Video-Game Mechanics In Your Campaign

Now and again people discuss how to bring elements from video-games to TTRPGs. There’s a lot that is easy to bring: lore, item descriptions, monsters, maps. The same you could bring from a book. But they usually talk about translating mechanics (that work due to the nature of video-game button input and the calculations behind programming), or some undefined mood that comes from the entire presentation of a video-game, possible through the limited input and static design of that medium.

The famous “how to do Dark Souls combat in a TTRPG?” question. After thinking a bit, I can settle the issue.

Much like early RPG campaigns employed rules from all over including board games (following FKR principles), you can use video-games as resolution methods for your campaign.

Want Dark Souls combat? When a combat starts in the campaign, turn on the game and beat a boss. Downtime? Use any management game for a season and check the results. Domain game? Civilization. Mass combat? Choose your favorite RTS map. The list goes on.

Tags: FKR

RPGs as Craft

A craft is “a pastime (…) that requires particular skills and knowledge of practiced work”. The whole of craft also includes perceiving what the untrained observer wouldn’t, becoming yourself a trained observer of others, experiencing tools and materials to grasp their practical interrelationships, and engaging in collective understanding. Having enjoyed Jenx’s series on RPGs as hobby, I want to talk RPGs as craft.

Blackbox Gaming

Blackbox (AKA HUDless) gaming is when the players are unaware of any mechanical tool used to establish and provide resolution to situations and conflicts. They may roll dice but aren’t informed of what the roll means or its mathematical logic – besides obvious intuition like “rolling high is good” – and in some cases have a diceless experience as the referee rolls everything. They might be privy to a few. The player’s sheet includes information like name, backstory, noticeable traits (“good at climbing”) and inventory, but not references to any procedures. Players negotiate what they want to do and how they do it only through the fiction, and the referee narrates the result.

Play Reports – Adventures in Improv

My New Year Resolution includes doing stuff that normally scares me in different parts of my life. In the tabletop arena, that includes running zero-to-almost-zero prep games, something I never did. I have optimized prep principles so I never give myself more trouble than it’s worth, but I just feel the burning need to have a fair amount of prep and decided that my skills as a GM could be improved by doing these experiments where it’s just me and my lovely ass on the chair. Ran two sessions (so far) to that effect this month. One was expected, the other was unexpected. Here are my notes and thoughts:

Trust in RPGs

Trust comes up often in roleplaying discussions. Relevant to my articles is defining FKR as a “high-trust” style as it is frequently called, but what is trust in the gaming context?

An Easy Suggestion to Start in FKR

This is not prescriptive. I don’t know your setting, the rulesets you may have used in the past, or your players. But I do know that FKR can intimidate people, mainly by two factors: the difficulty in understanding what it is (here’s my attempt at explaining it) and the fear that it’s extremely demanding on the referee. That you aren’t cut to run FKR style unless you know your setting/genre as well as a Prussian officer knows war. I want to dispel that bullshit.

Principled Freeform and FKR

(My sincere thanks to Jonathan, Justin and Ven)

You end up seeing Principled Freeform referenced in some communities, but receiving a definition involves jumping from old forum thread to old forum thread and picking up the pieces. How to proceed? It’s particularly interesting to me because as a FKR person, the discussion about “GMless FKR” (an oxymoron) is recurrent and Principled Freeform is cited as the already existing definition for the non-FKR proposal, so it would be useful for everyone to have a clear post about it (Procedural Freeform and the difference will also be explained). Besides, Principled Freeform is very rewarding to play and deserves wider attention.

FKR and Abstraction

(This is the third post in my recent series on FKR. I recommend reading the first one for a clearer understanding of this one).

My thesis here is that an arbitrary attribute of a ruleset like length or math crunch should not be used as determining factor regarding its utility to FKR play.  To present it, I will go over three points: why freeform and ultralight are associated so strongly with the FKR, how so called “crunchy” rulesets can be used by FKR referees without any dissonance, and a direct example of a famous RPG abstraction being applied to hypothetical FKR play. I believe case studies greatly strengthen hypothesis.

Complementing my FKR Analysis

My previous post had a much bigger reception than expected. I’m very happy with the discussions and would like to take this opportunity to share a few disagreements, since they were all very intelligent and don’t deserve to be lost on conversations.

FKR – Non-Exhaustive Analysis

EDIT: This post now serves as a Megapost collecting all my posts on FKR in a link tree for simple reference, updated as new articles are written:

• Complementing my FKR Analysis: About responses to this very post.
• FKR and Abstraction: About FKR, math abstraction, rules-lightness and how you can use “crunchy” systems with it.
• Principled Freeform and FKR: About what Principled Freeform is and how it differentiates from FKR.
• An Easy Suggestion to Start in FKR: It’s very easy.
• Trust in RPGs: Related to FKR being considered “high-trust”.
• Blackbox Gaming: About players not knowing the rules.

Introduction

FKR (Free Kriegsspiel Revival/Renaissance, unless I’m not up to par with current nomenclature) has featured here a couple times. FKR is still having a moment, I’m somewhat associated with it, and I thought having an extra post people can point towards to newbies as an explanation would be at least an interesting contribution to do over half an hour. However, my interest is also doing an analysis of FKR as a concept, which problematic of play it’s meant to address, if any, and how it gets tangled up in perception with different objects like freeform.