Table Shapers

Brain Blasts are a creative exercise to see how YOU would solve a hypothetical game design challenge through new mechanics, roleplay, approaches, whatever! Feel free to throw me a comment if you have a topic you'd like to see here.

Check us out on discord if you want to see the previous weeks.

Playbooks, rolled stats, archetypes, life paths; there's a lot of ways to make player characters, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

Let's make some more this week.

I'll go first.

Grab a magazine or newspaper (or a book, if you're feelin' frisky), rip out six or eight small portions at random. Arrange them in a circle so that they overlap, but still show words or pictures. Whatever you see is the basis for your character.

Brain Blasts are a creative exercise to see how YOU would solve a hypothetical game design challenge through new mechanics, roleplay, approaches, whatever! Feel free to throw me a comment if you have a topic you'd like to see here.

Check us out on discord if you want to see the previous weeks.

When you break a game into its base elements you'll that communication is a major component. It's how we relay the rules, the setting, the concept, our actions, everything. Games are only possible through communication.

And one of the limitations of communication is perspective.

From a GM's perspective, they may believe they're showing a complex political disagreement that's spanned hundreds of years between two factions with dozens of nuances sprinkled throughout the campaign. From the players' perspective, unaware of this part of the setting's history, they just see two idiots arguing about how to set a table for dinner.

A more common instance you may have seen; new players, unaware of what is and isn't possible in a game will attempt things long timers "know" they aren't capable of. Or the difference between the actions of a player who has seen a particular monster before and one that hasn't.

So this week, I wanna see y'all play around with perspective. Use it to change the shape of the narrative, redefine rules, turn villains into heroes.

Brain Blasts are a creative exercise to see how YOU would solve a hypothetical game design challenge through new mechanics, roleplay, approaches, whatever! Feel free to throw me a comment if you have a topic you'd like to see here.

Check us out on discord if you want to see the previous weeks.

Sometimes your GM needs a break or you can't run your regular game for whatever reason. Y'all scheduled time to play and you don't want to it to go to waste. Problem is that no one's got anything prepped ahead of time. So what do you do?

It's time for some improv gaming.

Come up with some simple twists on games you already know how to play to make them more interesting for a quick improvisational one-shot.

Some examples I've tried before:

• Round Robin: Everyone makes a character and the player on their left plays it. One person starts as the GM and gets the ball rolling. Set a time limit. When that's up, pass the characters left again and the person to the right of the GM becomes the new GM, picking up where they left off.
• Freaky Friday: All the players make a character (again). Distribute them randomly. Everyone plays the character they made, but in the body of the character they recieved. The players now have to figure out how they swapped bodies and how to fix it.
• Meta Gaming: My personal favorite, play as your characters from your regular game playing a game.

Brain Blasts are a creative exercise to see how YOU would solve a hypothetical game design challenge through new mechanics, roleplay, approaches, whatever! Feel free to throw me a comment if you have a topic you'd like to see here.

Check us out on discord if you want to see the previous weeks.

This week we're shakin' up mechanical representations.

Take a concept and instead of using rules to representing the concept directly, use them to recontextualize the actions.

For instance, instead of combat rules being used to represent actual combat between two duelists; have the rules as a stand in for the characters' beliefs or ideologies. Their attacks and defenses being the clashes of individual points of those beliefs. Now, it's still a sword fight, but the winner is the one who's strength of belief or ability to convince the other is stronger.

— or —

When crafting instead of having a skill determine the crafter's ability, use the crafter's connection to the materials involved. How did they obtain it? Where did the tools come from? Who is the final result for? Now there's a personal tie bound to the crafter's wares.