The full index

Everything on the site

One line per piece. This is the dense list; the front page is not.

Fourteen pieces, in section order
Piece	Section	What it covers
Who gets to say it happened?	Who gets to say it happened?	Every roleplaying system is an answer to one question — how a table shares authority over what is true in the fiction.
The referee inherits a wargame	Who gets to say it happened?	The role came out of umpiring, where somebody adjudicated what the rules did not cover.
Player-facing rules, and what they move	Who gets to say it happened?	Putting the roll in the player's hands changes who carries the burden of knowing the system.
Braunstein	Four evenings that changed what a rule was for	A wargame in which players were given individual characters and objectives rather than armies, and the session ran away from its own rules.
Lake Geneva	Four evenings that changed what a rule was for	The dungeon campaign that put single characters into a medieval wargame and produced something with no win condition.
Apocalypse World	Four evenings that changed what a rule was for	A system built on moves and player-facing rules that rebuilt the procedural layer around conversation.
The OSR argument	Four evenings that changed what a rule was for	Returning to the 1974 assumptions is itself a design position about where authority should sit.
What the dice are actually doing	What the dice are actually doing	A resolution system is a probability distribution with a story attached, and the shape of the curve decides how often the unlikely happens.
d20 against 3d6	What the dice are actually doing	Flat against bell: one makes every outcome equally likely, the other makes the middle ordinary and the edges rare.
Roll-under, and the appeal of a number you already know	What the dice are actually doing	Testing against a stat the player already has removes a layer of arithmetic from every check.
Dice pools: many small chances instead of one big one	What the dice are actually doing	Counting successes across a handful changes the texture of failure as much as its frequency.
The layer nobody notices	The layer nobody notices	Initiative, the exploration turn and the reaction roll are what stop a session becoming an unstructured conversation.
The reaction roll	The layer nobody notices	Deciding an encounter's disposition by dice removes it from the referee's mood, which is a deliberate transfer of authority.
The exploration turn	The layer nobody notices	A unit of time that makes resources tick — light, rations, wandering checks — and turns exploration into a system.