radiant fracture

Again, just if you feel a spark of interest or think of a story that did this in a good way for you -- what about when a character experiences personality collapse, more or less?

The fourth character quality in Ten Candles is the Brink, which is a little harder to explain, but is something like the character's breaking point, or rather what they do when they break -- the nastiest version of themselves that they collapse into, often, though I've seen it played for beautiful irony.

It's framed as a statement, "I have seen you..." and then what your character does at the brink -"lie to a friend," "accidentally shoot someone," "run away in fear," "steal from the helpless," etc.

The reward for using this in 10C is to get to re-roll your dice. You're rewarded for story juice by a mechanical payoff.

So, I guess -- what's an interesting state of collapse for you to play?

* * * * * *

Just answer if it's fun, okay? No expectations.

I want a little project to occupy myself in case I need to be away more often in the winter, which I suspect I might.

{rf}

Thinking about a thing and looking for some quasi-randomized ideas, if you need a distraction.

What's an interesting strength for a character in an RPG to have -- interesting for you to play?

It can be a strength or skill of any sort, from a standard stat to a mundane expertise like knitting. Spellcasting is a bit too broad. Necromancy is closer to the level of specificity I'm thinking of. Over-specificity is fun (ex. can only reanimate dinosaurs).

What makes a strength or power fun, beyond just "I win all the things"?

As per the question about weakness, I'm currently imagining a mostly-mundane-ish-world RPG like Ten Candles.

Strength we can define in the 10C way as "a quality that helps your life more than it harms it," which doesn't mean it couldn't prove suddenly catastrophic in a final deluge of dramatic irony.

{rf}

PS no obligation to answer all of the questions! I'm just free-associating right now.

Hey my game jam is over! I'm announcing the results a little early.

Folks, that was brilliant. 32 people signed up, and there were 10 entries in the end! (Plus one after the deadline.) I ended up giving awards to four games instead of three because I liked so many.

It is damn difficult to be in charge of judging things, but I do feel like the small prize encouraged people to enter. It's so nice to win a thing.

Here are the four cup-of-coffee winners (couldn't stop at three in the end). I had lots of criteria, but it came down to -- how easy was it to tell a story that I loved through the game? All of these games helped me build a story that I wouldn't have come up with on my own and that surprised, delighted, and moved me.

• Monster in the Wilderness - ursula - a beautiful abstraction of the themes of Beowulf (or that's how I read it) - gorgeous
  
• A Moment too Late - ToriBee - You are a time-travelling tortoise who always arrives too late for the Major Historical Event and has to piece things together from the aftermath - Crept up on me!
  
• A Game of Tower - yhlee - Fantasy, surrealism, and personal growth via confronting your lies about yourself - delicious
  
• Kintsugi - elusis - A supple yet strong spine for stories of damage and repair - poignant
  

There was lots of fun and story to be had in all the games, though, and I recommend reading / playing the others.

{rf}


PS what is a good name for the cup-of-coffee prize and/or winner?

Okay, I'm going to do it!

Fractured Birthday TTRPG Game Jam
Runs Nov 1 - Dec 22
Results released Dec 31

It's my birthday. I would like there to be more small weird TTRPGs (Table-Top Role-Playing Games) in the world. Make my birthday wish come true. Create a TTRPG on the theme of fracture, breakage, and/or repair. Win a cup of coffee!

This jam comes with a tiny prize! Up to 3 (three) of my fave games will receive $10 (Canadian) so that the designer can buy themselves a congratulatory coffee.

More details and the jam submission page here: itch.io/jam/fractured-birthday-game-jam

Some Examples of Games I Like

I like spooky games, horror games, and games about feelings.

Ten Candles (beautiful doom ritual)
1000-Year-Old Vampire (roll & write delight)
This Vineyard Will Be Our Salvation (quirky, smart, critical)
Quietus
Pull Me From the Earth (Q&A excellence)
Star Crossed / Dread
Brindlewood Bay (love the crime-solving mechanic)
The Quiet Year
Debrief

Other Things I Like in Games

Collaborative storytelling
Queer & trans content / vibe
Solo journalling games, other writing games, other solo games
Unusual and / or witty mechanics (esp. physical objects)
Low-prep, improvisational games with a few rules to anchor play
Games about feeeeelings but also about story
Gamification of hard real-life activities or experiences
Games with aspects of ceremony or ritual

My Games

I think my most successful games are these, if you want to see the kinds of things I make:

You Are a Beacon (solo journalling game)
Getting There (2-player Q&A storytelling mini-game)
The Fledgling and the Vale (2-player Q&A story game)

sabotabby and I played that mini-game I made for my creative writing class, and the results were so deliciously out of control that you get to see it on our journals.

