Troy Press

Hypothesis: The first IMDB ratings are by the biggest fans and therefore represent the peak rating, with stable ratings being lower as non-fans eventually catch up and watch something. I look at Section 31 ratings and Season 5 Lower Deck ratings to prove the hypothesis in that context.

When designing your game, it’s important to understand what your Harm and Recovery System is doing for your game. Both should create drama-filled moments, which means they need to have Costs associated with them: but those Costs not only need to be sensible for the touchstones evoked during play, but also carry a level of interest and intrigue all on their own. 

Jack Guignol has an oft-quoted post, “Just Use Bears,” about using the stats for a bear when the players outpace your prep and end up facing “some cool, weird-ass monster that you don’t actually have stats for.” Lars, at Dice Goblin, expanded this further, to leveraging animal archetypes in general, “Just Use Bears… Or Wolves, Dragons or Spiders.”

The fundamental tension of the Twilight Struggle series of Cold War games is that you often have to play cards that help your opponent. The strategy centers around determining when to play such cards.

Powered by the Apocalypse games take diverse approaches to representing injury, stress, and deteriorating health. Unlike traditional RPGs with their focus on hit points, PbtA harm systems often try for other narrative consequences. Thoughts about Harm Clocks, Debilities, Conditions, Stress, Dice Pools, and NPCs.

1) You can practice the language with hundreds of people on social media, in bite-sized chunks.

2) You can make up your own words in the language, using established roots and affixes.

3) Many of the speakers are multilingual—they may even speak one or two other conlangs…

Originally pitched as a prequel, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds now has to be conceived of as a reboot on an alternate timeline, based on its own changes to the timeline and to the development of its characters. Nor should this be a surprise. The future of the 1960s show didn’t quite pan out.

In 2023, Joey D. Jones of the University of South Hampton interviewed me and over a dozen others about the authorial burden of interactive fiction. His paper on the topic is now available.

After a thorough review of dozens of science fiction PbtA games, and after hacking the last two TTRPG systems we played quite a bit, I decided to create my own game with exactly the vibe I wanted. Why a new system? I didn’t want to set an adventure in a cinematic universe so that we could capture that feeling of exploring the unknown.

One of the things my wife and I love is the live music scene. Most weekends we can hear live music at our pizza shop, at neighborhood bars, at a food-truck fair, and so on. These are almost always cover artists, though they may play a song or two of their own as well. I’ve always wondered about the songs that they choose to cover.

Urban prep is different than traditional dungeon prep. For a dungeon, or a hamlet or keep, you might key every location, but you’re almost never going to do that for a town or city. These are typically run much more loosely, with handwaving around movement through the city.

When reviewing the electronic boardgame Dark Tower, I learnt it was programmed using one of the TMS1000 microcontrollers. I’ve since fallen in love with this little processor, discovering that it powered so many other electronic games from my childhood: Big Trak, Electronic Battleship, Merlin, Simon, Speak & Spell, etc.

Dungeon World 1e is the geomorph set of fantasy PbtAs, thanks to it being one of the first TTRPGs to use the Creative Commons license. You can cut it out and reassemble it, build on it as desired. Here are some of the many works that are compatible with Dungeon World 1e.