2024 Masthead: DieselShot's January & Beyond
2024 Masthead: DieselShot's January & Beyond
WHAT AWAITS BELOW? An article on being Wretched, a new ttRPG about exiles building a town to survive winter, updates on our streams, a think piece on the tyranny of geometry on game designers, and shoutout to the Capsule Games ideating afield.
Pat’s offering of Stock Art continues to grow! Check our itch.io and DTRPG for great art at great prices for personal & commercial use. Fantasy landscape, dungeon interiors, creatures and people all sorts, oh my!
Lee has created a new WIP titled game, WHAT WE BUILT FOR WINTER, about exiles trying to survive the winter as they build a community with voting-centric mechanics.
DieselShot’s Stream Schedule below shows that we have a variety of fun games coming up: wake up 8:30amEST / 2:30pmGMT every weekday with X-COM 2!
2024 STREAM SCHEDULE
NEW STREAMS
X-COM 2 First Time Ironman, All Weekdays: 8:30amEST - Noon-ish, Lee tortures himself with a guest voice acting appearance from Rainbow as the Commander’s secretary adding colour commentary to every triumph and travail in a scifi game of guerilla warfare against an Alien occupation government with brutal tactical gameplay, permadeath, and no reloading!
Thursday Night Marquee: 8:30pmEST - Midnight:30, rotating games (indies like Shadowdark, our games like ChangedStars, etc). See us play our house modules, (re)connect with channel regulars and new friends, and generally have fun throwing digital dice!z
RETURNING STREAMS
HIGH ROAD: CALL OF THE SEA, Mondays: 7pmEST - 11pmEST, D&D5e. CALL OF THE SEA is the best introductory arc to our series of high adventure and ethical dilemmas! Learn about the characters, get wrapped up in fun new action with exciting characters and a big mystery on this search for a potential source of immortality on a high seas adventure that leads them to a remote island crawling with harpies, pirates, and intrigue!
GATE FILES: THE LIMERICK AGENCY, Wednesdays: 4:30-7:30pmEST, DieselShot’s own The Gate Unbidden system. Join us for a historical cosmic horror \ weird eldritch investigation mystery series using our own game with a fresh take on how Madness gameplay can be dynamic and player-driven!
Enjoy the first of many Pat Art Intermissions & Read On!
WIP Title: WHAT WE BUILT FOR WINTER
I wrote this game entirely today and it has never been tested. It’s a GM’less survival/town building narrative game about how a community of exiles will survive the winter. After initial map generation it relies not at all on random chance, but purely decision making\voting processes amongst the players.
Have at it:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SL6e-s5EvkuQW94N2FELdv3xM2G5izBt8zReMJO4XAM/edit?usp=sharing
The Importance of Being Wretched
Write you now, from between cutting coughs that hack my lungs and rock my blood brain barrier as my ribs buckle under the pressure and the phlegm threatens to block my air passage yet again, to inform you of a lovely occurrence:
I am happy.
I am terribly ill, and just as I thought I was getting better yesterday I plummeted into the hardest night yet. An electrical haze has flooded my mind and the stimulation is as sickening as it is sharpening. Even though I know I cannot long endure these fascinations, as I strip to adjust to new psychosomatic temperature paradigms, as reflect on how I must have slipped up on masking or other hygiene protocols to be suffering this fate, I feel somehow more electrified and awake than I have been the rest of the winter’s vacation.
In a strange way this ailment has been a gift. It has taken comfort and replaced it with interest. The need to supply my body with a mix of cough medicines at different intervals (yes I have googled menthol poisoning’s lethal threshold, it’s about a gram per kg of bodyweight for reference), the constant need to move around, my usual issues with lying down yet being stuck now in a room that is 80% bed, pacing around.
I wrote a game today, tentatively named WHAT WE BUILT FOR WINTER. It’s a GM’less tabletop RPG about an exile community building a village and trying to survive the winter. Aside from generating the map there’s no random chance at play, it’s about voting and resource allocation on the part of the player. This plays into something else I’ll be putting in this column, but I would note here I enjoy the feeling of just filling out a die table. Giving everything a result, no total repeats even if there’s similarities.
I flew through writing it, and while it’s far from unprecedented, I feel my obsessions curling and uncurling in ever yet more achievable ways. In a sense I hope to keep this sickness with Lee for all of 2024 and beyond, with respect to those who literally suffer from continuous illness—I know it sucks and you have had to endure far more than I ever. I doubt I’d feel that way in such a position.
But something about my stopped-up stupor and isolation in my room, the movement about, feels so energetic. Frenetic. My mind abuzz, at times fleeing the very light of dawn for a windowless bathroom and the misty pour of a running shower. To quote a message I sent my main group chat earlier:
<<<<the name was originally, as I gollum squatted in a dark bathroom at 4:30am with brainhaze and phelgmthroat misting by the waterfall,>>>>
<<<<WE BUILD FOR WINTER.>>>>
This is but one of a flurry of messages across all platforms, as I dig and scrape for what I am circling round. My delirium almost makes it feel more urgent, and draws Lee away from My usuaLethargy.
I am looking forward to being well again and being able to be around people outside the Bubble(tm) without risking infecting anyone, but I am also embracing this Wretched Mode of being this year. For all of the parts that I hate I start to love it more than comfort, a dynamic effluvia arising alongside the mucus choking Lee.
