Not a very high quality article. Makes constant reference to “faction and domain play” without adequately defining the terms for someone that didn’t grow up with them. (Presumably, the target of the article.) And a lot of typos.

There are probably legitimate uses out there for gen AI, but all the money people have such a hard-on for the unethical uses that now it’s impossible for me to hear about AI without an automatic “ugggghhhhh” reaction.

I didn’t overlook it, I specifically used the term “plagued” in reference to that.

And America wasn’t actually empty frontier, either. It was full of the native people that had been living there since time imemorial, and the ex-europeans slaughtered and plagued their way through.

Battlemaps are good if you’re going for a swashbuckling or strongly tactical feel. I like to say ‘your players can’t swing from the chandelier if they don’t know there’s a chandelier.’

Battlemaps are great for a certain aesthetic (in the the game design sense of the word) because they allow you to add things for players to improv with without explicitly enumerating a static set of options. If you draw the inside of a tavern, when the tavern brawl breaks out they may do something that surprises you; “Can I throw the bottles at him/flip over the table/dive behind the houseplant/throw him out the window/etc” Whereas theatre of the mind requires your player to either intuit that there would be a bottle on the table that they could throw, or you to explicitly say “and there’s a bottle on the table in front of you.” And if you tell them there’s something in front of them, they will laser focus on it and never even think to flip the table/dive behind the houseplant/etc.

Theatre of the mind is good for games that put the emphasis elsewhere. If the focus of your game is on entrigue, or courtly drama, or in a setting that’s highly improvised, that’s when theatre of the mind shines.

What was the game

Ooh, I will have to check that out for my own game, thanks!

Pointy Hat had a great video on this subject!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIKxk96ZFwg

3 weeks to do real life shit, 4 days to procrastinate, and 3 days to hurriedly slap everything together :P

I don’t schedule a game if I’m not going to be prepared