as someone that spent a few years hitting people with actual swords whilst also being hit by other people with actual swords (and tbh probably a lot more of the latter), my contribution to the latest TTRPG discourse about combat is that everyone should give hitting people with actual swords a go

Hello! I am running an Over/Under like called Baseline Drift. It starts on May 29th at 11am CST. The goal is a max player count of 300~ The Discord! discord.gg/j9WqGudQeH The rules! docs.google.com/document/d/1...

SOLARCRAWL: Is art-complete, as of today! Just another day or two of moving around layout to make it all look pretty, and I should be able to get the full game to backers in digital form! Finally! This one was beginning to eat away at my calm. Anyhow, here's the chapter art for "Discoveries".

"So they're calling it hard sci-fi now?" "Well, it's sci-fi that's hard." "Really?" "Yeah, hard to play, hard to read, and hard to like!" "Doooh-hohooohohohoh!"

universal based income

I'm having a few friends over for board games, some old, some new, this weekend, and I'm slowly getting excited to introduce Oath to a new group. It's been nearly a year since I last played it, but I actually owned my copy of that game for well over 18 months before I ever had my *first* game.

New post up, this time about a sandbox adventure I'm writing for a friend, and some tentative steps I'm making early in that process. It meanders a lot and doesn't finish a lot of its thoughts, because I'm still working on them, but I found it interesting to write! tangentjoy.blot.im/monaco-2150

new blogpost! this one's a defense of regular sentences and paragraphs in an RPG world awash with boldings, bullet points, and bolded bullet points. check it out: samsorensen.blot.im/apologia-for...

Day 1 of Dragoons resolved!!! It took me about two hours, hoping that'll decrease as people submit fewer longer orders over time, and also as I get more used to the process. Really excited to run three months of this wargame, and get some good workflow practice in for Solar later this year.

Dyke knights wip! ⚔️

Marathon is a great game. It's also a brilliant Pear Wiggler - the social layer is sure to get the O/U sicko in your head chomping at the bit. Feat @tjslotus.bsky.social and @juniperhl.bsky.social (and @eldritchbee.bsky.social's character Noll, but not by name. Lol.) amby.navy/marathon-pea...

me talking about game design like *references The Quiet Year* *references The Quiet Year* *references The Quiet Year*

So it turns out there's an upper bound to how many times I can say "if *I* ran a cataphract game, here's how I'd do it" before someone pays me to just fucking do it already. Here's a bit about how that happened, and my thoughts that led into the design. tangentjoy.blot.im/dragoons-a-w...

A smattering a profile pics I've done for discord rp pfps

#over/under Day 15: The game leans heavy on roleplaying as tensions heat between the Union and the Mob. Otso has conversations that create ripple effects throughout the game, and the game ramifications of story coalesce around a throwaway line in a background barfight between NPCs.

Tremendous number of content warnings with this one, it feels like hearing a girl shout in pain and having to decide whether or not you want to join her Obviously, as with everything she writes, very compelling

Continuing my basic dice concepts series with another basic dice concept, Curves. idlecartulary.com/2026/02/19/d...

Hey. I know everything is a lot right now, but I'd love it if you could take a moment to help Maya find a home. I've been here, maybe you have too. Let's help her not have to fight so hard. You dm me a screenshot receipt, I send you a code for a dungeon. Cool? Cool. www.gofundme.com/f/help-maya-...

I've also come to realize I like games (board, ttrpg, etc) where the possibility exists for a kind of bad, boring, underwhelming session. The possibility of a wide open, surprising, unpredictable narrative space basically requires the possibility of a kinda mid game sometimes. See: all sports.

It's a good post. I've heard people discuss the "tyranny of fun" before, in the context of say, handwaving the vestigial bits of old D&D stuck onto newer D&D. Encumbrance isn't fun, random encounters aren't fun, resource management isn't fun... (1/2)

"Players seeking to have fun is bad for many games" is the opening statement of my latest post, where I argue that players should stop playing games trying to have fun, and instead let the game systems take them where they will, and trust that the fun will come. tangentjoy.blot.im/against-intent

Made a mass-multiplayer letterwriting game about playing exocolonists adrift in escape-pods! Gonna be running a big game of this soon. millicent-malice.itch.io/alone-in-space

The rules of the game (almost the whole blog post) written into layout (my scanner)

A very silly conversation this morning put a brain worm in my head, so I'm making it your problem. tbr.bearblog.dev/ballroom-bli...

I got paid (not much) to write a MUD, which involved a whole bunch of research and tact, and then diving in headfirst to start designing a masquerade ball for a bunch of my friends to enjoy. It'll likely never run, but, I designed a cool duelling system for it! tangentjoy.blot.im/masqueraded-...

