Beau Kalden reached out a few months ago asking if they could do a reading from Sixty Years in Space, and I was more than happy to give them permission. The episode is now available at https://www.plutocrat.biz/episodes/10-60-years-in-space-pt-1-types-of-governments
Friday, 4 July 2025
Sunday, 1 June 2025
Making a tabletop roguelike - Part Two (Why TTRPGs?)
(I had planned on writing another post for part two, but this is an interlude triggered by another Discord discussion, so here we are. You may or may not find part one useful).
It is always useful to tease out the assumptions of a thing you're designing -- as an exercise if nothing else. Michael Brough for a while made an art of taking an assumption about roguelikes and turning that assumption into a whole game, whether it is character progression or inventory systems.
As I'm making a TTRPG, I've been slowly working through this myself - specifically "why am I making a TTRPG?". There's one straightforward answer: creating a tabletop role-playing game is extremely easy. Far easier than making a video game or board game. All you need is some kind of desktop publishing software, and a page on itch.io. And not only that, but you can be deliberately as expressive (glass of water as a hit point mechanic) and ambiguous as you want to be. I've spotted rule omissions in other pre-release TTRPGs, only to be told by the designer "Your play group can figure it out" and the beauty of the genre is entirely that you can. I've made a complete TTRPG from scratch and published it in under 2 hours.
"But how did you play test it?"
And that's the problem. Because the document as written isn't a tabletop role-playing game. None of them are.
Table top role-playing games exist in a space somewhere between board games, LARPs and their own unique thing - and they are hugely influenced and indebted to both. Inevitably I have ended up asking myself repeatedly "Would this be better as a board game?" or better as a LARP, and while I can try to answer those questions myself, I would expect other people to be asking those same questions and coming up with much more coherent answers than I could.
Let's start with the rules. Board games generally don't work if the players don't know the rules. But knowing the rules is the exception rather than the rule in the (traditional) TTRPG space. And while you could argue that more modern TTRPGs have tried to address this by simplifying the rules - these games can still work if you are entirely ignorant of them.
Well, if we're able to ignore the rules, there must surely be solid documentation about the practical process of playing the game. But it appears that LARPs do a much better job talking about this practice of play than TTRPGs do. The recent series on Dice Exploder about LARPs highlighted to me how sophisticated the thinking is in that space, whereas I can't see comparable writing about tabletop games (either board or role).
I think this is as a product of (paradoxically) how hard it is to get into the practice of tabletop roleplaying design. There is "no one place to go" because of the small size of the industry, and the way it keeps being shaken up by technology transformations out of its control. You used to be able to go to the Forge, then it was Google Plus for a while and now the majority of people have retreated to Discord, which has its own challenges for new entrants (being private by default, transient and moated to protect its communities -- attributes that are important to preserve those communities). Sure there is RPG.net, but it's much much clearer to me where to go for roguelikes (which are smaller again) or boardgames (which are bigger).
My recommendation as to where to start, after having spent a while looking, is podcasts: specifically starting with the Design Games podcast which does a great job going top to bottom on a specific design practice, then Dice Exploder which provides a zoomed in view of the history and practice of a single mechanic, then Read the Fucking Manual if you want to hear smart and thoughtful people with strong opinions talk about whatever they want to in the role-playing space, and around it.
So let's go back to my earlier bold claim that no tabletop game has ever successfully been written down. It's entirely impossible to enumerate all the circumstances a game can be played under, but in a board game, we can usually notice when the game breaks down because the rules don't work as written ("hey, you took my cards when I went to the kitchen for more snacks"), and in a LARP, a lot of work has been done to make sure that the game runs as intended ("the rules have been written in tears"). Tabletop games kind of fall in this weird middle between these two extremes, carried on the momentum of 50 years of playing D&D such that every other TTRPG is pulled along on its coat tails. But I think that's their strength.
You don't learn a TTRPG in isolation. You learn at the table. You watch actual plays. You learn go on to unlearn a whole lot of stuff that you learned when you change from one system to another. TTRPGs are accessible in a way that LARPs, and even board games aren't. Sure, there might be a need for a session zero, but there's no concept of teach the game the way that board games sometimes require. TTRPGs thrive on vibes.
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Monday, 19 May 2025
Making a tabletop roguelike - Part One (Another Manifesto)
(Or how I posted in a discord and got told by the mods to write a blogpost instead).
