Tag: briecs original

Turn, Bigness, Mental Health, and “Different”

First off, I’m going to make a damn #TurnRPG hashtag, then we’re gonna talk about this precious gift of a game I have been working on since December 2013. And have I got some WORDS for you this evening, my friends, about Turn, and about large design projects, mental health, & “different.”

a yellow bird on a branch with its beak open with a bunch of As in the background like yelling

Turn is a slice-of-life supernatural roleplaying game about shapeshifters in small, rural towns who must find balance in their shifter identity and community with their fellows. I’m planning to Kickstart it at the end of October. tinyurl.com/turn-rpg-beta-2018

I’ve been really digging into it and I’m in the expand and explain part – I think the mechanics are solid, but trying to ensure people understand the mechanics is hard. I’ve been struggling through recovering from a brain injury, & until recently, sometimes my work was nonsense.

So a lot of this is revisiting old text, making sure it makes sense, revising it, and adding as much as I can to make it approachable to people who aren’t me. John helps with this – he’s my dev editor – but he can only do so much when I’m struggling personally with the work.

Turn is the biggest thing I’ve made and a large part of me *needs* it to succeed, to be appreciated. So I want everything to be perfect! Like, everything has to be exactly how it’s supposed to be written in my head. And that’s a pain in the ass, and doesn’t guarantee perfection.

A picture of Diana as a child in Wonder Woman with a tumblr post posted over it that says "me, logically: it's never gonna happen. the tiny hopeful goblin in my brain: but what if it did"

So like today I’ve been asking for help figuring out a new title for the facilitator role because facilitator sounds boring and what I was using, Storyteller, is too associated with White Wolf (not why I was using it, but no one cares) and also doesn’t describe the role well.

Now I’m trying out Meddler, because I tried a whole bunch in text and it’s the only one I like next to Busybody but is slightly more teasing than mean like Busybody tends to be. And I listened to a bunch of people’s input, too, and felt kind of “eh yeah?” and like COME ON.

See, one thing that I need to really tell you here is that the longer your project, the more likely you are to hit a wall of mental health issues, new or old. They will fuck you UP. I love this game. I love it SO much. And I find myself poking at it all like “I should trash it.”

I’m working on this big, meaningful project and I’m getting engagement with input from people and all my big stupid brain can say is “Well I dunno, people haven’t said it’s visionary or anything, and these other people aren’t interested, so maybe it’s just awful.” This project!

Keegan Key saying "I mean, I spent the majority of it in a deep fog, in a profound depression."

And part of it is because it’s a big project, a lot of time and energy with (to date) little to no returns. Most of my projects seem futile because I don’t exactly swim in recognition, reviews, or funds as a result of them. But I still do them, and I’m still doing this. I’m especially still doing this.

If I was working on something smaller I could be done and stop torturing myself with the maybes and the whys. But it’s big. It matters. And mental illness just wants to dig in its claws and remind me that I’m not doing good enough. But I also know it’s because Turn is different.

Jaylah from Star Trek Beyond yelling in preparation of a fight.

I said it, I mean it. When I play Turn, it always feels different than other games. When I’ve been designing it, it feels different than other games. I haven’t played all games, and I’m not fucking gonna, but I do know that compared to the games I have played, Turn is different.

Maybe it’s because of the angle? Or because it’s quiet drama? Maybe it’s because I took away failure, and focused on consequences? Maybe it’s because this game isn’t designed to play like an adventure, but instead like everyday life that gets hard and troublesome but also loving?

Mad Max pointing towards one of the bikers in recognition.

And like, the biggest thing I struggle with while designing this game is that I want to maintain that “different.” Some people have looked at the mechanics without playing the game and said it was just copied from a bunch of places, but it’s not. It’s different. So it’s rough!

How do I keep my snowflake of a game from melting or getting mushed together and ruined? How do I present it to people in a way that highlights the difference? Worst of all, what if I AM wrong and my game’s actually just a boring facsimile of other games I don’t want it to be?

It’s a lot. I just want this game to be good and succeed and I want this weird experience I have when I play it to be replicable for people. I want to do a Kickstarter and not have it fail because I want people to be interested in it and excited for it. But I’m also very tired.

