Working in the abstract

This week we had a task to describe the thesis process. I’ve elected to change the title from last week

Enemy Expression in B/X-Derivative OSR Tabletop Roleplaying Games

Team: Solo

Project type: Research project

Technology: Games are books, written on Overleaf using Zotero as reference manager

The project mostly consists of reading and cataloging a series of tabletop roleplaying game rulebooks. The aim of the study is to find families of presentation styles for enemy statistics in these games using k-means clustering. I was inspired by the methodology detailed in this post https://traversefantasy.blogspot.com/2022/12/osr-rules-families-faq-methodology.html?m=1

The main dataset will be limited to any books and pdfs I can get access to. I have a good set already and many games have rules that are freely available. I can use the reference list in the post as a starting point and add in some statistics from rpg.net forum users preferred games to filter out bias.

Whether I end up with this plan or not shall be seen. I’m already thinking of using the findings from the above link as a basis and instead studying each cluster individually.