Traverse Fantasy

An indefinite game is one that could last forever not just by the players’ explicit efforts, but because it is structured to last indefinitely. Although an indefinite game will have certain markers of progress, like experience levels in Dungeons & Dragons , there is not a terminal state representing success within the structure of the game. There may still likely be a terminal state representing failure, e.g. character death, but even this can be remedied by creating a new character and starting over. Above all, the indefinite game is a fantasy simulator in that it allows the player qua subject to endlessly pursue goal after goal without terminal resolution. The player can keep fantasizing as they keep playing. This is homologous to Lacan’s notion of the plus-de-jouir , the subject’s drive: there is always something else to desire because nothing fully satisfies. Drive is key to indefinity. Any game worthy of the moniker of 'game' must transform the player into a subject by...

I am going to be republishing my essay about dungeon crawls as an avenue for male desire, which you can find in its original rough form on my Itch . In this series, I shall attempt to analyze the dungeon crawl both as a discourse in the psychoanalytic sense (a mediated relation between the subject and the Other), and as a language in the sense of data science. From the latter field I shall borrow two terms which are useful to explicate what distinguishes the dungeon crawl from other modes of play: deterministicity (i.e. the quality of being deterministic) and indefinity. A deterministic machine is one for which each possible input has only one outcome. For example, addition is a deterministic machine: when you add 2 and 2, you will always receive 4. Meanwhile, a non-deterministic machine could have multiple possible outcomes for any one input. By looking at a non-deterministic machine step by step, you cannot tell where any input will actually go because of the variety of different out...

 First, I want to give credit to  dieheart's blog post  which compares The Black Hack's usage dice to those of Macchiato Monsters. It sparked my interest in fun dice mechanics. :) As Resource Counters In  Macchiato Monsters Zero , you roll a funny shaped die representing a risk or a resource. If you roll 1-3, you have to decrease the size of the die. This represents a resource being depleted, or a risk becoming more likely. When you roll 1-3 on a d4, the resource is completely used up. Deltas from Macchiato Micro are a remix of risk dice: instead of keeping track of a certain die size, you only have to use a d6 and keep track of a certain number to roll under. This is the 'delta' number Δ. When you roll d6 < Δ, the resource is depleted (or the risk becomes more likely) and Δ is decreased by 1. If we were to swap the conditions of the Δ system so that d6 ≥ Δ means depletion, the chances resemble something much closer to the risk die system. Thi...

I should clarify something from my recent ramblings on Twitter: farming games (not games about farming but the generic treatment of games about farming) are not necessarily colonialist, but they certainly present a petite bourgeois fantasy, and colonialism up to a certain scale is a petite bourgeois venture. I think there's a good comparison to be made between this topic and D&D: does D&D necessarily present a colonialist fantasy, or does it speak to a broader petite bourgeois fantasy? The answer lies in the text of the game more than its structure because the aim is to scavenge the frontier, bring order to chaos, get some land, become a lord (or lady, as Gygax would [not] have it). Gold for XP speaks to this, and not just as a vestige of the original Blackmoor game: the bottomless accumulation of gold is the adventurer's drive for jouissance, their plus-de-jouir. This is approached from an extra-fetishistic angle, i.e. gold is considered innately valuable outside of th...

A spectre is haunting society — the spectre of society! - The Joker? I made a stupid Twitter thread thinking about monsters. Copy/pasted: given that monsters usually represent social anxieties, i think there’s value in nevertheless representing monsters as supernatural beings rather than physical real creatures which live and breathe like, i think that’s the point where you get into suspicious territory OR you represent physical monsters as deflated or pitiful or cute, like something that doesn’t deserve violence or vitriol which you would rather find other solutions for their annoyances instead I don't necessarily mean anything moralist by it except as a matter of preference and appropriateness. I want to research more about this kind of shift in fantasy/ideology/whatever, where the image of social disorder is projected onto human subjects. Is this true? Does the fantasy of social disorder precede its projection onto people? Does the image of the zombie (modern sense), the vampir...

This is kind of building upon my dynamic reaction roll idea. Instead of a static 1-in-6 chance of a wandering encounter, keep track of Dread . Dread  represents the spirit of the dungeon catching onto the party as they explore. Think of a dungeon less as an ecosystem or stronghold, and more the domain of a territorial spirit who wants to keep intruders out. You might roll 2d6 for the dungeon's initial Dread , or you might just start at 2. Increase Dread  by 1 each turn, up to 12. Past certain thresholds, the dungeon's presence will become more noticeable and threatening. At 6, the party might hear echoes or hums. At 10, there might be footsteps or chanting. Anything that freaks people out, and even better if it's specific to the environment. Every three turns, roll 2d6. If you roll below or equal to Dread , a random encounter is triggered. A random encounter is guaranteed to be triggered when Dread  equals 12. When the party rests, roll d6 and reduce Dread  by that m...

Thought it would be cool if an encounter had an ongoing Reaction to keep track of, while negotiating with NPCs! You're going to want to roll based off of the dice your players are rolling to make checks. I use 2d6 so I'll roll 2d6, but for d20 you might want to use 3d6. We want a bell curve! Instead of Reaction, we'll call this Tension. High Tension means that the NPCs are less likely to want to level with you, and might even pick fights. The neutral zone will be 6-8 on a 2d6 scale, and maybe 9-12 on a 3d6 scale. Low Tension means that the NPCs are pretty chill, and maybe even excited to talk to you. Players can negotiate with NPCs to reduce Tension. If you have a roll-high system, you might want to have players roll + Charisma over the current Tension. You can give them advantage (reroll dice and take the better result) if they offer the NPCs something they want. Since 2d6 is a pretty small scale, on success you can just reduce Tension by 1. You might want to r...