking tome or filling out an excel sheet for your guy is kind of like making a box that can hold a LOT of stuff. but the box isn't one of us. it can't play like we do (unless).

now if you only have a few things, each had better bring the heat, and they probably shouldn't be too similar. different shapes and textures, colors and feelings of being mashed into the teeth. 

am i talking about like. game mechanics? starting items? yeah, probably. 

because if you just have one or two things, you've GOT to use them. if your guy has a soft, sad smile but also 3 different active abilities, that soft sad smile is barely there; a roleplaying cue maybe, a point of detail, if even that. If that's the only thing you've got, though, that's a piece of you, that's the axis on which the whole character turns. this goes for items too, of course. If all your character has is a briefcase that they never open, their relationship to the world (or at least, the relationship established by the character sheet) is defined by that tension. 

this lil fucker remains anonymous

OSR / POSR (say osr and posr so they sound like "composure." do it. do it right now, puussy boy. do it right now pussy freak boy. do money spread. buy whole friend group shots.) gameplay is extremely material, as in, directly grounded with the players lived experience of their world. Because of this focus on verisimilitude and treating the fiction as a real space that your character inhabits with a body that is understood to at least broadly function in the way your own body does, having a character that hinges on smaller, mundane detail or really anything at all that isn't a useful tool for directly, realistically, affecting the game world, is something that the scene really hasn't explored much. 

even when it comes to games with more interest in modeling specific narrative structures (storygames, okay? i know you're thinking it's fucking storygames but i fucking hate calling them that) you don't really see this kind of focus on detail that i'm interested in, since the most common ways to define characters like that are abstract; relationships, dramatic actions. the theme, not the motif, in a way that feels backwards, juvenile and expository. 

Simon Landrein knows allll about juvenile and expository, doesn't he. Don't you, Simon? Don't you and your lil corpo art? Yeahhhh you do.

anyway, this couldn't be simpler to model. take your favorite starting trinkets/appearance/personality tables (nothing that has directly useful entries. at least not yet. later, once you get the idea, you can relax about that a bit), have each player choose a table and roll twice, and start play. every action has a 50% chance of success, unless you incorporate your character's Thing(s), in which case, you have an 85% or whatever chance of success. any other stuff you accumulate through play is still useful (a knife lets you cut things etc.) but has no mechanical weight and doesn't influence your odds of success at all. while you're at it, try playing a different game this way, or at least looking at your usual game in a different light.

 

louie zong you are receiving a tumblr twee exemption and don't you waste it

i know i said to give me less, but here's a little more. can you see all the people contained in just one of these things? I just know you can do it if you put your mind to it. I love you.

1. Black Leather Gloves
2.  Flute
3. Whalebone Cat, taken from a grave
4. Elephant Head Mask; when worn, blood drips from the neck. 
5. Needle and Thread
6. High Heels on the verge of breaking
7. Empty Matchbox
8. Dying Orchid
9. Gorgeous Mahogany Dining Table 
10. Gallows Scar
11. Long Hair, stiff with dust
12. Tooth Gap
13. Negative Mercy
14.  Marble Hand, snapped off of a statue at least a thousand years old
15. Hacking Cough
16. Egg with a scratching sound inside
17. A Meaty Chest, smooth as an eggplant
18. A Radio, always tuned to opera 
19. A Broken Umbrella
20. A Gorgeous Cry-Face
    

Min-ha Kim by Cho Gi-seok and both of them somehow know about the egg where I post from