August | 2025 | Deeper in the Game
3 posts published by bankuei during August 2025| Deeper in the Game
3 posts published by bankuei during August 2025| Deeper in the Game
It’s been years since I was last hiking, but something occurred to me. GM Prep is a bit like deciding what you’re taking with you when you go hiking. If you bring the right stuff, your experience is more comfortable, easier, and you’re ready for problems. If you bring too little, you have to do […]| Deeper in the Game
I picked up the Vermis fictional game books, and it sparked some ideas about the nature of game design. I’ll repeat the thread here, since it seems the internet is disappearing things quicker…| Deeper in the Game
I see the discourse is starting because there’s a $1000 “Dungeon Master University” retreat. I can honestly say the things that gave me the most useful GMing skills was running a few games that simply trained and taught me skills I carry over to other games as well. Primetime Adventures Primetime Adventures is a game […]| Deeper in the Game
The world of videogames sometimes teaches us things For the last month or so, I’d been following the general stuff going around with videogames’ Stop Killing Games initiative – th…| Deeper in the Game
It’s kinda bad times all around. It’s been bad times for years now, just more now, now. In this kind of times, you want a little escapism, “for a few hours, we were free”, as Sinners put it. But also you want to vent some of the feelings of the real world, too, so it […]| Deeper in the Game
I think one of the phrases of modern RPG design I’ve grown to dislike is “fragile design”, because it misses the context of larger game design outside of RPGs: many games are made with just enough rules to work, and when you pull some out, the game stops working, or works in such a different […]| Deeper in the Game
The game I’ve been grinding at currently has the working title “A Blade Uncertain” which, I guess fits because I haven’t settled on the title, aiyah. Anyway, this is a fantasy RPG designed to fill much of the niche that my friend’s highly modded 5E game does, without being married TO what D&D does; or […]| Deeper in the Game
Let’s say we’re playing a game, and when you make your character, you pick one of 8 archetypes and that’s the majority of the mechanical choice you make; everything else is like &…| Deeper in the Game
His Majesty the Worm has been on my to play list for a minute and is right behind Errant for dungeoncrawlers to play. It has a few key features that really seem interesting; combat with interesting initiative/offense/defense strategies, a bit of bluffing, a resource system where you heal/regain resources by playing up your character’s relationships […]| Deeper in the Game
One of the games I picked up in an Itch Bundle was Tim Zee’s Wake, which feels like a cousin to Lacuna mixed with a bit of old White Wolf Mage as well. The premise is that the collective drea…| Deeper in the Game
Thinking more about general game design and how rules are communicated. Most games use both of these to different degrees, but the question is what parts should be procedural? What parts should be …| Deeper in the Game
Years ago I first started talking about the split between Procedures & Directives in RPG design. As I’m currently writing up a game for some friends, I realize that some aspects of GMing …| Deeper in the Game
Shout out to HexKit which is the software I used to make these examples and one of the easiest mapping software to use. I used a mix of tilesets though you can do a ton with the default set or just…| Deeper in the Game
(ETA: Got my thoughts further in order and put together a full post on the whole Mechanical-Fiction Spectrum.) One of my friends takes forever to make characters. I’ve figured out that if the…| Deeper in the Game