If it was smaller, maybe I’d care less. I didn’t have a mental illness, maybe I’d struggle less. If it felt samey, maybe it would matter less. But none of those things are so. It’s a mattering struggling caring mess. I’m mulling over every design decision like it’s life & death.

My final real point, I suppose, is that all of these things: bigness, mental health, difference, they are important to the game and the design process I’m experiencing, and I have to overcome the challenges. I love Turn so much, and I can’t let it fade away, I can’t risk that.

So if I kind of sound like a pain in the ass a lot right now, & for the foreseeable future, I want you to know that it’s only because I’m trying my best. I want to do my best. I want the game that I put out to be one you can pick up & have an amazing experience with. I’m trying.

Andy Samberg as Jake Peralta on Brooklyn 99, in workout clothes. Someone asks " Are you crying?" and he responds "No. That's eyeball sweat."

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Last 46 Hours: Behind the Masc

This is the last 46 hours for the game zine I’m curating and contributing to, Behind the Masc, which is currently on Kickstarter. I wanted to write a quick post to remind everyone!

Behind the Masc is a collaborative effort with a team of great creators: Eli Eaton, Patrick Lickman, Raiden Otto, Adrian Heise, Lemmo Pew, Alex McConnaughey, Lawrence Gullo, and Tracy Barnett. They’re all making something new and original for this project! And they’re all non-cisgender masculine people like me, across the spectrum.

To my knowledge, Behind the Masc is a first of its kind as a crowdfunding project in indie games focusing specifically on our goal of reenvisioning masculinity – especially one by entirely non-cisgender creators. We’re using historical and mythological archetypes to show our perspective on masculinity and do so while making cool game products that work with existing games like the Demi and Minotaur skins for Monsterhearts 2, the Apocalypse World Trickster playbook, and the D&D 5th Edition male Baccae character background and Sorcerer recreation.

We’ll also have standalone products with a Twine game about the protector and my audio-text game, Echoes, about the hero. It means a lot to me. Last night, I wrote the first draft of the text for Echoes and I’m really excited to make this game!

My only stretch goal for this project is a higher pay rate for the contributors at $3000. We’re not trending toward that on Kicktraq, but we’ve raised those numbers a bunch throughout this campaign! We can work toward it, with your help!

Behind the Masc is new, and niche, and I knew that going into this project. We’re a collection of creators that make cool things but might not otherwise be noticed – and that’s part of the point. I would love to see more people back the project and potentially raise the pay for the contributors, but I will say now that I’m grateful we’ve come so far, that we’ve funded, and that the community has shown enthusiasm for the project!

Please back the project on Kickstarter if you’re interested, or share it on social media if you’ve already backed/can’t back! Tell your friends and colleagues about it, post it to message boards and raise awareness! We have less than two days to raise funds, and I’d love you to have a copy in your hands when we fulfill. Thank you!!

Hear me talk about Behind the Masc:

Modifier Podcast
The Lounge
[insert quest here]

(Cross posting to a KS update!)

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approachable theory: Destructive Design

The approachable theory logo, with the text "approachable theory" and an image of two six-sided dice with one pip showing, with a curved line below it to make a smile. The dice are black with cyan for the pip and yellow with black for the pip.

Hello all! Many of you have likely seen me mention the methodology behind my design, destructive design, and I thought it was due time I broke the idea down a little bit. I thought approachable theory might be the best place to do it, because simple is good. I’ll talk about the origin of the methodology, how it’s applied, and what’s the difference between destructive design and hacking. I hope you enjoy the article!

Origins

Destructive design has existed informally, for sure, for a long time. From the first time someone took the time to examine a game’s design and use it to construct something new, the roots have been there. For me, personally, they’re rooted in the approach my dad taught me for repairing engines and similar things – I talked about this a little on [insert quest here].

My dad can take anything apart, put it back together, and fix the problems it had – his repair skills are legendary. He taught himself a lot of the skills necessary for it using the root of the mentality for destructive design. He would take things apart entirely – whole engines, down to the nuts and bolts – and put them back together. In the process, he could find the root of what wasn’t working just right, learn how the machine worked, and find opportunities to improve things. He taught me this when I was a young kid, and it stuck with me.

