More Thoughts on Fate

 After a few years of sharing around my Fate Core principles post, I have had further conversations with people about it and developed some more ideas about Fate (broadly, not just Fate Core) that explain a lot of the issues that people report to me that they have with Fate. If you've struggled with it, especially if you were around for the Dresden RPG or Spirit of the Century, give it a look, hope it helps.

Here are the two things I want to try to get at:

1. People love Aspects too much. They shouldn't.  Aspects are great but when you love one too much it can get in the way of what their actual function is.

2. If you're feeling both "I shouldn't get Fate points just for doing something I would or should do anyway" and "I'm always running out of Fate points", someone at the table is badly miscalibrated about what the action of the game is.  

Old RPG Gamers and The Streaming Youth - From a Dark Forest

 Another question from the dark forest, which is essentially creaky old people muttering about how much better it was back in the day. I tried to answer the following self-summarized prompt, posted in late 2022:

"JD! You absolute fool. You dunce. Why do you say 'System Matters' lost the debate in the public sphere? What's all this about "the streaming generation" of players? And don't you just hate all that shit, why are you talking about it like it's legitimate?!" 

Over the last...maybe year and a half, I came to terms with the population of people entering the hobby via twitch or youtube streams (the Actual Play podcast phenomenon continues but is greatly diminished in comparison).  I have my issues with how those streams are conducted, but that's only of tangential interest here. I challenged myself: "You claim to care about your local gaming community, in fact you often assert that it's (and local communities like it are )  the only gaming community that exists. These people are going to flood your community and you are going to know nothing about their  point of view. Are you one of those pieces of shit artists who sit around being like 'oh man we solved all these problems in 2005, these new artists are dumb and have nothing to show me and will do nothing to help the world'". Are you that kind of guy, where they'll laugh at you behind your hand because you're old and have nothing to offer them? 

Gaming SCPs - 200-299

 I realized I forgot to mention that I actually did read all SCPs that existed, but this was back when there were only about three thousand of them, so a lot of these are just re-skims on my part.

This section has the first "monster SCPs" that I really like for gaming. Too many of the monster SCPs are just "they torturekill you if you break rule X" which are less interesting for gaming than you might think. Puzzles make more sense in gaming if they have other stakes.  The Tortured Iron Soul (SCP-203, below) is quite dangerous and gruesome but the obvious motivation in interacting with it is to gain new information about it such as its origin and effects.  And The Protector (back to back! SCP-204), once you set aside the edginess of "let's use these pedophiles to activate the anomalistic entity" is also really interesting.  This edginess sometimes ruins otherwise interesting entries - the phonograph record that causes time to freeze when it skips is primarily tested by killing someone near it, for example. C'mon. Couldn't we think of other things to test with it?

Overall, there's a LOT of good candidates in this range for gaming even though from a project perspective there's not much mythos or worldbuilding going on. I was really surprised how many of these 100 I thought were good! There are still plenty of derivative SCPs (one is just "what if Silent Hill, man"), and much of the project's identity still remains in the future.  One notable entry is the first real action-oriented SCP, primarily consisting of transcripts of the special forces of the SCP going into a weird dimension. It's also been updated to modern presentation standards so it's neat!  

There's also my first disease SCP - a lot of these are just zombie/rage infections that make people into m m m m m monsters! Gamers already got plenty of monsters, they don't need more. But this one (Base Eleven Disorder, below) is really nice and intriguing.  I didn't pick it because it's not really scenario-inducing, but the Dialysis Bracelet (SCP-269) is also a decent "medicalized" SCP, where you "kinda get what it's trying to do" but it's too alien/bizarre to pull it off. 

Similarly, Professor William Wordsworth's Collection of Curiosities is good because every new animal comes with sketchy/blinkered but quasi-accurate instructions on how to contain and care for each new anomalous creature, which of course is much more valuable (and challenging) than just gunning them down.

SCP for Gaming People: SCP 100-199

I kinda messed up and didn't do SCP-100 in the last entry, which is a shame because it's actually a really good one.

I should note that I'm curating these for gaming people, not necessarily for gaming. As you can see, some of these are very open-ended, others are more like oddly-formatted short fiction with a beginning, middle and end. Ripe for adaptation, perhaps, but  not necessarily easy to just directly import.  These are the ones I consider to have just the right combination of imagination, missing pieces, fun, the roughness of amateur-created writing, and the polish of easy digestibility.  Also that strange feeling when you read something and think "this could make a good scenario."  

