I don't know if I have any friends who still buy D&D books. Most have, I think, moved on to other [better] games. But if I do, and you're reading this, stop.

One day, George Lucas is going to reveal that his Ep 7-9 trilogy was going to begin with some planet's redistricting efforts to deny representation and consolidate power.

To celebrate Star Wars day I write up what lessons you can learn from Han Solo when wanting to play a character who really doesn't want to go on this adventure, thank you very much.

Real talk: I worry sometimes that game writers focus too much on making a selling point that their game is fun or easy to play, at an expense of making their game fun or easy to *run*. Especially in 202x when, more and more, players don't read books; GMs do.

I'm not a tree guy, but the botanical garden has these Japanese maples, and they're just so gorgeous. It's wild to be like, "This is definitely a tree. I know a tree when I see one, but this is like 'what if there was a tree, in italics?'"

Going to go comment "hell yeah" on 10 different posts on r/rpg so I can do a self promo, brb

Echoing what better people than I have said: Rae is an incredible designer. Go find their stuff on itch.io, DTRPG, or Evil Hat. Or show your support however you wish!

A lot more people need to watch Ex Machina. (The machine will lie if it thinks that will appease)

Is it common for Forged in the Dark people to refuse to admit there's a game in their game? I was asking for help on ways to use clocks or how to prep a mission layout, and someone went "Watch more movies." Dawg I don't care how many times you've watched Ocean's 11, that doesn't help you GM a ttrpg

Post a GIF from a movie you've watched more than six times. Hard mode: No Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, Marvel, Disney, or Ghibli films.

"This place is just like Twitter", they say, doing the exact same things they did on Twitter while expecting, idk, something different to happen?

TTRPG hot take tonight: We hear a lot in this space "humans are natural storytellers". By the letter of this statement, I agree. But it is often used to dismiss gaps in texts to give GMs advice on how to use their tools and mechanics. Being natural does not make it something everyone is good at.

Coming to terms with the idea that you can have fun playing a ttrpg for reasons that have nothing to do with the game's structure or mechanics. Cynics might call this "having fun in spite of the game". I have for a while been calling it "finding my fun".

OR JUST WRITE THE THING YOURSELF FOR FUCK'S SAKE IT WILL TAKE LESS TIME THAN WHATEVER THE FUCK THIS IS mashable.com/article/sinc...

For the last time: if you are attending the Correspondents Dinner and you are not planning to actively protest the presence of Trump and his henchmen (who want you dead) and yet you claim to be a journalist and a patriotic American.. You are neither a journalist nor an American STAND FOR SOMETHING

Community Opportunity: Help Jodi Black on GoFundMe https://shop.peginc.com/blogs/news/community-opportunity-help-jodi-black-on-gofundme

I think I'm realizing I'm "too kind" as a GM ("passive" might be a better word) and that a lot of ttrpgs are written assuming your GM is a dick, which makes it hard for me to run them.

Palantir are about six months away from ordering their employees to leave audio logs scattered around their offices

Rewatched The Illusionist (2006) last night, realizing how formative that movie was for me. The Prestige was easily the more popular film that year, and that made it hard to talk about because people wouldn't let you say anything without "Well, the Prestige was better".

A weird thing happened with Reddit where, experts with off-time used to pop in to topics and answer questions. idk if it's just "times have changed" or if their voices got drowned in "um actually" armchair experts and they left, but that's all it is now: correct-sounding speculation. Temu Quora.

One American paradox: The sandwich Invented so you could eat on the go. But at least here in the States, the best sandwiches are usually the ones overloaded with stuff and sauce to render mobile eating impossible or impractical. When we say "God bless America," this is what we mean.

This is the funniest thing I have seen in some time.

Something that's always bugged me about Final Fantasy (and Square Enix character design in general) is that the clothing feels like art pieces, not actual clothing. I just ignored it in the games I liked, but it was always there, like visual tinnitus.

As a weak defense (or not even), "big subreddits" always felt that way to me. They were the hub where you went to find the smaller, niche communities you really wanted to find. No one should reasonably expect deep takes on r/music. It's "too big".

FWIW, I'm one of those "cyberpunk junkies" that loves running the bottom side of the K. One of my favorite parts of PAXU is the 1000-2000 aisles, where the real indie passion projects lie. While the bigger names in the 6000-8000 blocks have big spreads and ceiling-hanging displays [...]