When I started in games, I kept finding games that were almost there, nearly right, but not quite what I needed. I wanted to fix it, and the only way I knew how to do that was to take it apart and put it back together. A common misconception is that my games and things I create with this method could be that they’re the put back together part – but that’s not how it works. I build something new – maybe making molds of ideas or pieces, but never copying right over – and try to make what I want to see, whether it’s like that other thing at all or not.

After all, my dad – an engineer – did that, too. He could take what he learned from those engines and build new designs for machines and tools. And it was pretty cool.

a man in a ball cap, tee shirt, and jeans sitting on a large rock near the ocean, holding a fish
My dad also likes to fish. Photo by Bonnie Cousins.

 

Application

It maybe isn’t easy to do destructive design, depending on your approach, but the core ideas are simple:

  1. Have a concept or mechanic
  2. Break it down into its basest parts
  3. Examine it in detail
  4. Build it back up again and look for cracks and loose bolts in the process
  5. Build something new from what you’ve learned

For an example, we’ll look at Struggles in Turn. Turn is a game about shapeshifters in small towns who must find balance between their human and beast identities. Struggles are what might otherwise be moves in a Powered by the Apocalypse game. There are just some slight changes, but they matter. Moves in Monsterhearts are one of the first parts that I broke down.

a text box containing the turn someone on move from monsterhearts: When you turn someone on, roll with hot. On a 10 up, take a String against them. • On a 7-9, they choose one: give themselves to you, promise something they think you want, give you a String against them.
The “turn someone on” move from Monsterhearts.

Here are some of the base parts of moves*:

– Descriptive prompt (when you ____, roll with _____).
– Requires die roll
– Stats can be penalty or bonus
– Success ladder (10+ succeed, 7-9 succeed at cost, 6- fail)
– Narrative options
– Mechanical options
– Risk of failure

When I designed struggles, I started with a different set of assumptions based on what I learned here. First, I built the pieces back together and realized that one of the key elements of these moves was what I wanted to avoid: failure. In Turn, while it might take time and will have consequences, you always succeed at what you do. So I struck out “risk of failure.” Next, I wanted struggles to exclusively be something that happened when you were doing something that your opposed form didn’t want to do, or that it might resist, or in situations where you were trying to hold your opposed form back from doing something. When you look at Monsterhearts moves, they’re only when you’re actively doing something, and you’re assumed to want to do it. I decided to make you always rolling a penalty to these rolls, so I took out “stats can be penalty or bonus.”

The success ladder is just handy, and I did want to require a die roll. I also wanted to include mechanical and narrative options for any pick lists. But with the ladder now, the 6- wasn’t a failure – it was just a giant pile of consequences. You do want you want, but the ladder represented the severity of consequences for succeeding. The base parts of struggles are now like this*:

– Descriptive prompt (when you ____, roll with _____).
– Requires die roll
– Stats are penalty
– Success ladder (10+ no or few consequences, 7-9 more consequences, 6- all consequences)
– Narrative options
– Mechanical options
– Guaranteed success

A text box showing the mind your manners struggle in Turn: Mind your manners – when your Beast threatens to speak first, roll -Honest. On 10+, choose two. On 7-9, choose one. You don't betray your nature and don’t mark exposure. You don't cause offense with your directness. You don't give too much information or reveal an uncomfortable truth.
The “mind your manners” struggle in Turn.

If you swapped these two mechanics – put struggles in Monsterhearts and moves in Turn – the games would be radically different. Giving characters in Monsterhearts guaranteed success could end up with towns overrun with monstrous teens, meanwhile making it so the stats could be bonuses could make shifters in Turn even more dangerous. It would change tone, and alter how people play.

The process of breaking these things down is really exciting sometimes! It is good to see what’s lying beneath the surface, what’s grinding the gears – and when put into application, destructive design can be revealing and instructive.

*Not necessarily an exhaustive list.

Destructive Design versus Hacking

What’s the difference between destructive design and hacking? Well, they’re not mutually exclusive. In fact, plenty of people who hack games use destructive design. The real core differences are that with destructive design your goal is to create something notably different on a structural or conceptual level, while some hacks intend to be similar, matching structure and concepts but with different dressing – and destructive design is an active and purposeful process.

Destructive design can happen even on the smallest mechanical or narrative design level. Some people do it, but wouldn’t call it that, because we don’t always label how we do something. Meanwhile, I use the term because it helps me align my methods and do things with intent. A person could consider Turn to be a hack – and some people do – but I don’t, because I think that I used destructive design to change fundamental concepts and structure. Like all parts of game theory, though, people’s perspectives differ.

