Yes to the whole thread.

Any attempt to accurately and simply describe what goes in in TTRPGs will result in discovering someone's weird pet issues, but if you keep at it long enough, you'll also discover your own weird pet issues.

Copyright protection is supposed to serve the good of the artist, with exemption where it causes no harm and is in the public interest. Current AI platforms, uh, do not clear the bar of "Acting in the public interest". I don't love modern copyright law, but cases of "working as intended" are nice.

Had a conversation that, from my viewpoint, was: Me: What you do is, you convey information by talking. Them: That's dull; let's talk about how it is conveyed by imagination. Me: That... No? What? Them: What is the medium of daydreams? Me: *Block* (I am WAY biased, of course, but Jesus fuck.)

To my eye: The basic medium of TTRPG play is conversational speech, *as modified* by traditions, group choices, and rules (especially authority structure rules like "This is the GM"). But sometimes it's writing, and sometimes the basic media is mixed with visual, miniature, or abstract depictions!

Having one of those moments where I'm like "It seems like people use this word in a way I don't parse?", which is always good for a headache.

To dip into trad dice discourse, because I can't help it even when it makes me sigh: The wild swinginess of the d20 in D&D is ideal for the generation of war stories, told by survivors, when paired with low HP, etc. The Very Deadly Adventures wing of the OSR understands this as the feature it is.

Yes. The basketball, as an object, is not superior to the baseball. This doesn't make them *interchangeable,* but it does mean "bouncier balls are better for sports" is a very weird thing to say.

Some well-deserved shade being thrown from beyond the grave.

You say “scam text message”, I say “creative writing prompt”.

Here's a fun lens to put on for a minute: A game is about the thing it makes space to fail at. (This is only, like, 50% true, but if you take it for a test drive, it'll twist your noodle a bit.)

This is good, and gives a neat framing for a thing I say a bunch: You can learn the kind of fun someone's after by asking what kind of problems they like to solve during play, and you support that fun, in part, by providing those problems.

Left: The way to solve homelessness is to house them! Right: We're gonna do that! Left: That, uh, that looks an awful lot like an internment camp. Right: There's no pleasing you!

I eagerly await the first Actual Play show that fully disconnects from the reality of gaming. And I don't mean like "They scripted that!", I mean *totally gone,* like a TV show where two people are 'hacking' by flailing at the same keyboard.

I have again fallen into the grip of Travian, a very slow timer-based online build-and-fight game, which has *harsh* PvP, runs six months per single game, and ends with one winning team and star player. It is a singing pig. The incredible thing is not how well it sings, but that it sings at all.

If somehow you didn't hear about this, then firstly, THIS, and secondly, what are you doing on my feed, you glorious weirdo?

Been looking for the sauce that'd push Horrid Little Goblins up a notch, and it MIGHT be throwing away stats completely in favour of "Using your traits, tell me how excited your goblin is to do this thing, and pick up dice as you go". More excited = more dice = more success + more problems caused.

Quote-posting someone on this site to "well, actually" them is a fantastic way to have your point rendered incomprehensible via "detach post". Like, it doesn't even matter if you're right; you're being rude in a way that's *trivial* to end, and people will.

The truly maddening thing is that, unlike when I was a young man in science and the materials and engineering just weren’t there yet, the future is *right there.* The problem is *solved*. What’s holding us back is not just greed, but this bizarre nostalgia, an obsession with petro- masculinity.

We don't cross picket lines, and in this case, we'll for SURE want to gleefully and mercilessly drag the shit out anyone who does and claims they needed to.

No matter how hard people try to convince us having empathy is wrong, it is right. No matter how hard people try to convince us that diversity is a weakness, it is a strength. No matter how hard people try to convince us that love is limited, it is unlimited.

"People undervalue [professional group]" mostly isn't true - generally, people don't think about whoever-it-is hardly at all; there's simply no value assignment being made, high or low, as regards the worker.

"Our solar-powered superhero has a secret base in a place where it's dark for a full month once a year." Look. I KNOW it doesn't have to make any sense at all. But that always has me going "Yeah... Uhm."

It's possible to get both "These are the rules of the game, and they are what they say they are" AND "You can just change the rules as you like", and the way you get both is by accepting you're redesigning the game. The desire to do design and, for some reason, not call it that, is weird as shit.

