mostly abandoned, partially blog @jexjthomas - Tumblr Blog

Posts

Bump in the Dark: Revised Edition is now LIVE on Backerkit! Do you like spooky small town 90s vibes? Stories about community and chosen family? Beating the shit out of this week's bespoke monster that you helped breathe into existence? Well, now you can pre-order a cool deluxe hard cover with a ton of new material!

Revised edition of Bump in the Dark, the Forged in the Dark game of hunting monster and building community with your chosen family -- with n

#bump in the dark #indie ttrpg #ttrpg #ttrpgs #motw #fitd #forged in the dark #blades in the dark #Slugblaster #pbta #powered by the apocalypse #monster of the week #buffy the vampire slayer #buffy #supernatural #x files #twin peaks #external Containment bureau #redacted material

tartharyen

I Love Boosters (2026) dir. Boots Riley TEASER TRAILER | IN THEATERS MAY 22

heated-blanket

which expedition member are you?

dead

alive

half-dead

gruntled

disgruntled

alligator

sloshing into the aquifer

Voting ended onMay 28

tartharyen

I Love Boosters (2026) dir. Boots Riley TEASER TRAILER | IN THEATERS MAY 22

#it was so fucking good #best intro to dialectical materialism I've ever encountered

dimosar

YODA: Luke, when gone am I... the last of the Jedi will you be...except for Ahsoka Tano, Ezra Bridger, Cal Kestis, Cere Junda, Quinlan Vos,

LUKE: ...Who?

YODA: ...Gungi- the wookiee jedi kid,

LUKE: a Wookiee Jedi?? Master, isn't that a bit tireso-

YODA: NOT finished I was...Reva, some of the other Inquisitors I bet, Oppo Rancisis- the ugly-looking tree guy from Phantom Menace, he was, Luke. And Ka-Moon Kholi, Selrahc Elous, some guy named "Naq Med" if reading this right I am,

dimosar

LUKE: Cal...Kestis?? Mouthfeel on that one is a little off...

YODA: a double jump, he can do.

great-gatsby

every reread kills me a little bit more

great-gatsby

reread and enjoy <3

morganaspendragonss

will you guys cancel me if i say that queer tragedy has a place in the creative arts and shouldn’t immediately be dismissed as bury your gays

rubynye

adding @glorious-spoon 's astute tags:

#bury your gays and women in refrigerators and the black guy dies first are all about treating marginalized people like props#to further the story of the (white straight male) protagonist#that's not the same thing as a tragedy! some stories are tragedies! whose story has weight and meaning - that's the question

prokopetz

I've had a couple of people ask for a digestible version of the whole "the real problem with Dungeons & Dragons is false advertising, not anything that's present in its text" thing I keep alluding to, so here's the bullet point version of that argument:

Dungeons & Dragons is owned by Hasbro. Yes, the same Hasbro that owns Monopoly and My Little Pony.

Hasbro wants D&D to be the only tabletop RPG that anyone plays.

In order to accomplish this, Hasbro needs D&D to be a universal entry-level game.

D&D is not a universal entry-level game.

All game rules are opinionated about how the game ought to be played, and as tabletop RPGs go, D&D's rules are more opinionated than most. This is not a flaw, but it's not what Hasbro needs.

D&D is also on the high end of complexity as far as tabletop RPGs go, and it's complex in a way that strongly rewards system mastery, so it's pretty far from "entry level".

Hasbro could produce a version of D&D that's at the very least less opinionated and more entry-level than it presently is, but they don't want to, because they've determined that certain rules features which run counter to both of those goals are critical to D&D's brand identity.

They also don't want to produce multiple versions of D&D tailored for different audiences, because they want every single D&D group to be a potential purchaser of every single D&D product; they'd be effectively competing with themselves for their own customer base if the published game was actually modular in any meaningful way.

So how does Hasbro square that circle?

Simple: they lie. They insist that D&D is in fact a universal entry-level game in spite of all evidence to the contrary, and back their advertising up with sponsored thinkpieces and podcasts and such to "prove" it.