A praying mantis on a pink background with the text "don't be a dick."
I love these animals from ravensribbon.tumblr.com.

Examples

One of the most significant examples of destructive design is Turn, which is currently in production. Turn was born of playing Monsterhearts and finding it wasn’t quite hitting the nerve I wanted, and then sitting there with my ideas piled up for like four years before I finally wrote anything down. There’s definitely evidence of Monsterhearts in Turn, but it is a completely different beast.

Another example of destructive design by me is Script Change. It doesn’t seem like it would be one! It’s just a content and safety toolbox, right? Well, some could say Script Change was inspired by the X-card… except the inspiration was to break it down into concepts and try to make it what I wanted. After using the X-card for a while and talking to John Stavropolous and so on, I realized it was a great tool, but not the right one for me. I examined it, watched it in play, and then figured out what worked best for me.

Many of my works are destructive design – including Let Me Take a Selfie! All of the games inside come from the root of seeing other selfie games and wanting to see how I could use a mechanic I cared about to tell the stories I wanted to, but not by using the same methods as the other games. None of them are directly inspired, none of them are intended to be similar at all to other games – they just come from the root of “break down this idea and build it back up so I can build something new.”

Conclusion

Destructive design is a methodology – a concept, and a potential way to do game design. It is based on the idea of taking something apart to understand it better, and using that knowledge to make something different and more suited to your needs. I hope this article gives good explanation to it and helps others explore design from a perspective that might not always be tidy, but certainly gives opportunity to learn something new!
 
Thanks for reading! Check out other approachable theory articles here!
P.S. If you’d like to write an article for approachable theory, email Brie at contactbriecs@gmail.com with a one paragraph pitch, your name, and your pronouns. 

 

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Behind the Masc Kickstarter

The Behind the Masc Zine Kickstarter is LIVE! This project is run by non-cis masculine creators and we’re making Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts playbooks, rich backgrounds for D&D characters, and some lovely art, too! Please check it out – we’ve got some awesome creators working on re-imaginings of masculinity!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/briecs/behind-the-masc-zine

Behind the Masc is a really important project for me and I hope you will all check out the Kickstarter and consider backing the project!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

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Turn Grows, So Do I

a gif of Chris Evans breaking a log in half
Chris Evans is a representation for me, the log is my fear of running games.

I recently updated the biggest games document I’ve ever worked on myself, the Turn playtest document. It’s like almost 80 pages now. Like, that’s a lot. The updates included:

  • minor changes to Human role abilities for clarity
  • minor changes to Beast archetype powers for clarity
  • adjustment to refresh for exposure
  • integrated essay content
  • more Storyteller content
    • how to on session 0
    • session checklist
    • explanation of rules
    • character creation
  • an entire player’s guide to all of the roles and archetypes
  • elaboration on some mechanics
  • rewritten elaboration on mechanics 
  • complete step-by-step on how to start a game of Turn

I don’t know if that sounds like a lot, but it was a lot of work!

I’m hoping to talk about a variety of these things over time, but the biggest one I wanted to talk about is the Storyteller’s Guide and how that came to be.

Storyteller Purposes Make everything personal (to the characters) Always put the characters at risk of exposure Keep the characters connected Love the characters and all of their flaws Give everyone a secret Use status as leverage Give every wrong a reason Don’t let deviance go unnoticed Keep in mind that everything takes time Offer every player and character moments of comfort and of success
The Storyteller Purposes were actually written by dictation to John while we were driving across the state last year.

I am not a particularly gifted facilitator, especially not in an actual “game master” type of role. I avoid it like the plague because it stresses me out, I don’t feel like I do a good job, and I don’t have experience in it. However, for Turn, I have very clear ideas on how the game should work. It’s the only game I’ve run 4 sessions of, ever. But I didn’t write any of these ideas down.

So, when John and I went to the lake cabin (my parents’), he asked me a ton of questions. I answered as best I could, and realized I kind of had to write all of it down. Since then I’ve been adding text to the Turn document like wild! I have a lot of ideas for how to solve the little issues people have come up with before I made the changes, but I have no idea if they’ll work for people other than me.