In response to me looking to get some TTRPG people onto Roguelike Radio, a fellow discorder Markus posted a link to his blogpost on Bringing Roguelikes to the Tabletop - a considered and well written piece on how to leverage some of the design tropes from modern roguelikes into table top role-playing games. It turns out this is not the first time someone has thought of this idea: another discorder (SamR) pointed out that the Old School Renaissance was in part inspired by an rpg.net post where a succession of adventurers lived and died in a procedural generated dungeon. Markus' argument (made on discord, in response to me) is that the key three roguelike elements (procedural generation, permadeath and system interactions) have already been incorporated by the OSR movement, and so examining repeated runs and metaprogression is more worthwhile.
I'm not going to pretend that I have encyclopaedic knowledge of the OSR genre (I believe I own one OSR game), but this struck a chord, because Sersa Victory - designer of OSR game Victory Basic, has adapted Unexplored's Cyclic Dungeon Generation into a tabletop version. Unexplored takes inspiration from Brian Walker's Brogue in many ways, but cyclic dungeon generation is unique to that game and an interesting innovation in procedural generation techniques. Unfortunately the algorithm is brittle and prone to failure states at many points (such as destruction or loss of keys), and I believe simpler and more robust dungeon generation techniques - such as adopted by Spelunky and Brogue itself - are generally more successful.
And SamR goes on to point out the more obvious problem with procedural generation in TTRPGS:
Meanwhile, procedural generation has fallen largely out of favor, because there’s an abundance of bespoke modules and referees can create their own content... Like the implicit promise of procedural generation is endless content that is nevertheless comprehensible. But any GM can create that no problem. [Ellipsis added].
So if procedural generation doesn't suit table top play well* -- and I'm not going to argue against a presumably more experienced wisdom of crowds --, what should a tabletop roguelike look like?
Rather than look at the modern roguelike, titrated and diluted through decades of implementation, I'm going to go back to our ur-text: Rogue, itself, to try to find some design principles that can define what a tabletop roguelike could be.
The first is a straight forward response to SamR's very excellent point. Glenn R. Wichman, Michael Toy, Ken Arnold and Jon Lane created Rogue because they didn't want to have to DM (whatever that mean - direct message? maybe email was too slow) and just wanted to play. A video game allows a set of constrained systems and rules to (mostly) safely operate for the player; whereas the explosive medium of table top play rules requires some kind of dampening effect like a carbon rod being inserted into the fissile material in a reactor -- a game moderator (GM) if you will (this is not a metaphor for sex maybe?). But this sounds like a lot of work and not enough play for one person (I suspect they should get paid). So any roguelike game is similarly going to forgo the need for this game moderator to allow everyone to play instead.
So a tabletop roguelike must be:
1. GM-less.
The second constraint naturally flows from the first. In a shared world, where everyone is a player, there is no authorial fiat: everyone must agree to the actions, outcomes and events (the systems). This is relatively straightforward in the game present because we can constrain situations of play to be within a specific space and time, but when it comes to backstory: it is too easy to create and miss contradictions in the wider world being made. So much like our Rogue, we are going to descend into the dungeon with a clear endpoint in mind (The Amulet of Yendor, in the original) and free of any past that might complicate this. The systems within the game may allow this past to be constructed, but we certainly don't want to play part way, and then realise we missed an important fact in a spin-off novel that negated everything we did.
2. No lore, one goal
(The easiest way to avoid the need for lore is to set the game in a modern setting -- any well documented historical setting would also suffice. The fantasy settings of OSR games might lean on D&D tropes enough to also apply -- certainly Rogue depends somewhat on this).
The third constraint will be where all the load-bearing design sits.
3. You can learn from your mistakes
You, as in you the player, not you the character. This is has many implications: the game systems must be complex enough that a simple solution is not obvious or (equally) random, but for which your gradual comprehension of the underlying rules and your capabilities as a player are of benefit. This also implies the possibility of an auspicious outcome instead of a steady descent into failure (even if auspicious simply means the last one to die, or the one to die most memorably). This also implies some repetition of systems, either through repeated play, or through enough similar scenarios that repetition dominates (but does not eradicate) variation.
Now I have sketched out the three design principles, it is relatively easy to cast around and find games in the same mold. I'll just pick three out:
Decaying Orbit - https://storybrewersroleplaying.com/decaying-orbit/
The Zone - https://thezonerpg.com/
Last Train to Breman - https://seaexcursion.itch.io/bremen
You'll notice pretty quickly that two out of three of these examples have at least one modern roguelike feature:
4. Cards
(Which I had planned on talking about in part two, but I got diverted to something else instead).
