VI·VIII·X KUP RPG

Last week I found a very interesting topic on board of an RPG community: a very skilled guy, Vladar, managed to create a full adventure module with AI text generation. This is absolutely outstanding to my eyes! I will report nor the topic neither the tools used for such a great achievement. I left my congrats to the fellow in the topic where he wrote about his job. I find in any case fair and honest to link the final output so that everyone can assess the quality of the output:  Castle of GPT . This piece of news left me with opposing feelings: from one side there is regard towards Vladar for the success of his work; on the other side I feel uncomfortable with the development the AI is having. Let’s first talk about the ‘sunny’ side of the story. The great achievement is a fact, beyond any reasonable doubt: this work confirms that in the future the industry will benefit of this very advanced technology and this is, needless to say, a high-potential option for the whole community of...

I am currently writing the adventure for the quickstart book and since I have no major updates, I just leave some thoughts on several topics I ran during the last two weeks. Needless to say, the first topic is Morality! Wow, another great finding: I have to thank my friend Catacomb Librarian who unearthed a post here : another fellow came to a very close concept and definition of Morality I had! Basically, Morality has to be a stat in order to have the proper importance within a framework of rules. In addition, it can modify according to the player's choices and it affects some rules in the game mechanics! This is really outstanding if I think to the solution I had in VI·VIII·X! Second point is that I started a topic in a community asking a very simple question: "What would you expect in terms of gaming materials and support to play a new RPG?" I got only a couple of answers but some brilliant point were outlined: the first one is that I should think to add to the setting...

I'm probably overwhelmed with too many to-dos and topics to follow and I'm getting stuck in the mud in too many topics and activities. I have to review priorities to try to refocus on my project and avoid getting lost in a thousand streams of discussions or thoughts. During these weeks, the most tiring ones for me, I had to spend nearly all my efforts on  'marketing' the game... As a summary, I had a wide range of feedback, from purposely destructive (hopefully for no reason since I don't know the people who wrote me) to truly encouraging. Among all, I feel like leaving a tip to Jamie Hardy, a veteran of this industry who has provided me with his invaluable advice. Jamie wasn't artificially positive, far from it: he wrote in a serious and straightforward way what's wrong with my marketing approach. I sincerely thank him and now I will try to put into practice everything Jamie suggested. Now, what is making me stuck is my natural marketing ineptitude: althoug...

One of the main takeaways of my very short experience in the publishing industry is at the same time charming and awful: the communication of and idea seems to be even more important that the idea itself... maybe I am ingenuous but I find it surprising! After some discussions on the main RPG boards I came with the conclusion that I had to try to make some 'marketing' by writing a blurb on DriveThru to attract more interest from a potential customer... Here below you will find two texts: the first one is 'my version', it is what I produced by myself... it is long and likely boring. The second one is 'true marketing version': this is a text by a really friendly fellow of RPGGeek made up based on the contents of 'my version'... it is definitely like night and day. They're not even comparable! I will never be able to do such a masterpiece in terms of communication! So, my most appreciated kudos and thanks go to Jamie Hardy who forged the 'perfection...

This post is a direct consequence of the one about the presence/absence of artworks in an RPG book I have written some weeks ago. Let me say that the discussion I started on some boards did not helped me in a decision as I didn't find yet a good reason if not the one related either to the tradition born with the first books and kept along nearly 50 years of RPG history or to the expectations of the readers who find it "normal" to have a picture every 3/4 pages... Anyway, this is not the real subject of the topic. Due to this reason I did some search and found something really amazing: the application of AI to images/graphic. What I found is both exalting and worrying to my eyes. Let's start from the beginning: there are already many users of AI graphics. I found a website where this is possible to test it as a trial. The website is  Midjourney : you can join for free and test what it is possible to do with it. Now, follow me: I am not an IT guy, I know nothing about c...

During the summer break I wanted to analyse the aspect of the Alignments in D&D in order to understand what has been the rationale in the definition by the D&D authors. I started finding this very interesting post : in here I got the confirmation that beyond any different definition/label, the concept of morality was aiming to profile a character's sense of ethic. I'd like to outline that this sense is not only focusing towards third parties but even towards ourselves.  Or, this is at least my interpretation and rationale for the Morality concept and game mechanics. I was so intrigued by this topic that I started a discussion on the DF boards here : I wanted to enlarge the discussion to old gamers so that they could address me to other interesting readings or topics. I was hopefully right: I just wondered why this feature in an RPG had been always treated in a subtle way... It has never been approached in a "strong" way with clear and crisp game mechanics...  ...

It all starts from the reading of a nice book (not essential but a good reading) of an Italian RPG author about how to create and develop an RPG. In there I find a recommendation which, by the way, was already as one of my topics of the chapter "How to run the VI·VIII·X game". The recommendation, in a nutshell, is that the GM needs to be careful to manage the intelligence of the player who moves his PC and the intelligence of the PC himself (as a stat). This was focused in particular to those moment where this appears outstanding, like when a riddle has to be worked out. I have this in mind since long time and I just wanted to treat this topic as a recommendation like I found in the book I read... However... for pure curiosity I posted this topic on the boards of ENworld, here: RPG Theory - Intelligence and meta-intelligence ...and I am very surprised that this topic did not attract such an interest! In those boards there are tons of users, authors, bloggers, all the main per...

Well, another topic coming from a discussion in a very popular community: the starting point is (needless to say) the rules framework in a RPG. The debate is more or less between those who need a light set of rules... someone would love to have a 5-page rulebook (!!!), someone else is looking for a single page only... and on the other faction, those who want an as much as possible detailed set of rules... those kind of massive books where the authors have foreseen nearly every event could occur (and not only: every event has been combined among the many other features sorting out a vectorial product of huge size)... Looking from a mere external point of view, it is clear that a RPG is the outcome of someone's needs: it can be as vary as the number of people playing RPGs... this is not really the point though. What is interesting is trying to sort out the roots of this hobby: it started from a group of wargamers (at the end of the day, the Fantasy supplement in Chainmail is the embr...

I posted some questions on DF boards just to have the opinion of some educated fellows of that community: the questions where not about contents, it was all about form and layout. Useless to say, we have fallen in the trap and I found an interesting view on contents by a fellow who left some brilliant thoughts here:  Post on Dragonsfoot  . The first point is interesting and not too far from reality: experienced players and GMs looks for games where there are several degree of freedom... those "light-rules games". Maybe that it is not always true (I can imagine that a group of engineers would prefer a very complex rules framework, no offense intended at all!), but what this guy writes makes a lot of sense. After all, it ends up to the logic of the VI·VIII·X game: a set of rules to be born by the GM mainly, leaving more room for role-playing and for tasting the situation rather than worrying about the correct modifier to be applied. The second and more interesting point is ...