To some kind of credit, I did try out the first draft of the “how to set up Turn” the other night and it went awesomely. I even did the new Session 0! And it worked great. I’ve added some detail since then, so I hope it’ll work. Here’s some things I wrote about, which are in addition to the materials I’d already written:

Character Creation
This has guidance on helping the players answer questions about their characters, how to handle animal groups, a note on NPCs, and special rules for some of the roles. It’s stuff that I know will come up, but didn’t write down. Some of this is just hard to figure out how to word, or I hadn’t had time to put on paper. Some things I just didn’t know needed written guidance, but it did – like the special rules for the Late Bloomer or the NPCs. But, now it’s written down!

Two sheets of paper, one titled "The Beastborn" and the other "A Wolf," with various details of the characters on it
The Beastborn and Wolf character sheets for John’s character in my new game, created by John W. Sheldon.

Session 0
This is how to actually get the game going. It directs the Storyteller to the Beginning Your Game section and then walks them through a structured first couple scenes. I’m really pleased with it and when I tested it out it went amazingly well, for someone like me to run, so I’m glad it’s on paper. I had to really separate out what was important in a first session, and I think that this meets it – connecting the characters, placing them within the town, and establishing the personality of the characters.

Running an Average Session
This covers the typical things a Storyteller will encounter in a session of Turn. Some people had expressed they weren’t sure how to engage stress or how to run beast scenes, so I wrote up some details on that to get people really on the same page. This involved writing up how you should pepper each session with mundanity – everyday tasks that will stress out shifters – and beast issues like territory and habitat struggles.

I also included a Storyteller Session Checklist that makes sure that there are NPC to PC connections, PC to PC connections, gossip, mundane vignettes, and beast scenes alongside the human scenes everyone leans to. I’m pleased with it!

Tracking Goals
This section was to make more concrete guidance on how to handle players trying to achieve goals. It includes guidance on using progress bars based on difficulty, and how that comes across for each goal. I needed to give a more solid way to mark and record this so that there wouldn’t be unfair imbalance in how quickly some goals were achieved. Plus, this way the Storyteller can have visual representation of the progress.

The top of two pieces of paper titled "The Beastborn" and "A Wolf," with text describing the character following.
A closeup of the character sheets – wolves have packs in the game, did you know? by John W. Sheldon.

Reintegrating into Animal Groups After Exposure
After I’d made a small change to the refresh rate for exposure, I realized I’d never noted that animal group stress doesn’t refresh. I fixed that, and then wrote up some rules on how Storytellers will use a progress bar to help shifters reintegrate with their own group or find a new group, based on difficulty. I think that this, the explanation of exposure, and my new guidance on beast scenes will help Storytellers more actively engage that material.

–
Overall this has been a heck of a lot of work. This is only the ONE section, out of all of the ones in my bulleted list up top. The thing is, I’m not really changing rules for 90% of this – I’m just explaining stuff. More of this whole project is explaining things than I ever thought it’d be, and I’ll tell you, I’m hoping that this makes a difference when people get into the text!

One of the hardest things I’ve had to do is make guidance for Storytellers. It’s not something I do a lot, and honestly, a lot of people in that role are people I don’t actually enjoy working with (just a personality thing, maybe?). I don’t necessarily want Storytellers in Turn to work the same way a D&D GM would, or even a Fate GM. I want them to care a lot more. It’s a heavy workload to run the game, by many people’s counts, especially for a “story game” sort of game – but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I started a game on Friday as Storyteller, and we have a fantastic group of a Late Bloomer otter, a Showoff raven, and a Beastborn wolf in a town full of intrigue because the shifters know who each other are and there’s formal shifter culture, and it’s incredibly exciting to think of the places it could go. I know I’m gonna have a lot of little progress bars and it’s gonna be exciting to mark each one off. I can’t wait!

A map with circles and lines showing a town, three cards showing a fast forward, a pause, and a rewind, and the Human Form struggles sheet.
Our town, Script Change, and the Human Form struggles – just the stuff I was reviewing while I was taking a break.

And that’s the thing, right? I’m excited about running a game. Me! I have literally pretended to be sick to avoid doing it, and here I am, enthusiastically planning NPCs and secrets, anxiously bugging my friends about playing the next session. I actually did an okay job, and it’s me saying that!