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* I can think of two examples where procedural generation can still be successfully accommodated in GMed TTRPGs: scenario creation and character creation -- particularly life-path style character creation. In both instances the participant is essentially playing a solitaire game with its own rules and constraints that then feeds into the larger shared play.
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Thursday, 8 May 2025
Setting fire to everything
I've been thinking a lot about the season 1 finale of Sens8 recently. It's a great piece of writing, bringing together a gestalt of characters with different abilities to achieve a goal much in the same way a table top role-playing game might. The finale is (mostly) set in an isolated facility in Iceland, and to get to the facility, the protagonist drives up in a expensive sports car with streams of blue smoke coming out from under the bonnet, and sneaks in while the red-blooded, car-loving guards are all distracted by the tragedy of a high performance vehicle gone to its death to soon.
In a TTTRPG, who comes up with that idea?
If it's the players, then congratulations: you've got the perfect OSR group capable of creative solutions to challenges and the rules just really need to get out of the way to let you play. If it's the game master or scenario designer, then that feels like there'd be the need for a lot of prompting for the solution, which might be hand-waived away with a couple of action checks.
But it's also probably not the first isolated facility you've had to get to, and it's definitely not the last. So how many times do we allow this technique to work? Maybe its not an isolated facility, but its a checkpoint in Gaza, and its not the first check point you've got to, but the fifth that day and you're going to have to go back through them in the other direction later on in the evening.
This is where the game designer steps in. We tend to focus a lot on the action check as a resolution mechanic, because its (usually) flexible and generic, and giving the players verbs to use are a really good idea, regardless of the medium, but action checks work best when situations are dynamic and the player's actions are varied and impactful (like combat); and less well when situations are repeatable and player influence on the outcome is limited.
I'd like to call this type of scenario an activity, to distinguish it from an action. Activities have repeatable outcomes, with limited scope for improvisation (or where we may wish to limit the scope for improvisation for thematic reasons) and are often tied to and reinforce the game's themes. Downtime is a good example of an activity. You get some points, spend them on some stuff, roll for some good or bad things to happen, and then get back to the important part of the game.
But activities should be in the important parts of the game as well; I'm just not sure they're designed as effectively. I've been thinking about the Sens8 scenario, because that corresponds almost exactly to something that comes up in my TTRPG Sixty Years in Space a lot. Arriving at a planet, asteroid or moon is almost exactly the same as arriving at an isolated facility: everyone can see you coming from a long way off, they have plenty of time to do something about it, and you need to turn up with a very good reason for why you're there.
Because we're doing this a lot, the players' first, smart idea of enforcing gun boat diplomacy on every world they go to is going to get repetitive fast - and may not fit in the themes of the game you're trying to create. But we don't want to hand waive away the impact of arriving at a site that you're not necessarily welcome at: instead we probably want to deal with a spectrum of reasons for turning up and responses. This feels like a perfect activity: at a minimum we'll construct some kind of list of things that a typical arrival goes through (are you travelling fast enough to explosively collide with your destination?, can they see whether you have weapons or contraband, what does customs think of you, do you need to quarantine for a while because the bug hunt you came from went a little awry), along with some skill checks to overcome some obstacles that may be put in your way.
But most players don't want to fill out a check list or a clock: they want to role-play. So maybe you decide that the activity should be a scenario: sitting inside your locked down ship while you wait to find out if any of your crew got replaced by a brain-sucking parasite sounds like a perfect sci-fi horror RPG. But it doesn't make much sense if you're delivering a cargo of fresh oranges. Hopefully the orange delivery guys like checklists more than the oopsie we did another Alien guys.
Or maybe you don't want to deal with this at all, and decide to just put a cut scene in, or a fade to black, and hand wave it away completely. Those are fine, but as a game designer, I like making systems more than scenes or scenarios.
I know of one way of creating an activity that's more complex than a check list, and more repeatable than a scenario - and so does every other board game designer. Because that's what I'm suggesting. If you can turn your down time or check list or clock filling exercise into a physical or logical map of a space with some rules for how you navigate it, then players will start to lean forward and engage with it in a way that elevates the experience. It might be as simple as a map of the space port, with the list of places that you have to go in order to get the paperwork completed to get past customs. It may be a combat system. It might be fire fighting rules.
