The Dungeon: the Sweeping Saga or the Bunker

 So I am responding to game-bud Ivan Richardson's "Dungeon Crawls to Stories." In this video essay gets into the ubiquitous question of why do these monsters live by each other? He uses the scenario "The Caves of Chaos" as his choice to show a working grid-grind type of work. He touches upon the concepts of gamism, narrativism, and simulationism, but mostly sticks to the point that disparate entities can be lorded over to explain why they live next to each other on a map with a bunch of rooms within a few meters from each other.

I'm not as he put it '...not criticizing, but critiquing.' I am taking up the subject the "dungeon crawl" versus its proclaimed opposite the story-driven scenario.
Sorry folks but narrative is going to happen. Whether it is because the GM has a narrative, or the roleplayers around the table get into the goofiness of the play-pretend that they are engaging in. It's what keeps people coming back to the table. The connecting thread can be based off of a rather linear direction and flow like say Ravenloft. It can be more haphazard and unrelated occurences in say In Search of the Unknown. It is because of the shared obstacles between the players and the GM stringing that into the yarn of whatever tale gets knitted together. It's not a compelling "ecology" of the encounters, or a detailed understanding rules and implied in-game physics, though those elements make for strong sessions.

Anybody that has had experience with even just a handful of GMs has probably met the Crawl-purist. They're the dude that insists that everything is random yet not arbitrary in the roleplaying session that is going on. Any story that occurs is because of the players' delusional belief that things are connected. This is despite the text of this of that classic dungeon being presented as the get-together's promised tale. If this last over more than a vignette of a room or two, they will then come up with a gladiatorial match where they want the PCs to fight one another or an all-powerful deity will demand that the group eats dog poop, or something similar. In their mind this visceral experience will restore balance in "roleplaying" and get things back to the war game details of a room by room collection of puzzles and Stat-attackers. Sure.

This is fine if you're this sort of GM. Fine if you want your players to get bored of roleplaying and finally move on into collecting card games maybe board games. While the more metered an RPG session becomes, without it basically being something akin to BINGO or amateur poker, there is a reason it only occurs in four-hour blocks at larger conventions. Meanwhile, at the smaller game festivals, kitchen tabletops, and computer screens, things get a lot more wordy than worldly.

Starfinder: Finally Finished Reading It

 

Written in 2017, I picked it up in '18. It has indeed taken me this long to read the whole book. Now I haven't read it religiously, but I have been picking it up about once a week and reading three to five pages. The information is dense and meant for the truly committed D&D 3.65 player getting into science fiction  with its own nuts and bolts. Of course it has like thirty authors and twenty-five supporting people listed on the side scroll of credits, so one might expect that from a book that is 19,000 to 1.6 million pages long depending on the day of the week that one is reading it.

At least some people are playing it. At GenCon, I've seen about a dozen up to twenty plus events for it every year since its release. They might've even moved on to second edition. I attribute this to supply-based RPG "designer" Industrial Complex producing mega-widgets that need to sell only 30% of the stock to make some money, but there are ppl sitting down to play the game. Unlike a lot of new SF RPG works on the bookshelves these days, which garner hundreds of true fans online for maybe six months of online play by some people, including disinterested wouldbe actors, on YouTube. Meanwhile the older SF RPG books have dozens of fans that suck on nostalgia juice and confuse the product with Starfleet Battles or Traveller alternately.

The rules are some very solid and detailed SF stuff. Even when a thousand ppl playing one hundred Starfinder campaigns a year, only a quarter of the provided rules would come out in play. When I started reading the starship section, I was glad to see that the authors were trying to turn vessels into Characters and encounters. I was also wondering how they saw my private notes, but hey I only really got serious about space ships in my own work like five years ago-- still some three years before I waded into this book's section for them. The Character species are things like sexy robots with facial hair if needed; humans; giant lizard people to be used as Tanks; antennae-having psychics, space chipmunks; hidden-faced four-armed things; and interesting, for once, bugs. Dwarves and whatnot from Pathfinder and/or D&D are welcome. The setting is a solar system (and a bit more) striving to be a blank slate for the author-GM. So blank it has only 300 years of history. I like the world listing format, it covers the basics in good sci-fi terms designed for actual play at the table (mostly time and gravity), which I find a very helpful take for my own stuff.

Would I play it? I haven't finished running my first D&D-based combat in thirty plus years over six sessions of play for my TOG OSR fantasy setting yet, so, no. Still the rules here are thought out and helpful to any S-F GM that is only looking for tips. The true Path-finding GM, I am sure can make it work. Overall a Loch Ness Monster game system on the scale of Smurf to Godzilla.

Oh the Trip of the Fantastic

I have run my Spacers, Wobble, Crawlspace and various FRPG explorations sessions over the same time periods sticking to very strict guidelines defining each. Meanwhile, I have been slowing down on my gaming. I have been less than interested to keep straying away from soccer and beer on Saturday. Sundays are a great day to watch TV series or movies and do laundry as opposed to squeak in extra game sessions. Late Friday nights being the only time I want to game. This has led to my writing sticking to whatever I am running the next Friday that anybody can get together.

 I have always like mixing up my roleplaying. Not so much mixing the genres that are set in my head. Someone once mentioned to that the longer that they run roleplaying games the more everything runs together after a couple of decades. As a guy that runs around three differing things over various sessions concurrently this has always worried me. I kind of have viewed it as a form of meta-GM dementia for experienced GMs that must be avoided at all costs.

 I am trying really hard not to start mixing the genres up. And then finding out about George Lucas schemes to make his own sagas in Star Wars it's harder than ever.

This is the sexy picture for Lucas's master tale of Star Wars after the three original movies and before his sequels. If it looks like Jim Henson's Dark Crystal to you don't be fooled. It's a series of kid shows that is not meant for kids nor meant to be much more than after-school specials. Its writing is not intended for the kid in the picture, but for the inner child of 50 y/o Star Wars fans. The budget in casting just made its casting meant-for-TV and therefore hopefully palatable to juvenile viewers.

He take his moderate success, these products did better than the infamous Star Wars: Christmas Special, and begin production on this series of works.

Leaving out the Ewoks, but still with really bad juvenile tropes, Lucas forged works of sci-fantasy that would be terrible. Terrible up until Disney got involved to show us how bad things could really get.

Let's hope that my new RPG strategy fails half as much as the Ewok saga.