I’m sure this is all the rambling of a sick mind and I wonder how I’ll look back on it when I’m well, but for now I’d ask you: give a moment of thought to the burning coals that keep you moving. I exhort you, dear reader, to find your wretched state and flirt with it a time, if not here to stay, to keep moving around that central vortex’s dire draw.
The Tyranny of the Polyhedron
Few things are as liberating as going digital only for a tabletop RPG. Why?
Because when you like the spread on the d11, you just use the d11. When you want to make the die size a variable, “roll 3d[X],” you can do that. The banding of possibilities do not need to be massaged with repetition or bell curves.
If you want to select at random evenly between 3 things, what do you do? “Divide a d6 roll by 2!” Except only rounding in a certain way. Except that’s asking for division, an objectively longer operation to execute than addition or subtraction for an untold majority of the population. Wanna select an item from a list? Randomly generate something? Well you roll or the dice or you randomly generate it and spit it out at once! I’ve used Silverghost to make my intro WFRP2e characters, I know which is gonna get Lee in the door on a new system gaming with his pals that night and which is going in the “maybe later” bin!
Of course, I’m not here to argue for pure digital games. I enjoy video games and they have their place, but they don’t do it for Lee like tabletop RPGs. I don’t think ultra-automated VTTs are video games and I love using them, but the problem they solve isn’t simply “goes faster!!!”
They solve the very limitations of Euclidean geometries.
Consider this. If you want an even outcome across 12 options, you can do that. But you could also roll 2d6, creating a bell curve. But that bell curve? You don’t want it, but you’re already being told it’d be “cooler if it was all d6, man,” because there’s parts of the world where the polyhedrals are rare. But even where they’re more plentiful than pennies, there’s only a handful of gimmicks that defy the normal restrictions. You can go out and get a d3, or a singular-die d100. They have, I assure you, not been adopted for a reason.
As game designers in the world of the die we are dying for options. Consider the leap between the d20 and the d12! Where are the missing links? Where’s my homo-d16-sapiens?
The lack of these options is a frustration born of media. Whenever people discuss the limitations of card based games or any other random generation, I see less a steel argument and more a well-worn wagon wheel rut through the mud of a country road. Of course veering off will get you stuck—we’re using this fluidly now as a pure product of historical travel. Getting off the main path is inherently going to be a blocking point.
Call Lee loopy, but I’d like to see a game that played everything BUT the resolution mechanic fairly safe. Give the people an easy way to play the genre the like, a la Stars Without Number Revisited, with an easy-to-use system that takes the right sensibilities from the right eras and added a lil dash of new idea but just generally nailed the execution.
I personally prefer vast leaps of innovation, unique and enthralling games that takes Lee to a place I did not yet know games could go, that boggle the noggle to unravel mechanically as I consider the implications—bit if we want to wear the rut where the wagon wheel goes, we probably need to rely on a whole lot of passers-by willing to push us.
I end this rambling rant with no incentives but an encouragement: consider the limitations you are chafing against that you have been told to accept as fact, as the way the world is, as the way games are, as what people will accept. Mechanically, narratively, and holistically question: “do I have to accept this as the way my game is told?” Tutorial videos, live streams, read throughs, quick references, and community discords can help people learn something unexpected and new they’re excited for—they can’t make them play something less interesting than what’s already arrested them.
And with nearly every game designer I’ve spoken to, there’s something truly arresting in them, powerful, impactful, of what their game could be. We all lose something in the translation, in the act of creation and inherent death of possibility. We are shaded down to 20 sides or less by every force from the market to gel-miller—so let us hunt for the winding ways and the scant views of unseen angles, where people cannot go if they will not turn to accept it exists. Find our way in the dark and leave a trail, offer a helping hand, and open ourselves to new possibilities and experiences.
Tabletop games have come incredibly far, in what backgrounds of author can reach audiences and how those games feel, look, and play. But I encourage everyone to consider this not the end, as the die is cast, but merely the latest Leevision. Or such is My... Leevision?
~fin
Wot Eye’ve Read
A fascinating little concept known as the Capsule Game has been discussed a lot on the blogosphere\Twitter lateLee, and I’m chuffed we have a term for them now. I quite enjoyed Lady Blackbird but have always had a bit of a stiff feeling towards a game that encapsulates all its possibilities, that cuts off what I consider to be the RPG’s platonic ideal (on a purely emotional, personal level): ultimate freedom within a setting or genre. I’m sure for others it transcends either with games like GURPS.
If you’re not familiar with the concept I’ll give the tl;dr as “adventure\characters\setting\system all-in-one encapsulated without intended expansion beyond.” That may not be perfect but if you want to look at some folks getting into the nitty gritty and differentiating, as I feel is important to let these games breathe and be judged on their own merits, check some posts below and consider following Joshy McCroo (@riseupcomus on Twitter), author of forthcoming tabletop RPG HIS MAJESTY THE WORM (which the author of this post misunderstood to be a game set entirely underground for like over a year and found it very interesting there were optional overland travel rules—“for those so inclined,” I supposed, ahkahkahk).
https://riseupcomus.blogspot.com/2024/01/capsule-games-part-i-what-are-capsule.html
https://knightattheopera.blogspot.com/2024/01/capsule-games-part-1-introduction.html