What

A Worksheet Manifesto (Rough Draft)

The Worksheet Manifesto is an attempt to explain why I'm moving my game design toward something I can print for free at the public library and give away. It's not a scold or a call to action; I buy full-color zines and hardcover books, and I support people charging for their work. This is a personal manifesto—an exercise in self-exploration.

I used to backpack for a living as part of my job and the logistics of how much food I could carry was very much a limiting factor of how far we could get in a week before we had to turn around.

We had to do so much planning about food, I counted calories for the first time in my life not to lose weight but to establish a bare minimum of how much food I needed. I started with 2000 calories before realizing that they decided that number was an average for people who hiked way less then 8 hours in a day. I went up to 2400 calories a day, I would have done more but reasonably I could only carry so much food on my back. I made sure a good portion of it was salty because after the first day my sweat would taste like water and if I didn't pack enough gatorade powder my legs would cramp. Pringles have never tasted as good as they would on day 3 of a hike when my body craved salt the most, at home they were disappointing. Food was about what my body needed and what would let me keep hiking.

I would often train new volunteers and impressing upon them how much food they needed to pack and how they needed to think about it differently was always hard. The hardest was young woman. They would tell me they only ate 1400 calories in a day, they were never hungry after that, they couldn't possibly eat that much. They always listened to me in the second week. No one ever brought enough in the first week man or women.

A few things that cards can do that dice can't:

You know that dice superstition that people have about how if they roll enough low numbers they're bound to get a high one? That sort of actually works with cards provided cards aren't immediately returned to the deck and the deck reshuffled. Because there's a limited number of each "roll," good or bad.

You can hold them in your hand. It's basically like pre-rolling a bunch of numbers and then getting to spend those numbers as they become relevant. Maybe you only get to draw more cards by playing all your cards, meaning that if you don't conserve your good cards your character's luck is eventually bound to run out.

You can make poker hands with them. Added to the previous point, maybe you will be forced to play a worse hand and have your character flub a non-critical roll because you're hoping for that better hand that'll turn the tide.

Playing cards can be used to implement large random lookup tables where duplicate results need to be avoided without resorting to forced rerolls. (Tip: remove the aces, jokers and court cards from a standard poker deck, leaving only the 2–10s of each suit, and you've got a set of cards which can be used to double-index a full d66 table to allow it to work with either cards or dice. Also, you just set aside 18 cards, so you can use those to double-index a separate half-d66 table if you need both.)

Even when you're using playing cards as ersatz dice (i.e., just drawing the top card from the deck and treating that as your roll), the drawn card automatically furnishes a persistent token representing the result of that "roll"; this token can then be fed into a resource economy, retained as an historical record of the outcome, or both. (For example, Rose Bailey's Beautiful Anomalies, in which "rolled" cards are played face-up on the table into a linear queue from which the GM draws, allowing players' actions in the present to control the GM's dice rolls in the future.)

In physical play spaces, the fact that cards have face-up and face-down states allows randomised outcomes to be made known to some but not all players much more easily than with dice. The face of a drawn card can be selectively shown only to certain participants, while a played card can be placed on the table face-down to offer assurances that the unrevealed outcome hasn't been tampered with. (This can be done with the outcomes of dice rolls via note-passing, of course, but using cards in this way removes the need to trust that the note accurately reports the unrevealed roll, which can facilitate some types of adversarial play.)

Building on the previous point, cards have extra axes of statefulness. A die typically offers only the rolled number and its position on the table as stateful information, but a card can be face-up or face-down, placed in an upright or rotated position, etc. In face-to-face play, cards are also much easier to move from zone to zone on the table when position-as-state is required, making them better suited to applications where randomisers double as resource tokens or playing pieces.

Deckbuilding. It's a lot more feasible to give each player a personalised mini-deck of cards to draw from than it is to give each player a set of dice with customised faces; if you're determined to bring deckbuilding mechanics to the tabletop, basing it on actual playing cards is going to be a much easier sell for potential players than asking them to screw around with papercraft tokens or blank dice and markers. (Or, heaven forefend, asking them to actually buy custom dice which can only be used with your game!)

My grandfather worked in aerospace during the war. He took me on a tour of an American aircraft carrier once, when I was very young. I thought it was conceptually pretty neat. It had places and things I recognized like water fountains and a cafeteria and bunk beds.

I live somewhere with lots of predatory birds. I still enjoy sitting out by the lake and watching the perigrine absolutely annihilate ducks. Redtail hawks are way bigger than you think they are.

But I remember heading up to the deck and seeing a decommissioned gulf war era combat aircraft. I think it was an old F4 Phantom II. It had dead missiles still loaded onto the wingjacks for display. I knew what combat aircraft were but I think I was young enough that part of my conception of this object was "dragon".

Ive compiled all the different packs from Dnd 5e masterfully drawn by Betterlegends on Tumblr! I’ve been printing these and handing them to my players for character creation, truly useful (and preeeeeetty)

Serious shoutout to the artist! All credits to him! 

Thats Fair II

Gargantuan mega superbundle alert!

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That's nearly 700 TTRPGs, all bangers, something for every genre and table, available until end of June 2024.

(in this post I have avoided saying certain words in case they algorithmically influence its reach and visibility, please feel free to say those words in the reblogs)