The Prompts & Standards Episode

We come back from a brief sabbatical to consider a bundle of topics from our Scholars. We talk about prompts in truly true roleplaying games (and reclaiming them from their AI-related meaning), things in our lives we've adopted from games and that we adapt into our game design, and different interpretations of the idea of a "standard" in game design. An assumption, yes, but what about a mode of experimentation, like a Jazz Standard? This is one of our more after-hours style conversations that touches on lots of the things we're always thinking about.

Show Notes:

• Jorge Luis Borges Quote (from The Garden of Forking Paths): "Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary."
• Asa Donald/Backwards Tabletop
• Poul Anderson, author of The Broken Sword and Three Hearts and Three Lions
• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
• Jack Vance's Dying Earth

Games Mentioned:

• Vast & Starlit
• What Is a Roleplaying Game
• Sanguine Games' Usagi Yojimbo
• Apocalypse World
• Flip 7

And there's more:

• Unwritten Earths Symposium
• Our Patreon
• Join the Discord
• Nathan's games
• Eppy's games
• Music by Will Jobst