Further, they've spent decades fostering a culture of play which conceals the gap between the game they're advertising and the game they're selling by ascribing any appearance that D&D isn't a universal entry-level game to the incompetence or malice of individual GMs.

The game the rules want to produce disagrees with the game the group wants to play? Nonsense – even the rankest beginner should be able to produce any experience of play using any set of rules, and if your GM can't, they're a Bad GM.

The game is hard to learn? No, it isn't – your GM is merely gatekeeping you. This wouldn't be a problem with a Good GM.

The upshot is that the published rules are more or less irrelevant with respect to achieving the desired experience of play, because they're operating within a culture of play which dumps 100% of the work of making that desired experience of play happen on the GM.

Indeed, much of what modern D&D presents as GMing best practices are really methods of working around the fact that the rules you're using disagree with you about what kind of game you're playing.

(It's not a coincidence that D&D's entrenched culture of play also insists that it's normal for GMs to be miserably overworked and treats GM burnout as a big funny joke, then turns around and loudly wonders why there's a constant GM shortage.)

The trick is, because you're still at least notionally using the rules of D&D, the fruits of all that GM labour are perceived as the product of "playing D&D", not of the GM's hard work.

In essence, Hasbro's business model for Dungeons & Dragons is selling you your own GM's labour with a D&D sticker on it.

It's a very neat trick, if you can pull it off.

Now, at this point some readers may be asking: well, sure, but not all GMs are doormats. What about "killer" GMs who do gatekeep and railroad their players and otherwise act like complete tyrants? I hear horror stories about them all the time.

That's the second trick: these are not opposites. The GM as human Xbox and the GM as tyrant of the table both represent the GM doing all the actual work of making the game happen. The latter isn't the outcome that Hasbro wants, but it's a logical conclusion of the position the want the GM to be in.

ftmtftm

One day when I'm not still struggling with the dissociation and burnout caused by the fascist invasion of the city I live in at the hands of my federal government, I will write about how the fact that Judith Butler is hated by the right wing, radfems + TERFs, and gender conforming binary trans people (especially transmeds) actually makes complete sense because they're all demographics of people with their own intense attachments to/investments in the sex and gender binary and Butler's work asks us to question, divest, and detach from that very system.

jinnietootsit

comiques

Moonlit

prokopetz

I don't disagree with the observation that a lot of folks in tabletop roleplaying spaces don't believe that game design is real (i.e., in the sense that they believe any GM should be able to achieve any experience of play using any system, and refuse to recognise that rules are opinionated about what sort of games they want to produce), but I feel like putting that at the forefront is confusing the symptom for the disease. A lot of folks in tabletop roleplaying spaces don't believe game design is real because they don't believe that games are real.

I've talked in the past about how Hasbro's efforts to deceptively market Dungeons & Dragons as universal entry-level game have fostered a culture of play in which any appearance that D&D isn't a universal entry-level game is regarded as evidence that you have a "bad GM", and how, in order to avoid being a "bad GM", it's necessary to treat it as a normal part of the GM's responsibilities to constantly monitor the outputs of the rules and quickly paper over any gaps between the game the rules want to produce and the game the group wants to play, like a cartoon train conductor frantically constructing the very tracks along which the train they're conducting is riding.

The trouble is that most players aren't stupid, and readily see through the act. They (correctly!) observe that the particulars of the rules don't actually seem to matter all that much, because most of the desired experience of play is the product of the GM's constant interventions, rather than the product of interpreting the outputs of the rules – but instead of identifying this as a problem, they conclude (again, quite reasonably, as they've probably never seen it done differently) that this is what tabletop roleplaying is. The GM merely pretends to be moderating a game; in truth, they're a pantomime-leader whose job is to maintain the illusion that we're playing a game with rules, when in fact what we're really doing is guided improv theatre.

