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Game Design: Progressive Character Generation

In books and movies, it’s rare to know the entire history of a character before the actual plot begins. In fact, in many books and movies, the only backstory you ever get occurs in flashbacks, after you’re familiar with the character on a more pedestrian level.

The DayTrippers campaign is fine with that. It’s all well and good to expect the Players to create the important aspects of their own characters’ pasts, but it’s entirely another thing to put them on the spot, forcing them to marry themselves to a character concept they haven’t even spent any time playing yet.

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Game Design: Oracle: The Stone-Drawing Bag

The Stone-Drawing Bag
Starting Counts: Black stones White stones
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Game Design: DayTrippers Planet Generation System

The interstellar destination below was created using the DayTrippers Planet Generation rules (now in beta testing). Click here to generate another one.
STELLAR SYSTEM GARYSSUS
A Red Star 5 times the size of Sol
with 2 planets in orbit.

GARYSSUS I
TYPE: Moon
GRAVITY: 0.11 G
ATMOSPHERE: Atmosphere is escaping the planet
PRESSURE: 0.22 Earth atmospheres
WATER: No standing water
CLIMATE: Arctic conditions
PRECIP DL: 5
BIOSPHERE: Highly evolved lifeforms
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Science: The Difference between Narrative and Story - Pt 3

It has been pointed out that writers and sociologists have different definitions of the word "narrative". But the differences are not as great as we might think, and in the last installment of this series I promised to square that circle. Here we go.

From the writerly camp we get several definitions for the word "narrative" (leaving aside those which simply use it as a synonym for the word "story"):

  1. A Narrative (common noun) is an arcless, themeless retelling or reporting of events.
  2. Narrative (abstract noun) is a direction or theme which guides or gives purpose to retold events.
  3. The Narrative (common noun) is the form taken by the events of a character undergoing change.

From the sociological camp we have the definition in which a Narrative (common noun) is an open-ended network of stories or statements that a group of people tell themselves about themselves, about their history, about their values, or about their place in the grand scheme.

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Happy Birthday Drupal

Today the Drupal project reached the grand old age of fourteen. This is a great milestone for the community and the project, and in celebration, the Drupal association has released the results of their 2014 Community Survey. Among the insights:

80% of Drupal Users who responded say they have plans to adopt Drupal 8, and another 8% say they are planning to evaluate the new release.

Upgrading is an inevitability, because "the drop never stops" - i.e. there's no backward-compatibility in the Drupal universe. But personally, I've always waited about a year before recommending major upgrades for my Drupal-based clients.

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Science: The Difference between Narrative and Story - Pt 2

In the first installment of this series, we looked at the differences between Story, Narrative, and Narrative Structure. A Narrative Structure is the shape and purpose of a Story, absent the mundane, non-archetypal details. As for "Narrative" vs "Story", some banal but substantiating links I found were this and this.

But for my money (and politics aside), the most interesting one by far was this

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Game Design: DayTrippers Adventure Modules 1 & 2 Released

Hot on the tail of the core rules, the first two adventure modules for DayTrippers are now available on RPGnow.com: "Less Little" and "Vidome 123".

Less Little is an introductory module for 1-2 players. The tone is dreamlike and humorous with some mildly adult situations, and the plot is firmly guided. This module is recommended for beginning players and campaigns with a whimsical touch.

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by Dr. Radut