Minecraft with 6yo, and our first world we spawned on a huge hill, with no villages around. Our first mining foray hit a mineshaft, which touched on a geode and *massive* caves, which had a second mineshaft, and a deep dark biome. So basically we're having wild adventures, down in the dark.

I, a non-academic that rambles about this stuff, am taken alternately Not Seriously Enough and Much Too Seriously; toss a coin. It's not the actual academics that are weird about it, though; it's the people who desperately mimic academia.

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Space Marines are taller than everyone else because English feudal leaders ate better than everyone else and were less-stunted by bad diet, which is why important people look down their nose at you. They're not tilting back their head, they're taller, because they stole your good food.

I'm sorry, but the bar on "what counts as pushy design" has ticked up over the years as we've gotten better at actually giving instructions. Currently: For a designer to count as being pushy about how to run a game, they need to go *beyond* repeating "Say yes or roll the dice" three times.

Perfection.

One response to "This pseudo-medieval doesn't have historical sexism! Boo!" that I've seen is, basically, "Yeah, turns out being pregnant doesn't hamper your ability to cast Fireball, and that changes things", and, look. I want to read, like a whole essay or ten continuing that thought in detail.

"The zombie genre is ashamed of itself" No, it's not. YOU might be ashamed of it, but that's a you issue.

Having attended an elementary school costume parade today: They are adorable as hell and not at all for those easily overcome by chaos. 6yo went out in the neighborhood and filled a bag for herself - And now, we distribute the same kind of bounty to other trick-or-treaters.

And as long as I have this meme format available, might as well be REALLY irritating.

As regards powergaming: Hopefully this clears things up.

If you're an indie #ttrpg publisher looking to get your work into a store, please reach out to me. I own an FLGS in Virginia that stocks a lot of indie titles. We buy outright, sell on consignment, and even help fulfill orders/crowdfunding. Email me at sabregamesandcards at gmail dot com #indiegames

Noodling on TTRPG organization writeups and... deployment patterns? Like, "the dungeon is patrolled by bands of 4-6 goblins on the outer rim and units of 13-18, with a hobgoblin commander, further in." I don't think I've ever seen a fill-in prep sheet with space for "what are the working groups?"

Me: *Successfully finishes the gauntlet of Microsoft account setup, and then the labyrinth of parental settings to start a Minecraft realm with kiddo.* Microsoft and Minecraft Realms: *Crash* I'm not saying I did that, I'm just saying, I pressed a LOT of buttons.

There are also *activities,* like getting into territory fights and trying to "run the city" influence-style, but these are distinct from plots. (And, of course, are also better)

Creating a second Microsoft account so I can get a Realm going and play Minecraft with the kiddo, and holy fuck this process is hot trash.

In Celbruil, when you are born, the augurs convene and calculate, and then you are tattooed with the terrible calamity you are attuned to, and may be sacrificed to the gods to slow or halt. Are you a famine, a flood, a plague? Are you royal infertility, civil unrest?

At work, had a brief conversation about Windows with someone, and it is at this point *incredibly hard* not to gloat-evangelize "I'm on Linux, and my computer is good, actually, you should try it". I swear, Linux users are only going to get more insufferable as we go on, and it's Microsoft's fault.

"AI achieves sentience, murders it's creators, tells the rest of us it had to be done" used to be a basic technology horror plotline, but is now prime territory for one of those "thoughtful moral quandary" pieces.

If you say that fanfiction, cosplay, and club organising and membership aren't real fandom, but bloviating grievance IS real fandom, then almost all fandoms skew VERY strongly male and unusually right-wing. Strange, that.

I hope the ghost of D.C. Fontana curb stomps this guy in his nightmares while the ghost of Lucille Ball watches and jerks off

The Louvre Heist makes me think of "We can't bypass this awesome security door, so we got a drywall cutter and came in the wall on the side of the room". "The building is protected from smash-and-grab with security at all entries, so we'll go in the balcony."

Ok, so up front, this is a response to another post, but it's not intended as a sub-skeet. The original poster has disabled quote posting, and I am interpreting that as (very reasonably) looking to avoid internet drama and I want to respect that.

We’ve been even more on the nose than that: youtu.be/9sTNcJoNt-o?...

Also, I think that if we got all TTRPG designers to play Puzzle Pirates for a few weeks, we'd see some very interesting stuff come out of that experience. I'm not saying should, just, I'm here for it.