PALARONG MAKINISMO

A great many things inform the tarpit that is online TTRPG discourse but a noninsignificant amount of it is due to the fact that nobody knows what the fuck they’re talking about. At best, you get crude principles and near-pointless taxonomies enshrined on blogging sites and forums; at worst you get labels and argumentation wholly founded on personal likes and vibe-checks. There’s not even a dearth of theory really—we have a decade of the stuff from the Forge and elsewhere (flawed and limited certainly but most of it’s interesting and been archived)1, and various journals on roleplaying still get whole-ass volumes to this day2—they just aren’t well circulated. This ultimately limits any real conversations about The Conversation and the myriad ways to design play; it’s just not the kind of scene that produces new or interesting topics, only circling the drain on the same bullshit that was already getting old by the late 2000s. 

The core of Palarong Makinismo (Ludic Machinism) is to provide an actionable model—that is, a framework someone can use to analyze, critique, and design a given TTRPG. The hope is that by equipping people with the ability to actually talk about TTRPGs, not as a mere abstract activity but as a thing that can be made and dissected and talked about, we might start finally getting somewhere. Pure adventurist cope but it’s either that or we all kill ourselves.