Slush 2025-06
The earworm in my nostrils. The ringing in my fingertips.
Two Rules of Three
I ran into these game design experiences around the same time, and couldn’t shake the conviction that they’re running into the same truth from opposite ends.
Hannah: Was there anything that wasn’t on that list of things that you already want to change that cropped up?
Evan: One big thing that cropped up, and this was really connected to there being four players, was an issue with dividing up the group […] That was an aspect of three-player games, but I actually liked it a lot […] because I thought it was a meaningful decision point to say, “who’s going to be with who?” Like, “what if somebody gets left behind and now there’s just two of us?” It felt like these were […] profoundly impactful decisions.
With four people, […] the ways that you can split up, mathematically speaking, it’s like there’s a billion more ways. […] So every time that we came to one of those points, “we’ll decide who’s going to do this and who’s going to do that,” I was like “oh no. This is happening way too often and it’s way too big a discussion and it’s really hard to manage.”
[…]
Hannah: When we were playing these games with three people, […] the group was just together. It was like “what do you guys want to do? […]” and somebody would choose. Then you all went and if you decided to splinter off it was so narratively consequential. And that’s how it feels if three people are gonna go to an amusement park in real life!
Evan: I think there’s like a real human social phenomenon here, which is that if you have three people, breaking off kind of “shatters” the dynamic of being a group at all. But with four people you have the choice of splitting into two and two.
Hannah: Yeah! And two and two in multiple combinations now.
—Hannah Shaffer and Evan Rowland, It’s My Playtest and I’ll Cry If I Want To, The Design Doc Podcast
Because the client didn’t buy the game, I’ve never done much with this deck, but I’m intrigued by some of the principles relating to a three-suited deck. I’m especially fond of the fact that there can’t be a tied pair, because there are only three cards of each rank.
—James Ernst, Designing Traditional Card Decks
When an RPG prints something that needs to be errata’d, I’ve seen them print full-page stickers to replace the offending page. What game would you improve by replacing a single page? What single-page sticker could improve any game?
(Thanks, Dwiz!)
Ecological Stoichiometry
Or “Trophic Scaling.”
Let’s assume that dragons are obligate carnivores. Given this and their size, can we derive the range of their territory? If their territory is quite large, what limits does this place on global dragon populations? Do they migrate or hibernate seasonally? As a keystone species, how do they affect other animals in the region? How many dragons can one area support?
Similarly, what is the upper bound on a lake monster, given the size of a lake?
Can we bound the size of a sun-eater with momentum constraints? (I think I half-remember someone trying this.)
The display case is empty, except for a small sign reading (1d8):
- On loan
- Undergoing restoration
- irreparably damaged
- Lost
- Zoologically improbable
- Frightening to children
- Taken as collateral
- My dog ate it
Borges wrote about the simplest “labyrinth:” a circular trench so large its curve was imperceptible to the human eye. How large must this trench have been?
Fragments
The dust at the bottom of the bag.
- At the molehills of madness
- “We must imagine Columbo’s dog happy.”
- Print-on-Demand flipbooks from uploaded video clips.
- Why don’t elephant tusks get cavities? Or do they?
- Do stageplays adapt to comics more easily than other media?
- A sub-light galactic empire built on asynchronous, robust, parallel outposts. (This is not new, see Prophet, for example.)
- Tools to fight giants. (I no longer know what this meant.)
- Ravenloft domain of paranoid adventuring party dark lords.
- Cats are farsighted. They all need reading glasses.
- Fake Madrid
- 11 cats/11 tails/22 eyes/99 lives
- Alloyed/Allied
- Fallingwater murder mystery
- Crazybones mobile game
- Columbo LARP
- Magic is a combination of sensitivity and reframing
(Bad Ad-Hoc) Hypothesis: dramatic monologues are not expository tools, but an extinct speech pattern to aid introspection.
- An interrupted monologue leads to worse decision making or confusion.
- Possibly causes the interrupted to restart, leave the scene, or finish reciting under their breath.
- Overheard monologues have plot implications.
The Imperial alarm sound in Star Wars doesn’t need to travel far, so it could be higher-pitched (sometimes it is). It feels deadened and sits underneath speech (this is ideal for the medium). It doesn’t demand attention, so much as fade uneasily into the background. It’s not a reversing truck or overheating boiler saying “look at me” or a fire alarm saying “please evacuate.” It seems to just say “generally, be cautious.” Generously, it’s a call to “battle stations,” but then, once there, you still have to hear it, so it can’t be too piercing, too overwhelming. In terms of alarm design, I think it’s pretty good.
I used to work at a place with an “Asset Recovery Department.” In truth, it was a kind of all-purpose waste-disposal and recycling group. You could take a box of papers and old hardware or whatever, leave it in a box for them and they’d securely destroy the papers, repurpose what hardware they could, and recycle the box and the rest. Which was kind of impressive and useful in its own right: bureaucracy in action. But I primarily remember it because of the ominously corporate name.
The Gorgon
A fairy chess piece.
- Moves one square in any direction, as a king.
- Captures only en passant, as a pawn, but in any cardinal direction.
- When the gorgon captures a piece, replace it with an equivalent piece from a distinct set. No player may move, move through, or capture it. The statue may threaten check.
Good Wikipedia Lists
Do you need a possible immortal from history? Try List of people who disappeared mysteriously: pre-1910.
Do you need shenanigans? Try List of scams.
Do you need magic? Try List of psychic abilities.
Do you need reassurance? Maybe List of common misconceptions about language learning.
Looking for a kind of place, not but a specific one? See if you can find it on Lists of places.
Too specific? Let List of lists of lists wash over you.
This Star Wars scenario came to me in a dream:
The empire has been attempting to weaponize the song of the [hyperspace] sirens. The officer in charge has put together a demo, possibly involving a nervous young vocalist who has learned the song but doesn’t know what it is. The superior officer doesn’t believe it’s safe, and so sent all the people he doesn’t like. The performance has also attracted a handful of rebel groups.