Finally, there are some SCPs that have puzzle or game elements themselves.  Trying to figure out SCP-194 (linked below) is fun!

In these second hundred SCPs, we see the development of new areas of SCP worldbuilding (Marshall, Carter and Dark, and one of my favorites, Dr. Wondertainment) as well as an early example of a good medical SCP, SCP 103, the Never-Hungry Man.  Of the "gore" SCPs, this is one of the few that emphasizes that medical doctors actually do try to treat patients and are concerned about them.  Lots of bad SCPs have high body counts just for the sake of high body counts, and portray the SCP foundation as being more or less maniacal; this one rather drily reports a medical team refusing to do what their boss orders them to do to a patient, being forced to do it anyway, and the boss being "court-martialed".  Interesting... But you can also see the "torture/just do horrible things to test subjects" style even in otherwise pretty good entries - see the Anachronistic TV, which provoked them to try to torture people with it rather than figure out how it was making episodes of I Love Lucy that never existed...  Compare to The Painting (SCP-151), (not included below, but a pretty basic SCP), where obviously the real question is how the Painting was made! 

As you can see from the below, I tend to like SCPs that leave people changed or strained rather than dead or mangled.  The Variable Coaster is a good example. People ride the coaster for, subjectively, months, but they are there only for three minutes.  This approach to horror/fantasy eventually would manifest in some of the SCP wiki's greatest works, the "infohazard" or "memetic" anomalies, which approached the Lovecraftian idea of knowledge or experiences as the horror itself.  

Notable, below, is a unique version of the "creepy ventriloquist dummy", not animate, exactly, but fearful nonetheless...

Good SCPs for Gaming People - SCP-002 through 100

Another "someone mentioned they'd be interested someday maybe" post...

I bow to the frenzied demand of the public...

Why play Wizards-era D&D? - Another Question From A Dark Forest

 The dark forest questions continue.   This one comes from a D&D skeptic.  Specifically, "why play Wizards-era D&D?" (3rd through 5th edition, plus Pathfinder, perhaps 13th Age, and other games in the orbit).  The idea is that since encounters are meant to be balanced, and characters are meant to be balanced, that really you're just marking time as you level up. Reaching 20th level is a foregone conclusion, and levelling up and getting more treasure is the only real reward in the cycle of play, so why play it at all?

I think there is something to this question.  Although Wizards-era DMGs are, in my view, extremely good at certain things, they are less good at addressing the question of where the Challenge in Challenge Rating really is, and certainly do not suggest the sort of "well, you strolled into the dragon's cave at first level, guess you all got eaten" play that was common in map-based play prior to 3e.  To some degree that type of play is denigrated as balanced encounters are seen as the main type of encounters to be had.  There is something to this observation. It doesn't come out of nowhere. Here is my response.

97 author recommendations from a dark forest

I'm on a dark forest server where people a lot of times talk about books but it's always nerd shit, sf and fantasy, sometimes horror, etc. You know, the dominant form of books, film and entertainment during my lifetime. Anyway, I decided to help these dorks out with my own highly personalized recommendations of Normie Books Regular People Like To Read.  Significant responses are collated at the bottom of the post.

This is just a recommendation list, anyone who attempts to recognize this as Discourse will be forced to write a 5000 word essay on how Understanding Media applies to Booktok. Also note that this is from a random stroll through my kindle library, it isn't typical of my shelves (or really of my reading.)  There's lots of shit you can't get on Kindle still!

How reading this type of stuff helps your sf and fantasy gaming more than reading sf and fantasy is left as an exercise for the reader.

JD's Pro Tips For 7e Call of Cthulhu

 Pulling another post out of a dark forest I was in and putting it here for easy sharing.  How to play 7th Edition Call of Cthulhu.  

Pictured: Call of Cthulhu,
7th Edition, (1993), colorized

I think it's vital to note that 7e is the first actual new edition of Call of Cthulhu - an edition that firmly updates the system and changes its approach to many topics. Some of my tips will seem extremely basic and obvious to people who have played this game for multiple editions. Others are new to 7e, fitting into those mechanical approaches that are new.