The Doug Alone

On the day I am writing this, which should be about a month before I post this, False Machine posted blog entry called 'On Guard' . The tl;dr version is that the "game" is a set of guards simply guarding the back entrance of a magical academy. They cannot leave the post — per se — and therefore the game is mostly played out in the construct of "doing nothing." The four pillars, as laid out by False Machines, are "Stay in Place," "No Drama," "Long Term Awareness," and "Minor Situations." The post then goes on to discuss visual and other sensory elements, structures, questions about how this could played. It sounds, to my ears, like something you might see in the Nordic LARPing community . In that context, it is easy to imagine a game where everyone stands around an actual door and then various things occur when a Greek Chorus of sorts suggests intrusions into the calm. Nowadays, I do very little of that type of...

    Finally Returning to The Bleak + The Pearl The last time I posted The Bleak + The Pearl content was December 29, 2024 . The last time I played The Bleak + The Pearl was actually early January. It is mentioned in Fourth Wall Break #7 . At the time, I thought there was going to be "a week or two" before I tried playing it again [around three weeks after the last posting]. In reality, it has been six months. Why? The simplest answer is that the "one campaign arc at a time" — replacing the old system of playing through two-to-four campaigns at the same time and posting once from each around weekly — ended up working well. And all the other stuff I have talked about impacting my solo play time schedule this year. Those things combined and I just got busy (in general) and specifically got busy having fun doing other things. Had The GLOW 1996 not taken five-plus months, we probably would have seen Bleak + Pearl back in March. All things considered...

Looking Back at The Resolutions It has been exactly a month since my last Fourth Wall Break . In that time I have fairly completely changed how I post and blog and added in some new mechanics. Tried out one new system and am planning to try more. I figured I touch back in to see how my new year's resolutions were doing. To refresh, here were some of the resolutions that were actionable: Formal Move Towards { Worlds → Campaigns → Arcs } Format Focusing on One Arc at a Time Post Once (and Early), Edit at Least Twice Trying Out "New" Game Systems Trying Out "New" Game Worlds (Re)Trying Out "New" Oracles Things to Not Sweat... Make More Art, Design More Stuff, Focus on Game Motifs, Etc Build Up a List of Graphical Resources Looking at that list now, four+ weeks later, most of them are coming along just fine. #1  (Formal Move Towards...) was pretty easy. That one was less about doing things differently and doing things more formally.  #2  (Focus on One Arc)...

Image is © Dean Spencer. Used with Permission. All Rights Reserved.   Five Pretty Big Changes to The Stone Crack'd I think we are reaching a point where we can build up to the end game for The Bloody Hands . I finally feel like I have an idea of something suitably epic to finish up the whole campaign. Let's see how "The Stone Crack'd" ends, first. Now that we are returning to The Stone Crack'd and playing out "the last great missions of Arden Ulet," I want to try out a few changes to help ramp up some things. The Bloody Hands has long been my "just try it out and see what happens" campaign and so I think a fitting tribute will be to try and push a few assumptions of mine around pretty hard. Greatly Reduced Death Armor It is pretty common in my games that some characters have "Death Armor" where they can't die — at least not until some phase is reached — and instead just lose the ability to control or really ...

← Back to Final Eustace & Hitomi Chapter || Back to First Eustace — Chapter →   Dated July 24, 2024: These were page 2 and 3 of my original concepts that lead to the campaign/arc.   A Few Rambling Words The Future of Eustace & Hitomi Some Fun Notes from BEFORE "...and the Case of the Rambler's Inn" Things I Liked Things I Did Not Like So Much Lessons Learned Things That Might Be Fun to Do Different A Few Final Pieces of Trivia Up Next for the Doug Alone is... A Few Rambling Words First, a life update of sorts: the fever that warped and delayed finishing Chapter 11 — on my end, I had time to get it finished and scheduled on time for the blog's end — turned out to be Covid. Still is Covid, as of writing this on January 14. Not sure which flavor or collector's edition I have but I am calling it COVID-'25. Year's off to a great start. This was the first campaign arc t...

tl;dr version Over the months of adapting my playstyle to the blog, some of the "Dougness" of my playing got increasingly lost. This post talks about trying to reclaim that and establishes the four baseline techniques I use to communicate my sessions to folks through this blog: Play it in my normal style and then write up a recap (the original flavor) Try to play it in-line with each session being an hour-ish spent playing and writing a blog at the same time A fiction-first style of play where the mechanics are minimized and the focus is more on presentation and development of "chapters" A style of play that embraces different modes (Gamemaster, Player, Lore, Commentary) to give the different elements each a fair shake to build up mental gaps In this post, I will look at those different elements and talk a bit why a return to #1 while retaining #4 (and some #3) is likely the best options for me.  It also has a longish example of the kind of roleplaying mistakes I li...

UPDATE: Within about 24 hours I got an email from Google saying the site had been cleared and it included a list of links/downloads not to include to avoid getting hit again and none of that stuff was stuff that was on this blog (which, again, is just...recaps of solo rpg sessions with links to itch.io and DriveThruRPG and free stock art websites).  This goes back really likely to "glitch" or something up with the template that caused a false alarm (aka, a glitch).  Anyhow, guess I can get back to posting long descriptions of rooms in a aetherpunk laboratory now. For some reason that I do not understand, the "dangerous site" error has started cropping up on this blog. Going into the search console says the content on the homepage includes "deceptive pages" and the home page is just, you know, Blogger's own layout: There was  a follow button I tossed up but took down but that was the official Blogger widget (and no one followed). I only have a few rea...

Roleplaying games are a fascinating artifact that I hope survives for a long time. There are a lot of things that you can say about RPGs but I think the two I want to focus on right now are a pair of contradictory statements: Roleplaying games cut through the near infinite amount of abstraction presented by "real world" considerations by providing a framework that simulates a particular subset (usually combat and a few other adventurer subsystems).  Roleplaying games are an abstraction of "real world" considerations and not necessarily meant to represent any sort of 1-for-1 aspects and instead provide an escapist avenue beyond specificity.  In other words, an RPG often takes an in-Universe reality and dissolves it to fluff text and a few abstract dice rolls and stats and then feeds this back into the in-Universe reality with the broad idea that anything outside this abstraction is in itself an abstraction.  I am personally writing this like a college essay, by the w...