From Duct Tape to Digital Dice: A Gaming Life in Three Acts
How constraints, complexity, and creative tools shaped one designer's journey through decades of tabletop gaming
Act I: The Scarcity Years
My tabletop gaming journey began with the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set—so basic that dice weren't included. I had to save allowance money to buy a set of those mysterious polyhedrons later, carefully rationing each purchase like a Depression-era kid hoarding candy. When friends eventually moved on from the hobby, I inherited their Advanced D&D rulebooks, some of which I proudly reinforced with duct tape when the spines cracked from overuse.
Somewhere along the way, I discovered a secondhand copy of Traveller's "Black Box" with its three slim booklets describing characters, starships, and worlds. You sense a pattern here? Disposable income wasn't exactly abundant during my formative years, but somehow I managed to hopscotch across stepping stones of gaming all the way through college—the same period when I discovered left-of-the-dial radio and fell headfirst into the wonderful chaos of independent and underground music.
Act II: The Complexity Trap
An engineering degree (chosen more for its reliable employment prospects than any burning passion for fluid dynamics) led to a respectable oil and gas desk job during an era when "carbon footprint" referred to what you tracked into the house after stepping on charcoal briquettes. Suddenly blessed with discretionary income, I promptly invested it all in home recording equipment and musical gear. The gaming shelves were out of sight and mind.
Nearly a decade later, I struck gold at Half Price Books—particularly the location near NASA's Johnson Space Center, which became my personal treasure trove. Someone, presumably having either found religion or passed away, had donated entire gaming collections. The World of Darkness line began colonizing my shelves: vampires, mages, werewolves, and wraiths from the days when White Wolf was still White Wolf and live-action role-playing wasn't quite the punchline it would become.
When DriveThruRPG launched and PDF rulebooks became the norm, my groaning bookshelves gave way to humming hard drives, sharing space with MP3s and movie files. Almost as an aside, I watched friends launch and eventually retire their own fanzines—a real-world demonstration of DIY publishing that wouldn't circle back to inspire me until much later.
By then, nearly every game I owned descended from the same genetic lineage: complex systems that attempted to simulate entire worlds through lattices of rules and dice. Marc Miller's fifth iteration of Traveller finally broke this particular camel's back with its overwhelming complexity. That's when I drifted away from gaming entirely (I do credit the 1977 edition of Traveller with encouraging me to learn spreadsheets—perhaps its most lasting contribution to my life).
I didn't expect to return, but then the world itself started falling apart.
Act III: The Minimalist Revolution
I'm not entirely sure how Mörk Borg appeared on my radar during the early days of the COVID pandemic, but the timing couldn't have been more perfect. The lockdown, economic uncertainty, social upheaval, protests, riots, and the apocalyptic wildfires that turned Oregon's September days into an eerie orange twilight—all of it converged with this gleefully nihilistic game about going down screaming in a dying world.
Mörk Borg was like tabletop gaming's answer to Nordic black metal: all blastbeats and cartoonish brutality. The rules were skeletal—just enough sinew holding together the bones of a game whose central premise was prophetically appropriate. Around the same time, Mothership entered my orbit with its elegant framework of mechanics that felt like oxygen re-entering a space hulk's corridors.
What struck me most about both games wasn't just their streamlined rules, but their supplemental materials: single sheets of paper folded into pamphlets, the gaming equivalent of a perfectly crafted shiv—grounded to a sharp point and ready to devastate someone's afternoon.
The AI Collaboration
Within the last year, I began working with AI language models, first through a company subscription for the day job, then independently. What started as professional experimentation evolved into something more personal: I assembled a coterie of four different AI models that became my design studio, where I could act as chief editor, designer, and producer while they served as collaborative text generators, mechanical brainstormers, and player simulators. One model threw out the phrase "transmog your pain," which became a core mechanic in a parody RPG about World of Warcraft—exactly the kind of curve ball connection that made these collaborations so rewarding.
Two recent experiences crystallized my thinking. A local potter mentioned their frustration at needing to master three 300-page rulebooks just to join their kid's D&D campaign. Later, when my wife bought me the 2024 D&D Player's Handbook and I attempted reading it aloud as an evening activity, my voice gave out after thirty pages—along with our collective patience.