For anyone curious what the rules are: 1. An Aspect is anything written down about the game world that we all agree is true. 2. The GM has a reserve of tokens that can be traded around the table to resolve disagreements. If you need any more guidance than that, I'm always happy to help!

New blog post!!! I'm going back to Aspect, for real this time, and I'm really excited to bring you all with me. If anyone out there runs my game, let me know how it goes. An index card worth of rules text, and a couple notepads and pens, is all you need to play. tangentjoy.blot.im/two-rule-asp...

Well, it took the better part of a month, but I managed to write up another full blog post about Solar. This time, it's about the absolute massive scale of space, even just within a solar system, and how I've gone about capturing that in game. open.substack.com/pub/tangentj...

Well, I'm really grateful to the Bluesky community, so I'm holding a giveaway! By following, liking, and sharing, you're already entered <3 The giveaway will be held on Friday the 23rd. If there are a lot of entries, I'll add more winners. Good luck! #giveaway #discoelysium

The perennial challenge of the satirist is to outrun the truth.

You know you're becoming a real sicko at long last when you finally crack and start transcribing your setting notes, characters, and regions into a spreadsheet rather than a text doc

I struggled for a really long time to decide what the first Solar Cataphracts game blog post was gonna be. I needed something in depth enough that it couldn't just be a discord message. How about a four thousand word breakdown of #Over/Under 's economics? open.substack.com/pub/tangentj...

Six months into a Lancer game, I'm slowly convincing my players that it isn't, and has never, been about the mechs. Lancer is a game about hexagons, and as long as that's all you're thinking about, it's great fun! Unfortunately, Juniper also likes feeling things about mechs, I wish her luck. 🩷

Hey everyone! I've been working on a game currently titled Solar, occasionally Solarphracts. It's a hard sci fi play by post wargame, "pbp Eve Online", with a ton of inspiration from @samsorensen.bsky.social's #Over/Under and Cataphracts games.

This week, we’re talking about… getting to the point 📝! So, so many RPGs go on and on as if they’re being paid by the word. Which, fair, you might think. Except, isn’t there someone you’re forgetting to ask? THE READER. AND THE POOR PEOPLE THEY HAVE TO EXPLAIN THIS TO. Let’s try to fix this.

So this post has an error, visible in the thumbnail once you know what to look for! Thanks to @kazianova.bsky.social, here's a follow up post with some much nicer graphics to enjoy. tangentjoy.substack.com/p/update-to-...

Hear me out…

New post! This time about a way to navigate hexflowers that I've been exploring this evening, and applications for a friends' dreadful OSR game that she's working on. open.substack.com/pub/tangentj...

As a hacker collective, we couldn't just let my whole "not being at Dragonmeet" thing get in the way. With the power of things like "digital" and "cyber," we made this perfect picture happen.

After I finish up with Silksong, I'm considering playing Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, a game that now that I'm learning more about the alternating death/respawn mechanic, feels more like Sekiro: Shadows Die in iambs.

Explaining #over/under to out of game players in #vanitera450 is making me realize what a farce the wargame turned into by the end

large vizier models are typically trained using backtreasoning, where the model steps backwards through a plot or scheme to arrive at the cradle of twisted desires that birthed it

making some nice progress on my lil post #over/under zine. Its quite fun trying to immitate some of the style of A Pound of Flesh when all you have is google docs (I intend to run this all through some hand collage later to give it the real juice!)

Spent the entirety of the last two weeks pretending I was Anthony Bourdain Here is a link to the full compilation and a retrospective at the end: docs.google.com/document/d/e... #OVER/UNDER

Okay so I don't have a blog, I'm just gonna post some #over/under thoughts here and try to keep myself concise. I don't really play games for fun. I tend to go into them with the goal of mastering some system, and in LARPs and in this, that tends to be social. In some ways, I got my win?

i kept seeing the tempest (merc/soldier) faction in #over/under use the words "mercy" and "consequence" and i was like... that seems... familiar. It turns out that Tan (@tjslotus.bsky.social) and Otso's friendship was so profound that it literally changed Tempest's narrative internal code.

Okay everyone Yuri stocks are somehow booming!!! Maybe the one thing the datacache cannot understand is the POWER OF LOVE *if* I can save this game via the power of yuri, you can damn well bet I'm gonna give everything I can to try!!!!! More on this tomorrow

Hours later and I still cannot express how funny it is that The Grash Uppem Gardening Club is where that conversation happened. I am in *tears* laughing at this tiny garden being chosen for an absolutely character defining scene. Prospero's Dream is an unfathomably beautiful place.

More like the war STARTED because someone was in love with you.