Gaming, tools, and thoughts from Game in the Brain.
Background – This is for ICRPG as I try to run all the old DND adventures i wasnt able to run in High School and College. BUT i’m still a…
Read more →Most tabletop systems that try to mechanize relationships end up with one of two failure modes. Either the relationship becomes a stat block — a number you add when convenient…
Read more →I’ve been designing tabletop games for almost thirty years. For most of that time, game design was a slow, subjective craft: you write a rule, you playtest it with the…
Read more →1. Executive Summary During validation of the Theater-of-the-Mind (TOTM) terrain system, the expected divergence between open ground and narrowing ground failed to appear in Monte Carlo combat results. A trained,…
Read more →Companion to the TOTM Terrain Guide The terrain tags answer one question: what is this ground? Playtesting the zone-based combat simulator surfaced the question they don’t answer: where are you…
Read more →Sun Tzu’s translation problem, the ego of old game designers, and what happens when anyone can run the simulation I have been working on one problem since my twenties: how…
Read more →On missed emails, attention, and who your mind actually belongs to. One of my staff missed a client email this week. He felt terrible about it. I want to be…
Read more →TOTM — Theater of the Mind — means running combat with no map, no grid, and no miniatures. The battlefield exists only in the shared imagination of the table. This…
Read more →Every year, Japan quietly retires thousands of industrial robots. Not because they are broken — the mechanical bones of a six-axis arm, the gearboxes and the harmonic drives, can run…
Read more →The Art of the Trap: How to Recognize and Neutralize “Loaded” Bait Statements Have you ever been in an argument where, no matter how you answered, you felt like you…
Read more →Part I treated a game as chains of costed actions falling into three families — Violence, Social, Resource Management — each with its own currency, and argued that play is…
Read more →To determine the price per gram, the total cost of each item was divided by its weight in grams. Below is the compiled list of all jams from the files…
Read more →1. A process is just actions, and every action has a price Strip a tabletop game down far enough and there’s nothing left but process: a sequence of actions, each…
Read more →When we think of TTRPG problem-solving, we usually default to the Big Three: Violence (hitting the problem with a sword), Social Skills (charming or intimidating the problem), or Subterfuge (sneaking…
Read more →If you are a worldbuilder, an author, or a game designer, you have likely struggled with the definitions of “Light,” “Medium,” and “Heavy” infantry. We often fall into the trap…
Read more →https://ccg.gi7b.orghttps://git.gi7b.org/justin-admin/ccg-mneme-ce Mneme Cepheus Engine Character Generator — v0.1.8 Is Ready for Your Table If you run a Cepheus Engine or Mneme science-fiction campaign, you have probably spent more time than…
Read more →I wanted magic in my low fantasy setting to matter. Not as spectacle — as something that actually changes how people live. So I started asking: what would a medieval…
Read more →Mechanics Guide — Stats, Skills, Modifiers & Options (v2.4) Document Metadata 1. Core Statistics (Stats) Every Agent has six core capabilities. For humans, each ranges from 3 (worst) to 18…
Read more →https://wiki.gi7b.org/index.php/Economics_of_Textiles_Clothing_and_Armor We take cloth for granted. A bedsheet, a pair of jeans, a padded gambeson under a mail shirt — all of these seem like simple objects until you count…
Read more →I keep building things that no one will ever use. Not because I’m bad at building — I’m genuinely not bad at it anymore, not with the tools I have…
Read more →The first complexity matrix came back and said 3D6 Eas — a game designed for accessible play — was roughly as complex as OSRIC. OSRIC is a 412-page AD&D retroclone…
Read more →What This Is The idea is simple and it came from frustration with the standard LLM behavior: the model answers confidently whether or not it knows the answer. The confidence…
Read more →the board state changed and i dont think enough people here noticed. US industry is getting priced out of its own narrative. Not gradually — structurally. The return on american…
Read more →The logic.My ideal is that people collectively, in large numbers, will make better choices. The data I collected as the head of Comfac IT, trying to sell the service at…
Read more →So i ran my last 20 years of blog posts through an AI — fed them into ChromaDB as vector embeddings, 2,376 posts from 2006 to 2026. Not to get…
Read more →1. The Tri-Model Proof — Handling the 20% Hallucination Rate Running a single AI model for anything complex is asking for trouble. DeepSeek and Kimi hover around a 20% hallucination…
Read more →Event Overview The episode was broadcast live from the Lumiri Code Fest in the Netherlands, a hackathon organized by Open Source Science focused on developing Ubuntu Touch apps and Lumiri…
Read more →If you flip through the pages of classic tabletop RPGs like Traveller or watch legacy sci-fi, you’ll see a common theme: hovering vehicles. They glide effortlessly over rugged terrain, ignoring…
Read more →Abstract: We propose the following testable thesis: the global expansion of firmware lockdowns and Digital Rights Management (DRM) across billions of devices will not suppress repair markets. Instead, it will…
Read more →https://game-in-the-brain.github.io/Mneme-CE-World-Generator version v1.3.156 Date: 2026-04-27 Project: Mneme CE World Generator This update covers a substantial day of work on two interlinked problems in the Mneme world generator: how habitability is calculated…
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