wait a fucking second

 wait a fucking second

yeah wait a fucking second Dubravka Babić is fucking AWESOME!!!

"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" — Me, apparently

 i've been a terrible clown. i asked for less and gave it to myself and when i opened up i said "oh good i can emphasize how enlightened and un-tool-pilled (which. if you find yourself a toolpilled maynardmaxxer in this day and age can i recommend being 13 years old and really into Jung?) i am by turning these details into fucking TOOLS."

"85 percent chance of success on Actions Involving Your Broken Umbrella" is maybe slightly more interesting than 85 percent chance to KILL but like. not that much more interesting. it's hardly hip, and frankly its mouth doesn't seem cottony at all. 

so what's to be done? i bet a lot of you LOVED writing "Broken Umbrella Actions (85%)" on your character sheet too. fuck you though! i guess!

increasingly i'm sort of like. Who Cares about Modeling the Semi-Realistic Odds of Success. negotiate or whatever. all the cool kids are doing it, and they're also using negotiation and compromise to adjudicate success in fiction first tabletop role playing games!

i'm going to take away even more from you. i want you to have less. do you understand that.

she understands that and she's a Medici Venus (anatomical wax model), 18th century, so.

here

take your favorite starting trinkets/appearance/personality tables, have each player choose a table, roll twice, write down the results, and start play. the GM can tell you what your character's life looks like when play begins, or you can tell them, whoever has got the better idea. someone should give your character a name, and you should write that down too. 

you cannot write down anything else about your character ever. 

use whatever resolution mechanic your table wants as long as it doesn't require writing anything else down on your character sheet. i'd recommend using the laws of your world.  

(okay fine maybe you can write one more thing on your sheet if you need to for your resolution mechanic but ability scores? type shit? each one of them counts as one more thing by itself.)

 

Elizaveta Porodina smells like burning dreams. that's not slander! she said it herself!

there's a big part of me that thinks what's cool about this should be self evident but there's another part of me that doesn't trust you for a second. so i won't.

even the most meticulously inventoried and documented game carries with it a certain degree of abstraction when it comes to say, the number of matches in a box and the beads of sweat on the general's mustache and whatever. as a result, they don't impact play unless for whatever reason someone evokes them, creating them for an instant before they're blown apart by the force the rest of the game carries with it. writing creates and maintains,  and that stays true when we talk about written rules, even if the rules themselves elide or whatever. it's the quintessential tension of apocalypse world which means that it's the quintessential tension of nearly every storygame (fuck!) since then.

so we're not going to write anything down except for these unlikely little fragments and we're not even going to let them tell us what to do. there's barely enough there to grip by the skin of your teeth. 

and I want that skin to grow.
i want you to have bizarre skin-sheathed teeth that hurt blindingly bad when you chew. 

each of Parker Steven Jackson's names were taken from the artists whose artistic talent and biomass he assimilated. sorry that's not true probably