There’s so many things I love about game design, and as hard as it can be to do it on spare dollars, I can’t ever stop being amazed by how much it teaches me. It is a constant learning experience, and I’m very glad that my time spent digging into Turn’s mechanics and text has encouraged me to do something I find terrifying – and made it exhilarating instead!

It’s awesome, and so is Turn. Check it out if you want to see the hard work I’ve been putting in! Thanks for reading <3

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Leading with Class

Hello all,

For the past several months I’ve been gearing up to start a new project called Leading with Class. Leading with Class is a web series I’m doing to teach leadership theory and practice using roleplaying games! It’s so exciting to have it together!

There’s a Patreon for the project and I have a Twitter set up that I’ll be trying to use for the project as well. It’s a dream of mine to teach important skills and make knowledge more approachable using games, and this is a great opportunity to use my experience and my education to put some good into the world. I hope you’ll join me!

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“Wrong” Turn

So someone is playing Turn and I’m very excited about this, but they and a fellow player have both stated clearly that they don’t think they’re playing the game the way I want it to be played.

And like.

Andy Samberg as Jake Peralta strumming a guitar and screaming.
This is my favorite and most often used gif.
Okay, I would like people to play quiet dramas, and slice-of-life style stuff. That’d be cool. But quiet drama means different things to different people, and part of why I need playtests is to see what it means in people’s interpretations of different types of towns and stuff. Not every play of a game is going to be the same, and I accept that.

So like, I’m struggling because I don’t know exactly how they’re playing, and I don’t think it is “wrong” or anything, but I do think that the way they did setup and what themes they chose influenced the play, and that matters. But how do I even say that? Like, even if you’re playing the game slightly differently than I expected does not mean it’s not playing the way that is appropriate based on the way you’ve set up the town?

Like, here are the ways you can play Turn “wrong”:

  • play it in a city or suburb, or a place with a large population
  • don’t have shifters in it
  • appropriate culture to play it
  • violate the “don’t do this in Turn” section of the essays (re: content)
  • pretend it’s just a standard PbtA game and don’t engage the mechanics
  • ignore identity and community as aspects of the game
  • don’t emotionally engage with the narrative or subject matter
Lego Batman saying "no" over and over while flopping around Wayne Manor.
Yeah, I know, don’t tell people not to do what they want with your game. *eyeroll*
All of the other stuff is interpretations of my design, which I can’t control. Tempo, subject matter, etc. are all stuff that are different in a lot of games, like Fiasco can go anywhere from “wow, this is exciting!” to “wow, this is depressing!” to “wow, I am super confused” in one freaking session. Monsterhearts can go from dark and filled with examination of abuse and sexuality to a few kind-of-friends Scoobying around town trying to protect everyone. This is to say little of trad games like D&D and Shadowrun, which can run the tonal rollercoaster AND still let you explore the subjects the games promote. 

There are tons of types of small towns, all with their individual leanings and themes and politics. Small towns can have microcultures that make surrounding towns look at them like they’re upsidedown in a teakettle, and that includes the way people deal with things there. It’s complex, and that’s why there are different themes and elements of the towns you create in Turn. The thing is, I haven’t played all of the combinations! 

