To Be Resolved

When winter settles over your beehive home, the pace of life in the hive slows to a crawl. The surviving workers cluster together around the queen and gently buzz their muscles to maintain a safe internal temperature. The hive burns through its honey reserves and prepares for spring. Step 1: Keep the Hive FedIn order for the hive to survive the winter, the number of filled surplus honeycomb cells must equal or exceed the population of the hive. Empty one surplus honeycomb cell per adult worker…

Something I didn't realize before I plunged into the tabletop blog scene is that the term "game design" is fraught. It's partially fraught because nearly every hobbyist has their own definition of game, and it doesn't help that most people have their own pet definitions of design, so we have something on the order of n log(n) competing standards for what game design is. Having a language of game design does not guarantee that you will be able to design good or interesting games in the same way…

A few weeks ago, Lyme at Brackish Draught made an observation that really stuck with me: The "in times of crisis you revert to your training" thing isn't just for gunfights. It also goes for any fast-moving, high tension situation. It could be a social crisis where escalation to violence isn't possible, or even a large group of people like a ship's crew trying to respond to an electrical fire. Tactical infinity and creativity in combat are mostly for fight choreographers. Actual emergencies or…

Last year I wrote a couple of essays wrestling with the concept of Narrative in tabletop RPGs. In the first, I waddled through the delineation of diegetic and non-diegetic objects, eventually arriving at a weak thesis: Narrative is the synthesis of the Game State interacting with the Imagined Space in response to the actions of the Players (to include the GM) over time. I delineated between a few broad categories of game to postulate whether players acted in the Imagined Space to initiate…

What a busy June, good heavens! This month been quietly productive on the Honeybees front. I completed a first (and instantly obsoleted) draft of Queen Bee Ambitions and Temperaments at the beginning of the month in order to snap a baseline of the twelve tendencies that I originally proposed in What Makes a Honeybee Queen. I then sat back down and worked through my core game loop from scratch and had some friends review what I called "V3" of the game procedure. Their feedback helped me flush…

This past weekend I was listening to the Queens of the Stone Age 2013 album ...Like Clockwork while I was choring around the house. I love this album but I hadn't chewed on it in a year or two. The third track, The Vampyre of Time and Memory (link opens in Youtube), is a somber synthy piano piece under Josh Homme's confessional vocals. The song has always stuck with me, but due to what Jay Dragon has called "ludic pareidolia" I found my mind wandering to what it would mean to literalize the…

I jumped the gun and posted an entry to Prismatic Wasteland's Random Blogwagon about four months early, before he had even set rules and a topic for it. I very much enjoyed talking about reliability and fatigue as random processes, but now having actually followed the prompts at hand I want to make a new post. I drew a King of Hearts for a blogger to reference and link, so for the first time I'm going to talk about the insanely prolific blogger GROGNARDIA! I haven't spent much time with James's…

Last week I pushed out Goodbye Hexes and enjoyed a weekend of relatively free time. Unfortunately, that free time only let the bee madness fester - I was happy with the concept of navigating by sun direction or by landmark, but I was still not satisfied with the idea of unit steps. I went back to basics and read a few articles about how honeybee scouts actually explore their environment, and this paper in particular helped me to articulate the friction I was feeling. The frustration I'd…

Another design journal, another sequel. About a week ago I was 7 or 8 days into working on the Community family of Queen Bee Ambitions. I'd been reading about Drone Congregation Areas, an incredibly weird phenomenon, and thinking about their implications on the game map and structure. I let the idea percolate long enough that I told my friends David and Zak that it was time to move away from the 7 Hex Flower that I'd playtested and maybe move toward a more traditional hexcrawl map. Maybe…

Last winter I put together a draft of rules for swimming and drowning in His Majesty the Worm because I was running Michael Madsen's Caves of Cowardice module, which heavily features rivers and deep pools. I wanted to revisit and compile them for fun for my friend Valeria. From Michael Madsen's Caves of Cowardice His Majesty the Worm uses a slot-based inventory that consists of Hand slots, Belt/Body slots, and Pack slots. We will focus primarily on swimming as an inventory management problem so…

Howdy! It's been a crazy week and a half but in the small hours I've had time to work some more on Ambitions. Today we'll look at a case study on the second rung of our Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Territory. In particular we'll look at the External version of this Ambition, which I'm calling Conquest. European honeybees, the bog-standard honeybee that most of us interact with, tend not to be horribly territorial other than directly protecting themselves and their nests. However, in the last…