I'm going to repost the TTRPG map making manifesto that I've posted elsewhere, because I think point 3 is especially relevant for the role-playing experience:
1. Put maps in your game for the players to use, not the GM
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Monday, 28 April 2025
Sixty Years in Space 4All
One of the wild design decisions I made with Sixty Years in Space is that it's rules compatible with the board game it is based on. Not only in the sense that it uses the same terms and units (in both senses) as High Frontier, but in that it could get to your turn in the board game and you say "hold up", assemble a group of players to form your crew, sit down and play the roleplaying game from the game state on the board and after a year of in-game time, the outcomes will be compatible with having played your year-long turn in the board game. That is, the odds of prospecting a site will be the same, building a factory has the same requirements, printing space craft components will take as long and so on.
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Thursday, 10 April 2025
Update 4 for Sixty Years in Space is out
Update 4 for Sixty Years in Space is now out. This update is focused on completing the colony administration rules in (A)-Base (D)-Landing and expanding the counter and dice "vocabulary" used across the game. The (A)-Base (D)-Landing supplement is now also priced at the same pre-release price as all the other supplements and core rules; but if you contributed $60 or more to buying the core game rules, you now get it for free! The colony administration game is the most board-game like of the any of the rules I've written for Sixty Years in Space and focuses as much on the social stratification of your growing population due to housing insecurity and inequality as it does on the mechanics of ensuring that you have enough food and labour to keep the colony running. You can read the full release notes here.
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Thursday, 26 December 2024
The Seduction of Roguelikes
The power of adventuring through New Plan or seeing the map of the Forgotten Realms for the first time is in the gaps in the maps. The sense of possibility that these give -- not every rumour is true on the rumour table but it could be. And as a player in this space or referee running it or video game designer trying to make it or author trying to write about it, you try where possible to try to smudge the margins -- to spill the writing on the page or pixels on the screen out beyond their constant boundaries to excite the imagination of the participants about a thing that you cannot possibly create.
I have for nine years now been making what is for most people an unplayable game -- Sixty Years in Space -- which has had a modest level of success in part because people reading it fall in love with the idea of the game, rather than its implementation. It works best in this fashion as a science fiction novel without any characters in the genre that is the most successful at telling stories without characters. Sixty Years in Space is the natural conclusion of this process of spilling pixels beyond the boundaries of the page, because it describes a thing that will never exist, empowering hypothetical players to use the roguelike tools of procedural generation, systems expression and permadeath to literally add colour to space.
But you could easily go in another direction with the same roguelike tools. Rather than expanding on absences, you can build a total systemisation engine: a series of interlocking systems that encompasses every possible interaction; procedurally filling in all the gaps on the map; and use permadeath to build an attention field with slopes between boredom and adrenaline. Dwarf Fortress and Caves of Qud both do this: Dwarf Fortress as a city builder/fantasy world simulator and Caves of Qud as an open world RPG. In Caves of Qud, instantiated players consume what looks so far to be well implemented genre fare in a science fantasy wish fulfilment engine. It fixes "no gaps in the map" by ensuring wherever you look there's enough detail to excite you, without any of the friction of it having to make sense.
I don't intend to disparage Caves of Qud, which is more than happy to leave gaps for you to fill in its vast sweep of history, in its dull water-vine filled fields, in the articulation of its visual language and user interface, but more want to highlight that that the roguelike genre is a robust and vast enough an usul to contain both multitudes.
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Monday, 11 November 2024
What's next for Sixty Years in Space?
Update 3 required a huge investment of time to put together - but it solved a number of problems with Sixty Years in Space. I really should take some time off to celebrate but I'm already thinking about starting writing further updates to the game.
I don't think I'll be making many changes to the Crewed Rules: and I anticipate those rules, along with All Errors are My Own, are unlikely to change significantly between now and some hypothetical version 1.0/ end of early access.
A Lot of Zeroes also didn't change much between updates 2 and 3 which suggests that it may be nearly feature complete. But A Lot of Zeroes is also different enough from the main game, that I might want to make it playable in a completely standalone fashion - with rules compatibility with a hypothetical Sixty Years In SRD, whatever that may be.