Drawing from Agile methodology, I began defining the core problem: Why had we taken this particular road trip to Abilene, and was the selected route truly appropriate? Working with my editorial team of digital collaborators—who could generate theme-appropriate text, test mechanical ideas, and simulate player behavior—I developed TiGGR—Tiny Game for Generalized Roleplaying—as one of my foundational experiments.
The Philosophy of Constraints
TiGGR embodies principles from the Theory of Constraints and POSIWID (Purpose of a System Is What It Does): create a shared storytelling experience without requiring volumes of rules or lore. The current implementation fits on two sides of paper and can be distilled to eleven lines of text. The heavy lifting gets done by the gaming group itself, rallying around a cultural touchstone and self-organizing a plot trajectory into a forty-five-minute collective story.
I've used TiGGR to explore scenarios ranging from a weekly grocery run to a haunted Trader Joe's to community drama at a Martian outpost, from law and order in a desert city where collective emotions drive legislation to the first and last Sex Pistols U.S. tour. Eventually, I paused my own experimentation to discover established frameworks like Into The Odd, Cairn, Powered By The Apocalypse, and Lasers & Feelings.
That last one initially puzzled me. Its steadfast adherence to the tiniest possible footprint—a single page and a core mechanic expressed through a binary theme—was a constraint that somehow fractaled into infinite possibility.
The Creative Laboratory
I now have over thirty publications on itch.io, some using TiGGR as their narrative engine, others employing bespoke systems that extend each game's central thesis. My most recent offering, "At the Record Plant, 1978," emerged from parameterizing the drama and excess of late-70s Los Angeles rock culture—think Fleetwood Mac's Rumours and Tusk sessions, filtered through recent yacht rock documentaries and introducing Michael McDonald as an element of the supernatural.
The structural constraints of Lasers & Feelings acted as a focusing lens for the polychromatic possibilities of that specific place and moment in musical history. This confirmed what I've learned: limitations don't stifle creativity—they channel it.
Journal Artifacts Disguised as Games
Whether these experiments are traditionally "playable" seems beside the point—though they're certainly functional. I'm not questioning anyone's intelligence or patience; rather, I'm acknowledging that my nearly three dozen publications serve as journal artifacts disguised as RPGs. They document explorations of what becomes possible when you combine deep cultural knowledge with elegant mechanical frameworks, often with AI collaborators helping to stress-test ideas and generate content that pushes beyond my own creative blind spots.
I currently have half a dozen Lasers & Feelings experiments in development, ranging from 1980s Las Vegas shenanigans to cozy vintage mall musings. I'm keeping close to heart the adage about hammer-wielders looking for nails—at some point, I'll shift my excavation in new directions. In the meantime, I'm thoroughly entertained by viewing different worlds through L&F's particular kaleidoscope.
From Complexity to Curation: A Design Manifesto
This journey from complexity to constraint mirrors larger cultural shifts in how we process information and create meaning. We live in an era of infinite content and diminishing attention, where the crucial skill isn't consuming everything but curating meaningfully. The most elegant solutions often involve doing less, not more.
Whether you're designing games, building software, or simply trying to organize a weekly game night with friends, the principle holds: constraints clarify purpose. When you're forced to distill an entire world into eleven lines of text or capture the essence of 1970s rock excess on a single page, you discover what really matters.
The duct tape I used to repair those old rulebooks was more than maintenance—it was an early lesson in working with what you have, finding value in "damaged" goods, and understanding that sometimes the most cherished possessions are the ones you've had to fix yourself.
Gaming taught me that imagination needs structure to flourish, that creativity thrives under pressure, and that the best stories emerge when everyone contributes to building something larger than themselves. Those lessons have served me well beyond any tabletop.
Our experimental games can be found at our itch.io page, where recent highlights include "At the Record Plant, 1978" (yacht rock meets supernatural Los Angeles) and various TiGGR-powered scenarios ranging from haunted grocery runs to Martian community drama. The excavation continues.