I am a NZ based theatre maker, game designer, and lanky robot. This is a place where I am collecting blog posts, reviews, and writings about my various interests. You can find them organised by topic using the headings above, or find my other social media. Someday this website and blog may find a focus, but for now, I will simply be making weekly posts about things that interest me. I'm currently making a competitive role playing game (The VOW), a two player board game (Rogue's Masquerade), messing around in Godot, and working on several shows for the NZ Fringe Festival.
31st of May 2025
Ask someone to “describe a character” and they may struggle. Ask someone to “describe a spellcaster in a fantasy setting” and they may suddenly find their task to be significantly easier. This is despite the fact that “a spellcaster in a fantasy setting” still fits within the remit of “describe a character”. This phenomena is particularly common in my other area of interest: Improv.
18th of May 2025
Quite often creatives get asked: "Where do your ideas come from"? It's a silly question really, everyone has ideas, which can come from seemingly nowhere or from all manner of different places. But some people do seem genuinely amazed at the ideas that other people have or the things that they come up with. Plenty of people have interesting or incredible ideas, but they don't think that their ideas are interesting or incredible because they are having them on a regular basis.
4th of May 2025
Whew last week was BUSY. But my goodness did it end with a bang! Over the weekend I participated in the PB&Jam GameJam as part of the New Zealand Games Festival. This little jam is a desperate race to create some semblance of a video game in 48 hours. I was participating with two good friends: Ben on Audio, whose work you can find here; and Charlie on visuals, whose work you can find here.
18th of April 2025
Blood on the Clocktower is a brilliant game. For those who have never played it, I HIGHLY recommend that you do. Even if you are someone that doesn’t normally enjoy social deduction games, I still believe that Blood on the Clocktower offers something new that may improve on issues that you have with other social deduction games. This is because of the brilliant work of the creator in iterating on previous social deduction games – making small incremental improvements that build to make a much greater game.
4th of April 2025
Continuing where I left off from last week discussing rules light and rules heavy systems, I wanted to discuss the idea between soft and hard rules.
Soft and hard rules, at least in my thinking, refers to the ability of a system to flex and be adaptable to different situations and uses. In general, this tends to align with light and heavy rules – lighter systems tend to be “softer” while heavier rules systems tend to be “harder”.
26th of March 2025
I feel the need to continue writing in a similar vein to my previous post. In that post I was discussing how rules create a feeling in TTRPG’s, and the difficulty of specific rules niches that create strong elements of genre and feeling vs broader rulesets that can do more things, but not necessarily as well as the more specific rules. I really wanted to expand on this, because I keep coming back to this idea, especially in relation to the VOW. I’ve realised this might take a while, so there will be further posts following on from this, but today I wanted to discuss the idea of light and heavy rulesets.
21st of March 2025
Habit forming is hard. Really hard. Starting this blog is my attempt at forming a new habit, which will eventually flow on to other works. Its hard to talk about projects that you’re working on if you haven’t worked on them in some capacity, and so part of the intent of this blog is to force me to be aware of and continue work on all of my various projects.
Habits take a long time to form, with an estimated average of 66 days (assuming it’s a daily habit). Missing one day does not necessarily impact the habit formation, but missing many in a row can slow the formation process.
But life gets in the way. Things get messy, or busy, or complicated, and it’s easy to forget something or miss a post. The key is to note that you’ve missed it, not punish yourself for doing so, and then make a commitment to meet the next habit-forming opportunity. This is the important part. Committing to continue even to a small extent. Even if the blog post is short, you still have to make it and continue the habit.
14th of March 2025
Recently, a post by Morgan Davie sparked discussion in an RPG discord that I am a part of. The discussion was around the use of rules in TTRPG’s, and specifically the idea that rules are “just vibes to create a play vibe”. While jokingly said, I think this is somewhat true and I wanted to discuss it today.
20th of February 2025
While thinking about this initial idea for a competitive Role Playing Game, Matt Colville, a famous D&D youtuber who is creating his own RPG, released this video. In essence, he uses four key words to help define the parameters of the game, thereby helping to focus design on supporting those four key words or goals. In their case, the keywords were Tactical Heroic Cinematic Fantasy. If we were to write an equivalent set of keywords for The VOW (and I did), they would be “Competitive, Political, Epic”.
13th of February 2025
Recently while playtesting The VOW, I had a friend ask me: “why does it matter if someone wins?” To answer that question requires a quick delve into the intention behind the game and its inspirations.
5th of February 2025
With the NZ Fringe Festival fast approaching this year, its time for a big post about all the shows that I’m involved in (and a quick shoutout to a few of my friends in the festival too).
19th of January 2025
One of the pet projects that I am working on is The VOW – a competitive, political Role Playing Game. The intent is that players play as the leaders of a nation (or nations) and have to manage their promises to their citizens – their Vow – against the day to day demands made by their citizens and the movements of the other empires. I have begun playtesting this game, and while initial playests have been promising, I have quickly run into a couple of issues. In todays post, I am going to discuss the iterations of the resource system, the feedback I have had on them, and my thoughts on this and the attempts I have made to address it. While this is very “devloggy”, bear with me! I think there are some interesting learnings to take away.
8th of January 2025
People play board games for many different reasons: The satisfaction that comes from skill expression, the opportunity to socialize with friends, or perhaps enjoying the story created by the game. If you're anything like me, one of the reasons you might enjoy playing games is the discovery.
I love learning new games and discovering the different ways that the systems interact, and opportunities begin to introduce themselves as your understanding of the game grows. However, this joy can begin to fall away when you've played the game a lot, as there is less and less to discover, and fewer new or unexpected strategies present themselves. Eventually, you find yourself returning to the game less and less and start looking at the hot new releases. This cycle begins again with a new game (or expansion) and suddenly you have an entire shelf in your house dedicated to board games both new and old, or perhaps you begin to sell off all the older board games that no longer have the spark...
8th of January 2025
Great question, anonymous reader. There are a couple reasons, but the largest and most important of them is that I want to work in a creative field. I already do various work in NZ as a theatre maker, but I have my sights set on making a board game, making a video game, and writing. For all of these dreams, establishing an online presence and identity gives me something to point to and say "look, there I am, I exist! Here are the things I have done, and here are the things I am working on". In the modern age of the internet an online presence is almost a necessity, and websites like Facebook can be ephemeral in their usefulness, whereas a permanent website is more stable.
Jamey Stegmaier has some excellent advice on this topic, and is one of my inspirations behind this project. In fact, in this blog post he discusses several reasons people avoid starting a blog: a lack of time, a lack of confidence, the feeling that you have nothing interesting to say or that you don't have a topic to talk about. I know I certainly feel like I fit into these last couple of categories. Nonetheless, by writing here, I hope to improve my confidence, my capacity to write, and find topics that interest both me and others.
There is one area that I suspect may become my niche in this little corner of the internet, and that is the overlap between games and psychology. I have a Masters degree in Psychology, and have found myself often considering how some of these concepts interact with game design, whether that is board games or video games. In fact, I have already begun thinking about my next post - a discussion on Novelty and replayability (with reference to the Hedonic Treadmill ). Who knows whether this blog will continue to be about games and psychology, or whether it will morph into discussions about fiction and science fiction writing? For now, i'm simply going to write about something that excited me each week and we'll go from there.
Thank you for coming along and I hope you stick on this journey with me!
- Campbell