A Facility with Words would like to become two books, if it could: one about worlds with large populations -- and with more work done on civil functions and the exfiltration game -- and one about worlds with atmospheres and life. If I do make that split, the second book would be called All Terras are My Own, with a sub-game for terraforming worlds, much as I added a sub-game in (A)-Base (D)-Landing about base-building. A good part of expanding A Facility with Words will be making more encounter cards: for plants, animals and individuals and robots beyond the Advanced technology level that the current encounter cards stop at.
I shipped (A)-Base (D)-Landing with two empty chapters (which LaTeX conveniently compiled out) called Site Events and Colonists. This is part of the reason I'm comfortable only asking for a minimum of $1 for these rules -- not that they're incomplete: just that the base building game is missing some chaotic push back as you play. Both of those will tie together because the majority of site events will scale up with the number of colonists at site. The Colonists chapter will also add history encounter cards to give more context for the life that each colonist experienced back home on Earth.
There's also a number of supplements and spin-offs I've mentioned in the game or elsewhere. Absent Without is now going to end up covering the Directions era, starting in 2100 - now that Sixty Years in Space actually covers 60 years in space (2040-2099 inclusive). I'm still figuring out the shape of this, as many things that want to go in there may better be placed in other rules and as a result it's going to take a while. Colony: Subtitle is going to be a set of rules that cover getting from small colonies to big ones, with all that that entails: tax, legal systems, local politics - but also undersea exploration and an alternate scenario where humanity never leaves the surface of the Earth. RE: Crewed Rules is going to be an introductory scenario involving recruiting the crew and putting them through basic training. Of the Solar System is going to have a whole lot of faction missions -- one mission arc for each faction in All Eras are My Own -- and exists as material I initially cut from those rules. Six Meals in Space and Roche Limit are two card games that currently exist as a few scattered notes but could materialise at any point. I also at one point threatened to do a per-crew position rewrite of the rules called the 4Play system...
But first I think I'm going to address the chief culprit in the room - that there's too many rules and they're far too complex, still. Far too many for any playing group to be reasonably expected to learn. My argument has always been that space is complicated and getting it realistic takes a lot of work, and my expectation is that if you really care, you'll be willing to put in the work. But due to the segmentation of social media - and especially the evolution of TTRPGs to be more art, product and actual play focused - I'm finding that even connecting with the niche of a niche of people who I think will be interested is difficult - even as I struggle with discovering and clearly communicating the game. If you came to the rules in an earlier iteration, it appears you're not likely to come back.
And that's why I think I'm going to work on a different game for a while. It's going to be called Epic Hazard Operation. It's going to be about what happens from minute one of when the space station where you're working explodes, or the infection escapes, or the grey goo evolves. It's going to feature a crew from the bottom rung of society, the supervisors who try to keep them in line and the professionals who come to clean up afterwards. I'll try to make it as rules light as I can - which will still be rules heavy in the grand scheme of things. The secret sauce will be the players don't know the real rules. Because its designed for you, the Sixty Years in Space enthusiast, to act as the procedural generator for the map that they explore, the systems they don't know how to operate, the upgrades they don't know exist, the factions they don't know they can antagonise.
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Saturday, 9 November 2024
Update 3 for Sixty Years in Space is out
Update 3 is out for Sixty Years in Space is out. And I'm incredibly proud of it.
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Thursday, 27 June 2024
A Manifesto on Making Simulating Games
I’ve spent a lot of time listening to a lot of smart people talking about table top role-playing games and the great news is that I think the best podcasts out there are better than anything equivalent in the video or board game space.
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Sunday, 14 April 2024
Sixty Years in Space update 2 is now out
For more details see https://half-apress.itch.io/60-years-in-space/devlog/714676/update-2-is-out
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Sunday, 31 March 2024
Sixty Years In Space: Devlog 4
One of the great joys of maturing as a game designer is that I've got very good at making complex systems as simple as possible.
Each square represents (for a crew member) 4 kilograms. You cover up squares as you load up equipment and your load number is equal to the highest number you cover up. Equipment slots are represented by multi-square items: B for 8 kilogram slot items through to F for 125 kilogram slot items.
This load table is approximately equivalent to the notion of fitted loads - things like spacesuits which fit on your body and therefore a lot closer to your centre of mass -- and which count only as their actual mass for permitted load (I didn't tell you that the power series in the load table doubles the load mass for every 4 increase in load). But to do that, we need to have space suits load templates which fit as closely as possible to the "astronaut shape" drawn in the lighter greys on the table.
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