The game is a dialogue created by asking and answering questions. I've removed the questions here, but kept the dialogue format.

Feel free to try the game with a friend and post the results in the comments, if you feel inspired.


The alleged car is a new type of EV, but designed by techbros who were far more interested in a grift than in making a functional vehicle. They were also, as it turns out, amateur occultists. The battery works, in theory, but in addition to charging, it on occasion requires a blood sacrifice. Not a whole human, necessarily. Just a little blood.
We're late because your biomechantronic arm caught a virus and went all evil hand and kept swerving us into the ditch. We had to pull over and have a long argument with it about fate and destiny and being a part of something larger than itself.
It's partly your fault for not downloading the software updates and partly whoever set loose the virus, and partly me for starting a conversation about free will with it in the first place (I was bored and stressed out), so everyone's in an extra bad mood now, and also it's possible we're too late to stop the pseudoSingularity which might, as we explained tersely to your rogue arm, render all this free will more or less moot.

We brought the runic silicon chips, which carry on them the ancient invocation that will debug the pseudoSingularity, but did we remember the manual for their deploy and operation? We would have, if you had ever been the sort to read the manual.

You're not wrong about me and manuals.

We're going to the Pit, that toxic junkyard of discarded magitech a thousand stories deep, with a seething lake of heavy metals and vampiric data spectres at its heart.

That's where the Sibyl sent us after a very rushed and expensive divination. There's at least a 50% chance that she's in the pay of the BludDies anyway, but we're out of options.

I'm frantically chanting every incantation I know in case one of them is the right one, so occasionally the windshield wipers start up, or flames shoot out of the hand-of-glory hood ornament.

Oh, and we're running low on blood.

Running my biomechantronic fingers over my scab-studded human one, I consider whether it's time for another blood draw. My nano-monitors are edging into the orange territory on the anemia marker, but what good will a normal WBC count do me if we stall out on the highway and get our eternal soul data devoured by ferals?

After all, the High Queen of the BludDies is an old friend and sometimes lover, and I wouldn't want to disappoint her.

I bowl out of the bloodEV with the silicon runes rattling in my hand as the howling hypotheticals come screaming out of the pit.

And there's the High Queen between me and the edge, her void eyes glittering, information streaking down her limbs like mercury, but she's not looking at me. I might as well not be there. In a minute I won't be.

I'm just the means to this end, you and this dead-eyed glory burning like a phosphorous flame.

It's never been you and me, not really. It's always been you and her, and it's you and her now, here at the last showdown before the next showdown.

And maybe you didn't even know what you were going to do when you got here, until you got here. Maybe you were teetering between hero and heel turn.

But you know now.

{rf} / sabotabby 

I need a game.

My full family visited me, all six of them, parents, brother, sister-in-law, two nephews aged 21 and 2, last weekend.

The one thing we all, from age 2 to 72, at all sorts of levels of ability and distraction, can do together is go to a restaurant. I had to refuse to order food twice because I just couldn't eat any more.

I need a game. A game we can play at a cafe or restaurant or dinner table. I have many requirements.

Of course I want to invent the game myself, but five weeks may not be quite enough time.

Some Parameters, In No Particular Order

1. No fiddly bits a small person could swallow or put up their nose
2. Played in rounds so you can easily drop in or out
3. Playable by at least 6 players
4. Playable without lots of reaching over the table
5. Playable on limited table real estate (probably involves not too much putting things down on the table (maybe just by the dealer))
6. Played in turns rather than free-for-all, to avoid spillage
7. Actually fun
8. Strategy for my brother
9. Randomness for me
10. Doesn't have to be playable by the 2-year-old, but would be nice if he could grow into it

A card game or dice game, adapted, might work -- maybe something like Dixit or Apples to Apples / CAH, a matching game of some kind, where each person makes a match attempt or a bid or something that's then compared/evaluated.

In the past we have had table success with King of Tokyo and San Juan, but both of these are not workable with the 2-year-old.

We could play a cell phone or tablet game in turns but that isn't very interactive -- it's more like sequential solitaire.

Collaborative or competitive -- both are good.

Any thoughts, either in terms of actual games, adaptations, or designs?

I am thinking of adaptations such as wearable points. Ex. instead of putting down counters or tokens to count your score / position, I was thinking there ought to be a silly hat for whoever was winning. I mean, a pencil is okay. Written scorekeeping is okay. I just like silly hats.

{rf}