Gears

I. Spotlight

WS Healed, co-designer of Most Trusted Advisors, writes a long essay about games and interpretation that takes a very academic route but still ends somewhere extremely practical: “Don’t try to make your text a meddling busybody in the process of the game’s negotiation, whether to micromanage or to roll over and show its belly — not only can rules be opinionated, one of the best things those rules can do is invite opinions back.”

II. Media of the Week

Dice Exploder did 2 hours on Triangle Agency and it’s a great discussion about its promises and frustrations. It’s a long discussion that gets to a lot of the core questions at the heart of the game.

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III. Links of the Week

On Old Men Running the World, Kieron Gillen and Jim Rossignol discuss Mythic Bastionland: “The king who had lied to his children for fifteen years about being injured, leaving them to run the kingdom and be driven away, all so he could try and trap his ancestral enemies into a final battle: everything cascaded out from that, all from the spark of something like “INJURED PILGRIMAGE” and rolling him as the FOX KNIGHT.”
Tim Denee writes about the difference between rules light and rules heavy games using the metaphor of “gears” from cars and bicycles: “Low gears give more power (torque) but less speed. In a low gear you are very strong, and can build up momentum from a stationary start, or power up a steep hill. But you don’t go very far with each turn of the pedals; you’ll quickly reach a point where the gear is limiting your speed instead of helping you to get going.”
Was it Likely has a charming table for determining how your commanding officer acts.
TTRPGFans has an update on John Harper’s new game Ride or Die, a Fast and Furious style cars-and-robbers game based on Agon.
There’s a TTRPG For That has a nice list of hidden gems from the No ICE in Minnesota bundle as as well as a review of Warrenguard, a game of dragon riders.
The Monthly Mecha newsletter from Backwards Tabletop includes an interview about mechsploitation game Girlframe. (Also, features a link to my essay about Mike Pondsmith’s non-Cyberpunk games.)

IV. What am I playing?

I’ve got both campaigns going strong: Band of Blades as well as Gradient Descent via PsiRun. I think Band of Blades has got a comfortable rhythm to it. The whole “the main character is the legion” part of it is really coming through. It’s a game of smaller moments and smaller characters. If anything, I sometimes feel I need to put effort into making the missions sing.

PsiRun has a timer for the end of the campaign. Everyone has 6 questions about their past and when the first character answers all of them, the game is over. I think we have maybe 2 sessions left at most. So I’m excited to see how we cap it. Gradient Descent has been fun and even philosophical but navigating the space become more and more of a challenge for me.

The connectivity and logic of the dungeon is occasionally baffling — sections which should be more interconnected are actually isolated, and so on. It feels arbitrary and more linear than I would’ve assumed a real facility like this would’ve been. But that said, the randomness of dice has been quite triumphant. Rolling on encounter tables, making sense of the results, tying them into what’s happening has been regularly delightful.

V. Small Ads

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Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend. If you’d like to know more about my work, check out the coolest RPG website in the world Rascal News or listen to me talking to other people on the Yes Indie’d Podcast.