"For the player, nothing."

... is my long-standing "bumpersticker slogan" for what #HTTRPG is all about, encapsulating (but not explaining) why passionate roleplayers love the form.

It also echoes the yearning I feel.

I haven't had a GM who could deliver on that promise for a while, now. The last one (brilliant, lovable guy who _gets_ roleplayers) is focusing on his career/staying afloat and hasn't had time/energy. 😥

I've still been gaming, and it's been ... fine. Just, LOTS for the player.

Dragon's Flight, Challenge 41, is a case for how a thing can be HTT "shaped" but still frustrate.

There's a well-defined problem, the PCs are made aware of it, and that's the entire structure. Same as an HTT adventure, yay.

But ... all the actionable facts provided are military and/or hardware facts. So no amount of flex can expand the range of supported approaches beyond military and/or hardware actions.

20 minutes and some elbow grease could expand it dramatically.

#HTTRPG #AdventureDesign

I'm starting to get almost superstitious about Traveller adventures.

Trav has a gigantic adventure library, so obviously there's still a lot of spelunking to do, but while I keep finding #HTTRPG design in _other_ sci-fi RPGs of the 80s and 90s, I still haven't found a single one for the Traveller family of games.

Just, numerically, it's bucking the odds laid down by the broader SF RPG culture of the time.

It makes sense that it can, as Trav has its very own culture.

But it's ... interesting.

So, Marcus L. Rowland has cropped up three times on my #HTTRPG timeline so far, never with a full-on, no-asterisks HTT adventure but with some interesting patterns.

In 1983, I flag one of his adventure seeds (in White Dwarf) as "HTT mainly by virtue of being just a seed, rather than any kind of design commitment."

In 1990 I find myself flagging another seed with the exact same note, but THIS time he also includes some playtest notes, and he was clearly something of an HTT Game Master. 😅

Reading for the next adventure I'm going to run. Trying to find the overall threads so I can understand the adversaries in order to run a more high trust game. I just realized the front men are the "law and order" faction of the conservative party in the world. Which makes the people behind the scenes the... Project 2025 folks? Something like that. Holy shit, this makes it easier and also more disgusting.

#ttrpg #gming #httrpg #uspol

Can someone who's not a white cis guy (or at least not the one I just blocked because he pulled a "gamers are the real persecuted minority" on someone) explain to me what the fuck "high trust gaming" is? Because from that guy's self-important morass of marketing buzzword drivel, it sounds like "just trust the GM to walk you through a wonderful land where player agency does not exist" and I want to know if this is some kind of dogwhistle, or if that one guy is just full of some kind of shit.

#httrpg #ttrpg

I'm doing a #HTTRPG design workshop with @SJohnRoss and it is expanding my tools for #ttrpg immensely.

I just watched someone presenting an adventure/campaign outline which I would just have accepted just two weeks back.

Now I'm going "There is no engaging problem to draw the PCs in, just a simple goal the players have to buy into." and "You talk about agency, but you only offer video game choices."

Might still be fun to play. Just talking about how *my* views are changing.

Some ways of trying to describe #HTTRPG to strangers. It's mostly about #AdventureDesign, in a style that existed commercially (on the fringes) from the early 80s until sometime in the mid-to-late 90s, before disappearing from game retail.

I run Discord workshops that teach the basics of designing in this style. Even if you don't have an interest in HTT itself, there's plenty to pilfer for other styles. Just ask! Workshops are free, text-only, and 1-on-1. I'm ghalev on Discord.

#TTRPG