And of course there's nothing wrong with guided improv theatre – it's a fine pastime, and one I've enjoyed myself on many occasions. However, it does put folks who really do want to play a game in a bind, because now there's this insurmountable communication barrier. You can say "I want to play a game, and these are the rules of that game", and receive what seems to be enthusiastic agreement with that premise; however, a significant portion of the people expressing that agreement think they're participating in a bit of kayfabe, like very dedicated professional wrestlers who stay in character even outside the ring.

Critically, nobody is necessarily acting in bad faith in this equation. The folks who don't bother to learn the rules because they think games aren't real mostly aren't fucking with you on purpose; they honestly thought they were yes-anding your improv prompt by pretending to care about the mechanics of play, and when they discover that you really do expect them to do all that fiddly dice math, from their perspective it genuinely looks like you were the one misleading them. It's just a fucked up culture of play garbling all the signals in both directions.

(Note that, while I've identified Hasbro's deceptive marketing as the ultimate source of this culture of play, indie RPGs are hardly innocent of perpetuating it. You only need cast a critical eye on the "Rule Zero" sections of many popular indie games to notice that their authors are all in on the idea that games aren't real!)

j-tee

Dragon these………

freesiadotcom

having 40 minutes to leave the house is fked because 40 minutes is basically 30 minutes and 30 minutes is basically 20 minutes and 20 minutes is basically fifteen seconds. but 50 minutes? 50 minutes is an hour, and an hour? ooobh thats plany off time

tinyghosts

“I want you to do this with me for one month. One month. Write 10 observations a week and by the end of four weeks, you will have an answer. Because when someone writes about the rustic gutter and the water pouring through it onto the muddy grass, the real pours into the room. And it’s thrilling. We’re all enlivened by it. We don’t have to find more than the rustic gutter and the muddy grass and the pouring cold water.”

— Marie Howe, Boston University’s 2016 Theopoetics Conference (via mothersofmyheart)

artemis-howl

Marie Howe:

I ask my students every week to write 10 observations of the actual world. It’s very hard for them.

Ms. Tippett:

Really?

Ms. Howe:

They really find it hard.

Ms. Tippett:

What do you mean? What is the assignment? 10 observations of their actual world?

Ms. Howe:

Just tell me what you saw this morning like in two lines. I saw a water glass on a brown tablecloth, and the light came through it in three places. No metaphor. And to resist metaphor is very difficult because you have to actually endure the thing itself, which hurts us for some reason.

Ms. Tippett:

It does.

Ms. Howe:

It hurts us.

Ms. Tippett:

You naming something.

Ms. Howe:

We want to say, “It was like this; it was like that.” We want to look away. And to be with a glass of water or to be with anything — and then they say, “Well, there’s nothing important enough.” And that’s whole thing. It’s the point.

Ms. Howe:

It’s the this, right?

Ms. Howe:

Right, the this, whatever. And then they say, “Oh, I saw a lot of people who really want” — and, “No, no, no. No abstractions, no interpretations.” But then this amazing thing happens, Krista. The fourth week or so, they come in and clinkety, clank, clank, clank, onto the table pours all this stuff. And it so thrilling. I mean, it is thrilling. Everybody can feel it. Everyone is just like, “Wow.” The slice of apple, and then that gleam of the knife, and the sound of the trashcan closing, and the maple tree outside, and the blue jay. I mean, it almost comes clanking into the room. And it’s just amazing.

Ms. Tippett:

In some basic level, what they’ve done is just engage with their senses.

Ms. Howe:

Yeah, and have been present out of their minds and just noticing what’s around them, which is — we don’t do. And again, not to compare it to anything. They’re not allowed. And that’s very hard for them. And then on the fifth or sixth week, I say, “OK, use metaphors.” And they don’t want to. They don’t know how. They’re like, “Why would I? Why would I compare that to anything when it’s itself?” Exactly. Good question.

So then you think, why the necessity of a metaphor? Why do you have to use a metaphor now? Not just to do it to avoid it, but to do it to make it more there. And it’s very interesting.