Those times when you're not sure if you have ADHD, or if modern technology has created a multi-pronged attack on attention by, like, when you sit at a computer and you have 3 programs open, one of which being a browser with multiple tabs. And several of these programs are designed to be addictive.

www.kickstarter.com/projects/gau... Part of me genuinely thinks that, as D&D continues to be "the" heroic fantasy standard, this game will become *the* horror standard. Because the horror is backed by the mechanics in ways no other system can, or has. Don't miss this.

"Vance" is a useful new verb in the English language, and one consistent with our Latinate heritage. Compare: ➡️ ADVANCE: To move something forward. ⬅️ VANCE: To cause a situation to decline or devolve. In a sentence: "Donald Trump's second term vanced the American economy."

With just the resources in the Brindlewood Bay book I ran a campaign that introduced the big bad in session one, grew her presence and backstory over the campaign, gave my players an NPC to love to hate, and payed it all off in the end in a way I've not done in years of running fantasy + scifi rpgs

It's an ugly truth of our hobby that "you cannot win D&D" is, in practice, not the mentality wargame-based tables often adopt. Often enough, in fact, that it poisons "the conversation" without a seriously hard framing and further table discussion about what "the point" of the game being played is.

It's the last day of the Public Access campaign, and we have just revealed the final Secret Stretch Goal, a solo journaling game called Public Access: Apartment 319! Read more here, and be sure to back before it's too late! www.kickstarter.com/projects/gau...

Kickstarter is really dropping the ball here. The last 48 hours are some of the most important in a drive. If for whatever reason you were interested in this game and haven't pledged, you still can!

The Public Access campaign is winding down. I'm revisiting some old draft material I did, maybe someday I'll spin this up into something.

Just a couple of days left to pledge on this bad boy. Those stretch goals are lookin gooood

So we've just learned that our @kickstarter.com campaign page has been frozen for the last two hours. Not sure if pledges are going through. No idea where we actually stand right now. Oh yeah, and it's the final weekend of the campaign. www.kickstarter.com/projects/gau...

Hi, it's me. I have shared a couple stories of running games to the response of "I see how you got there but that's not how it's..." I do not intentionally try to run things like that. I just somehow trust writers to know more than me so I go "I am the idiot. I will just do what it says."

Anne Bogart once asked, "When does a show begin?" A show begins long before the curtain rises. You're in the show when you put on your suit or dress and set your earrings. When you eat before. When you look for parking. For some, the show begins when you first buy your tickets online.

I'm always a tad leery of people who read an rpg and then try to set it in their town, saying "I don't know much about [the base setting]." You don't need to. I've never been to London, especially not in Victorian times. I still run The Between.

Realizing this XP question I drafted is just a gussied-up "Did you brood hotly?" Which is, tbf, precisely what I'm going for.

"Why don't Americans-" The ruling class of America has intentionally disempowered its citizens spread across 3,000+ miles of land and then funded the police force as an occupying army that happily murders anyone who opposes them and imprisons whoever is left as slave laborers. So phone calls it is

Been running in circles with this playbook I've been drafting, and today it struck me that I'm just writing "What if Dragon Slayer Ornstein was also The Mandalorian"

“I will NOT sacrifice the Oxford comma. We've made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They assimilate the em dash and we fall back. They capture ‘not just X but y’ and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!”

I was already not FF7 Remake's biggest fan, but boy did they do Cid dirty.

Someone in my life was talking about how they were excited about using AI to feed it images/footage/recordings of their dead father to have it generate videos of him. I remarked, "Kinda like a digital ghost." He got *mad*. Like I was suggesting this was an affront to all life. (Because it is.)

I think I'm an odd person in the ttrpg hobby. I'm very much a "storygamer" but I chafe at open-ended "rp scenes" with no mechanical weight behind them. Perhaps it's the 4 years of conservatory actor training but I get little joy out of "let's just talk to each other". (no shade to anyone who does)

Yes this, but it's true in creative arts as well.

Not even tech guys. We see this in art as well. So much of writing is "work" -- solving problems, linking plot beats, plugging plot holes, in a way that's satisfying both to writer and reader. An idea only gets you so far. The real work happens after.

Just a couple more hours to venture into the woods, where nothing bad will happen, I promise!! I wrote a nasty little adventure about an especially compelling earworm that I'm sure your party of treasure hunters will s̶u̶r̶v̶i̶v̶e̶ love www.kickstarter.com/projects/fir...