There are many ways you could combine all of the elements in Turn, and frankly, I don’t have 4 hours every day for the next mumblemumble years to test it out fully. That’s why I’m excited to see other people play it! Yes! Show me your thing you did with my thing! That sounds really weird but I don’t care!
Queen singing "I want it all, I want it all"
Tell meeeeeeeeee
Now, I’ll be real. There are a few things that bug me, and this is not a thing that this person did really because they highlighted at one point how my game was not doing this thing, but man, everyone calls it a Powered by the Apocalypse game. 
I freaking. Okay. PbtA is a great system and has a purpose. Vincent and Meguey made a really amazing thing, and a lot of people have done amazing things with it. Turn is not a PbtA game. It’s inspired by it – and yes, I realize a lot of people think it’s the same thing to be inspired by a thing and actually a thing, but it is not – and I designed the game purposefully to go against PbtA principles I have seen reflected in related design. First, there’s no category of PbtA games. And second, here are commonalities between Turn and some games that are PbtA, and then some stuff that’s just Turn or not in Turn:
1) 2d6 (also you have a third die sometimes)
2) Move-like structure (you are rolling to resist rather than to take action)
3) Character sheets with personal information on them (you have two, one of which is sometimes swappable)
4) Stats with smaller numbers (you have 8, one for each sheet, and they’re absolute values)
5) Scaled results (you never fail in Turn, the results are to determine the consequences related to success)
6) No sex/intimacy move
7) No Hx, strings, etc.
8) Goals for Human and Beast that control advancement
9) Exposure tracked on relationships
10) Stress to measure turning from Human to Beast & etc.
This is not me saying “my game has nothing to do with PbtA,” this is me saying there are differences, they matter, and we need to stop saying everything is one kind of game because it happens to use a specific dice roll or has moves (which could be like feats), small stat numbers (like a ton of games), and scaled results (which I think was actually a thing in Shadowrun too, just not framed specifically this way?). Things are different! One thing is not necessarily the other thing! Like! Friends! We need to be a little more forgiving with definitions, or make some freakin’ new ones!
Tahani from The Good Place saying "and silently scream for the rest of time."
me.
Turn was originally conceived because I came home from playing my first session I can remember of Monsterhearts (this one*) and felt off about it. Something wasn’t right. It wasn’t hitting the right tone. I spent the next… really fucking long time… trying to figure out what that was, and meanwhile flipped numbers around, took out entire things, mentally threw out tons of material, and settled on what Turn is when John made me finally write it down because one of my greatest fears is that people will look at it and go “huh, oh, just another PbtA hack” and my fucking opus will be washed away into nothingness because some dingus can’t tell the difference between two different games that are wildly. fucking. different.
Sigh.
I’m a little…passionate today about this, and I think I always am, and always will be. But there’s reason for it. We use categories, especially manufactured ones, to scoop quality things into the trash all the time. Oh, it’s just another fantasy game. Oh, it’s just another PbtA hack. Oh, it’s just another Fate hack. Oh, I’ve seen so many games about zombies. Like come on. And the thing is, I rejected some of what I saw in PbtA work on purpose, and while some parts of mechanical structure remain, there are a lot of things I pulled from elsewhere conceptually. 
I would never dare to call myself original, but when you don’t have your own ideas, storebought is fine, so long as you mix them up in a new way and it still fucking tastes good.
I want to share my game with people without having the ever-burning comparison to “oh but you’re not as good as Monsterhearts and AW and and and” screaming in my face every time. I know you don’t mean to do it, most of you, but it sure burns my biscuits that you think it’s fun to tell me how much what I have labored so extensively over is Just Like That Other Thing. That’s what this is. This isn’t categorical. My game is different enough that it is reminiscent of PbtA work, but in part because of how many other games you could find similarities to, it is not the same. 
And that’s what I mean about people getting Turn wrong genuinely.
A shot from Big Hero 6 of the Aunt saying "I had a point."
I think.
It’s possible that I wouldn’t play Turn in the way you’re playing it, if you’re playing it and think you’re playing it differently than I intend. That’s like, good though? Because I am not every player. I am not able to imagine all possible ways my game could be played and executed beautifully, still exploring the concepts of identity and community while doing things with more passion and intensity, because the town they built makes more sense for that. 
So basically, I want to hear about the ways people explore Turn. I might be surprised, or unsure, or need to think about how something goes. But if the game works? If it is telling those stories, asking those questions, and it’s enjoyable? Then you’re probably doing okay. 
<3

*Shit, Turn is a year older than I thought.

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I love you and I adore you updated!

I love you and I adore you, my queer love letter writing game, is now fancier and up on https://briecs.itch.io/i-love-you-and-i-adore-you!

the very simple cover for I love you and I adore you

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To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

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Game for #TransDayOfVisibility


Roll 5 dice (any size). Choose two of them & add the number together. Now, publicly & positively recognize that many (out) trans, genderqueer, & nonbinary people.

To win the game, put this on a calendar reminder for next year & play it again.
💜

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

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Behrend Bernhard, Esq. on Itch.io!

I have been putting products on my new account at briecs.itch.io and by that I mean, I have put up three things, it takes a lot of time.

Anyway, I put up Behrend Bernhard, Esq., my performative party game about monsters and lies, and it’s post-edits so it’s been hopefully improved!

https://briecs.itch.io/behrend-bernhard-esq
Cover image featuring University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning surrounded by trees full of crows.

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.