10 years is a fantastic run! Hoping the reflections are full of joy.

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".

Sure, the correct-sounding speculators were always there, but usually an actual expert would pop in eventually.

Now most of them can't even comment on subreddits in their space because they have to be an "active member". When they're out there doing their thing, not checking Reddit 24/7.

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.

Lowkey, I don't think they want designers there, period. I keep using r/music as an allegory (because it's just easy). They don't care about music makers in that subreddit. It's a place of music enjoyers. Music makers in that space would spoil their vibe.

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.

That said, a spade is a spade, a cesspit is a cesspit, and yeah, r/rpg is a suburb. The heydey for reddit even when it worked well ended around the API sell and their push to new.reddit.

I lurk on my local subreddit and have a few I follow to look at art. But I don't touch my hobby spaces there.

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".

Paizo coming out with a "rules-lite" game, like we're just slapping that moniker on anything, a la grocery stores and "organic", aren't we?

"Why yes, our ttrpg is made with a grass-fed, free range dice system."

One of my quiet points of pride, dumb as it sounds, is that I backed a KS for a cool experimental game where the DTRPG version isn't the final one. And sure, the dev ghosted, but it makes the few people who have played the game...idk, feels like we're in a cult?

But like a fun one.

It appeals to something deep in me to be in the Kowloon Walled City of indie game land, turning sideways to avoid shoulder checks while a wild-eyed guy thrusts a zine in my direction like "Hey kid, wanna play a game? I wrote this in 48 hours while in a COVID fever dream. You could kill God."

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 [...]

Notably, that guy didn't buy anything. That was the end of the exchange. He didn't even look any books. Just walked on.

IMO, the Traveller 5E campaign is "brilliant" (for the reasons Jason says). It's an art piece and status symbol masquerading as a TTRPG.

I was at PAXU a couple years back, at the Studio 2 booth where they had the new edition. By coincidence, a guy happened to be passing by and, with a big grin, asked the sales rep "Can you still die in character creation?" "YEP!"

No one says anything else about that game. But they love it.

I'll know something's up when the Gauntlet produces a game that's "5E compatible" and "Ghibli-inspired."

But then again, if you wanna print money...

No. It's marketing to people who played Traveller back in the day and saying, "Hey, remember the fun times you had?"

I joked to someone when I saw the campaign that "No one's actually buying this to play it. It's a $400 shelf-ornament reminder of the fun they had 30ish years ago."

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.

If you've ever said "ttrpgs can't do horror", you owe it to yourself to look at the free preview at least.

Public Access Analog Horror Mystery TTRPG From the creator of Brindlewood Bay and The Between, Public Access is a roleplaying game inspired by analog and found footage horror!

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."

(to be abundantly clear, because of the convo I jumped off of: the GM and the text made the right calls here; but the player was used to rpgs as win/lose rather than story engines)

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

I *do* vividly remember a one-shot of Band of Blades at PAX where a poor roll led to some awesome drama. But the player could not get over the idea that he made a bad decision, and that the story going dramatic was a failure of him as a person.

Bro, who broke you.

I don't think I'm making this up, but I have a vague memory of a game designer saying "misses should be bad! You want players to feel bad!"

Because a math rock came up a low number? Get out of here.

It is a challenge to game designers to make "misses" as fun as successes.

Side Note: This is why I hate "Be a fan of the player characters" with zero further elaboration. Or one sentence, often a variation on "this doesn't mean let them win but give them challenges!"

Bro why are we here.

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.

Update 22: Secret Stretch Goal #3: Solo Journaling Game! · Public Access Analog Horror Mystery TTRPG Hello! Yesterday's Kickstarter meltdown seems to have resolved itself, and we have unlocked Secret Stretch Goal #2, Odyssey Tapes: Journeywoman Cycle! And so with that, here on the final day of the ca...

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...