Traverse Fantasy

The word “abstraction” has many applications in the realm of computer science and software engineering. One immediate sort of abstraction you might think of is the graphical design of user interfaces on computers and other devices. The earliest trends in graphical user interface design embraced a skeuomorphic language of visual (and verbal!) metaphor, where actions or objects on the computer were represented as real world things. For example, the desktop metaphor interprets the computer screen as a literal desktop where you store and access files. The copy/cut/paste functions evoke the literal actions of cutting paper and pasting it onto something else, and so they were represented as such in name and in visual representation. The most common 'save' icon is a picture of a floppy disk. Above are some icons that were used on old Macintosh computers in the eighties and nineties, by seminal graphic designer Susan Kare [1]. Each icon is a metaphor mapping a digital fu...

A while ago, I had written about the pseudo-medieval economy of Dungeons & Dragons by treating it as a pre-industrial capitalist economy emerging out of a feudal society. I had also written about a simple calendar system in light of that, to make it easy to model long-term play on top of social relations grounded in a living game-world. In this article, I will combine my insights from both of those earlier attempts to develop a singular theory of managing time and society in a campaign. The primary concern is creating a fictional timekeeping system that harmonizes with different scales of play, so that players can zoom out and act in the capacity of months or years without much mental math to scale these activities. Edit 3/15 12:00 PM: Throughout this post, I say that the ratio of pounds:shillings:pence is 1:12:240, when it was actually 1:20:240. This means there are 20 shillings in a pound, not 12; and there are 12 pence in a shilling, not 20. I should have checked this before ...

  I wrote this in response to LS's comment [1], but it ended up being super long! Hope y'all find it useful still. :) Hi, thank you so much for your reply!! So I’ve actually gotten some ire from damage-roll-only folks for the opposite issue, that the subtractive armor here causes attacks to miss too much . As much as I’d like to be an enlightened centrist and say that, if both sides are attacking me, then I must be doing something right, it’s entirely possible that I’ve really picked the worst parts of both methods. You might know this already, but I had actually been pretty apprehensive towards damage-only combat rules for a while for the same reason! I don’t like HP bloat and I appreciate that armor makes opponents harder to defeat without just upping how many numbers you need to make to make their numbers go down. It was only because I’ve been exploring jrpg-style mechanics for my project (emulating Pokemon, Megaten, etc.) that I began considering one-hit combat at all! So, ...

I feel like whenever I preface a post with, “I don’t expect this to be a long one,” it ends up being a long one. I’m going to avoid jinxing myself and get to the point. Here is a simple method to remove to-hit rolls from your dungeony dragony game, but perhaps coming from a different angle than other articles or rulebooks have suggested. Roll a monster’s hit dice, each 1-6, and multiply by two [1]. Damage rolls are from 1-6 minus armor class, which can be anywhere from 0 to 4. Alternatively, owing to Ty of Mindstorm: Armor classes are descending from 6 to 2, and damage rolls must be less than or equal to armor to deal damage indicated. Knock on wood! Motivation I wanted to look into this because I’ve been working, yet again, on a ruleset for my white whale project The Brimstone Gospel . There are three ability scores, and the average of all three is equal to the character’s level. This allows me to roll hit dice to find a character’s level (e.g. for a monster) and directly find the...

How’s it go, again? “Same song, different chorus”? My friend mv of hypertext corner wrote a great article about introducing novel uses and consequences to light sources in Mothership [1]. We had been talking about it since I wrote my article about how rules for light sources in Dungeons & Dragons relate to character movement insofar as a character sees much less farther than they can walk in a turn [2]. Their solution is since flashlights shine much farther than a character can presumably walk in a turn, it would be more interesting to think about how directional light informs encounter surprise. It sounds really fun! During our conversation, though, we were also talking about rates of exploration in Mothership which, by the book, aren’t given. We talked about it quite a bit before realizing it didn’t matter in the scope of mv’s article. They told me that characters had a movement rate of about 10-15 m and so I was like, okay, maybe we can extrapolate that the exploration rate...

After writing the blog post on the weird fantasy capitalist economy suggested by Dungeons & Dragons , I had been thinking about ways to apply that sort of thinking to something practical at the table. I didn’t suppose when writing it that anyone would actually want to establish a firm in their D&D campaign, much less would anyone have the mental energy to deal with the month-by-month math of running a business on paper and pencil. I figured that maybe instead it would be fun to establish a sort of organization as part of high-level play. It’s not quite domain play as much as it is conspiracy play. What makes low-level play interesting is that you as a player are constantly striving for something. Domain play in theory can become managing a state of affairs rather than working towards anything at all, becoming something more like a traditional war game compared to D&D ’s game of upward strife. This isn’t to say that domain play can’t have the same degree of progression a...

In this article, I’m going to take a closer look at some of the presuppositions underlying movement and perception in early or early-inspired D&D rulebooks. Originally, I was going to make one short post about treating movement rates as a non-random ability score, and then a separate one trying to figure out what different behavior that flashlights would have compared to torches if you were to set your dungeon crawl in the modern age. As it turns out, though, it’s difficult to separate light and movement since they are intertwined in how players perceive and then interact with the game-world. On 12"-Scale Movement Defining movement rates in inches seems at first glance a vestige of D&D ’s origin in tabletop wargames. Movement rates were given as such in Dungeons & Dragons (“ OD&D ”, 1974) and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (“ AD&D ”, 1977-9). The base rate of movement for an O/AD&D character is 12”. The rate decreases to 9”, 6”, and finally 3” for in...