#92: Movement in Video Games, Talking in TTRPGs

I. Dear Reader,

Video games are quite good. I recently started playing them again after a gap of around 15 years and I’m really enjoying catching up on everything I’ve missed. One interesting facet of videogames is how they make movement fun. Running, climbing, jumping, gliding - these are all things you can do in videogames. Some games make them awesome. You can take or leave the stories but gliding over sand dunes in Sable or climbing in Assassin’s Creed are just fun activities by themselves.

Is this something that can be incorporated into tabletop games? Can you translate the pleasure of maneouvring in zero gravity in Prey (2017) to a physicaly game? Well, no, you can’t. But I think there is an equivalent for TTRPGs.

Movement in videogames is almost an invisible mechanic. It’s the most basic, fundamental part of the game. It’s the thing that guides and defines your access to the rest of the game. That thing in roleplaying games is Talking. Just talking.

Just like some videogames come up with fun movement mechanics, some RPGs come up with new and interesting ways to talk that can be fun in themselves. Whether it’s introducing new words or phrases, providing artificial limits, or just wholesale structuring conversations in a new, some games change how you talk at the table because it’s fun. (It might or might not work for you but that’s true of anything.)

Here’s some examples:

• In the Rogue’s Phase of Swords without Master, the GM poses a challenge to a player who describes how they overcome it with style. Then, that player poses a challenge to the next player and they describe how they overcome it, and so on. It’s a kind of round robin of “show me how cool your character is”.

• In Masks, when you describe the action as if it was panels in a comic book. Love that stuff. (Example courtesy @MacFianna)

• Dialect is a game all about language so maybe it’s too perfect. I found this anecdote lovely:

  Shin Megami Tenser's Floating Disc @CuddlePotato

  @chaibypost We had a game where "happy birthday" was the standard greeting, and for months we'd all say it whenever we saw each other

• Another example from twitter was Microscope:

  VanishXZone (Matthew Cmiel) @MatthewCmiel

  @chaibypost One of my favorite examples is a minor one from Microscope. Scenes start with a question, and end the second the question is answered. It means many scenes end with cliffhangers, cause there is MORE to know, but not the question, so if you are curious, you have to set the next

• And there’s so many more:

  jay Dragon 🦞☀️ @jdragsky

  @chaibypost my favorite (non larp) examples would probably be: • the firefly whisp's prancing gaily play in Under Hollow Hills • contempt tokens in The Quiet Year • the recordings in Ten Candle

Hope you found that interesting!

Yours talktatively,

Thomas

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II. Media of the Week

Big Bad Con Online happened last week and it seemed like another jam-packed schedule. I missed all the live events but they’re extremely quick on their upload to Youtube. The full schedule is there but I particularly enjoyed this panel about what it means to make games that are more like playgrounds.

The Far Horizons co-op (formerly San Jenara co-op) are releasing a new sourcebook all about cults. AA Voigt takes a look at the two samples in their quickstart.

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III. Links of the Week

• The tabletop community is once against raising funds for a good cause. There are currently two bundles raising money for reproductive rights, one on on itch.io and one on drivethru.

  • The itch bundle has almost 300 titles including Beam Saber, Unbound, among others.

  • Dicebreaker has an article with the highlights of the DriveThru bundle.

• Awesome Hexcrawl is a directory of very cool posts and resources if you’re running hexcrawls.

• Interview with Kieron Gillen and Grant Howitt on the launch of DIE RPG, the game that Gillen has been working on for a while based on his fantastic comic series with Stephanie Hans.

• On Cannibal Halfling, Aaron Marks writes about “drama mechanics”. As always, Aaron deploys a reall solid framework and I’m very tempted to extent it to the newer crop of high drama games like Pasion de la Pasiones, Hearts of Wulin or Bite Marks.

• From the Gauntlet Forums, user darkade has built a built-in dice roller that you can install into google sheets character keeper so you don’t need a separate website or app.

• There’s a new international grant called the Dice Kapital TTRPG Micro-grant Scheme to help fund designers up to £2500. Deadline is 15th July.

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IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

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Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. I’m half-man, half-beast, half-journalist, half-game designer.

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