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Monterey Bay Aquarium
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JBB: An Artblog!
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@prokopetz
Finally creating a pinned post of my games. I’ve included all titles I’ve been involved with in some capacity, not just ones where I’m the author; when I’m not the author, I’ll note my role in (parentheses).
This post will be updated over time to reflect changes in the status of these projects, so if you’re looking at a reblog, feel free to click through to the original and see if it differs.
Last updated: 2025-11-06
Predictions for Dungeons & Dragons under Hasbro's management in the coming years:
Uma Musume style horsegirls introduced to the Forgotten Realms; setting's lore revised so that they've always been there.
Advancement rules now stipulate per-session XP bonus based on lifetime D&D Beyond purchase history.
Compendium of exclusive feat trees for specific gender and sexual identities. Bisexuality receives no feats of its own, being mechanically implemented as "half gay"; the resulting synergies are disgusting.
Editorial error in revised Dungeon Master's Guide accidentally refers to Dungeon Masters as Hasbro's employees.
"Noble savage" coding of barbarian class walked back, refocused on European folkloric touchstones such as the Ulster Cycle; all barbarian characters become Irish stereotypes.
AI-based DM service trained exclusively on work of Ed Greenwood launched; withdrawn a week later citing "guiderail issues".
Expanded discussion of navigating player expectations frames "not showing up at all" as a valid playstyle.
Dragon-blooded sorcerer subclass revised to state that one of the character's ancestors was "very good friends" with a dragon.
Didn't that last one actually get implemented into canon?
Hasbro has indeed spent the last several years pushing back against dragonfucking jokes so hard that they've gone as far as to revise some of the setting lore to imply that dragons don't even fuck each other, but they haven't yet had the guts to pull the trigger on taking the option of literal dragon ancestry off the table for sorcerers.
(The 5.5E writeup for dragon-blooded sorcerers does list "making a bargain" with a dragon above the actual-ancestry option, though, which is funny as hell. Yeah, I'll bet it was a mutually beneficial exchange!)
what would a ttrpg that prioritizes roleplay and actually functions as such look like? i've played a few that claim to be "rp forward" and every time the mechanics meant to facilitate roleplay ended up impeding it - and meanwhile i've had perfectly rewarding rp experiences in crunchier systems with no mechanical social encounter support at all. is there really a way to build rp into a system that works, or is it just a unicorn idea?
"Proiritising roleplaying" doesn't mean anything – it's a piece of vacuous marketing text targeted at people who've constructed their identity politics upon arguing about the correct way to pretend to be an elf.
The basic problem is that the term "roleplaying" is, itself, not well defined; in practice, it means whatever the person trying to sell you something wants it to mean. Here, for example, by invoking the presence or absence of "mechanical social encounter support" as the distinguishing feature of self-styled "RP forward" systems, you seem to be implicitly defining "roleplaying" to mean "set-piece encounters in which a player character attempts to persuade an NPC to do something for them without resorting to violence". Is this justified? Is playing out the process of hitting each other with sticks not "roleplaying"? Why not?
What most people mean when they toss the term "roleplaying" around in the context of tabletop games is something in the vicinity of "roleplaying is when we do things I'm interested in doing, and not-roleplaying is when we do things I'm not interested in doing". As all game rules are unavoidably opinionated about what player characters ought to spend their time doing – indeed, arguably this is the only thing that rules can meaningfully express opinions about! – the question of "does this system 'prioritise roleplaying'?" is typically reducible to "does this system agree with me about what kind of game I'm playing?". Games are then sorted into "priorities roleplaying" and "does not prioritise roleplaying" based on which side of the answer to that question they fall on for the person doing the sorting.
This is the ultimate root of a lot of this "the best sessions I ever had never touched the rules at all" stuff. For a variety of reasons, many people have genuinely never experienced playing a tabletop RPG whose rules agree with them about what sort of experience of play they ought to be having, and in some cases they can't even imagine what that would look like. If you and the system you're using disagree so badly about what kind of game you're playing that "engaging with the rules" and "engaging with my desired experience of play" are mutually exclusive activities, it's not surprising that ignoring the rules entirely would be your best play.
In this light, your question of "what would a system that really prioritises roleplaying look like?" translates to "what would a system that actually agrees with me about what kind of game I'm playing look like?", and that's not a question I can answer unless you're willing and able to get a lot more rigorous about what you mean when you say "roleplaying".
Here, for example, by invoking the presence or absence of "mechanical social encounter support" as the distinguishing feature of self-styled "RP forward" systems, you seem to be implicitly defining "roleplaying" to mean "set-piece encounters in which a player character attempts to persuade an NPC to do something for them without resorting to violence".
well, no, i was actually thinking about scenarios like navigating a ball/gala type event and exploring the plot through verbal conversation, but i suppose i didn't say that, so fine, egg on my face
i ask this because i've been thinking a lot about why i keep bouncing off games like Blades in the Dark and Monster of the Week, both of which like to bill themselves as "rp forward". there's a lot of tools and toys to play with in terms of social encounters for both of those games, to be applied in heist and monster mystery situations, respectively, so i think we can safely say that we're aware of what the rules want to be doing in this instance, and are broadly in agreement with them.
but in practice, i often forget that i even have those tools, or the conversation regularly grinds to a halt while people review their abilities lists, and it's just.... weirdly exhausting. and i keep thinking that surely there must be a better way, but i'm not a game designer, so fuck me if i know what that better way might look like. hence, asking an expert.
i suppose we do need more precise terminology, because yeah "roleplaying" is technically applicable to any aspect of game engagement you can think of. "navigating social situations" is slightly narrower, but maybe just "having a conversation" is what we're after. and maybe part of the problem is that most people are already halfway proficient at having a conversation? in ways that we're not proficient at the aforementioned hitting each other with sticks. so we can just Do It without needing to abstract parts of the process into dice rolls and hit points, because we can just observe what the other guy says and then decide how our character feels about it and how they want to respond.
so is the answer to this just "roleplay is a fake category, and none of it matters"? surely that can't be it. surely someone must know what they're doing here, and can come up with a framework to gamify Having A Conversation in a functional and satisfying way.
There are a couple of big issues here:
You've settled on defining "roleplaying [mechanics]" as "gamifying having a conversation". What does it mean to gamify having a conversation? In what way, and to what purpose? My previously proposed summary of "[having rules for] set-piece encounters in which a player character attempts to persuade an NPC to do something for them without resorting to violence" is one way of gamifying having a conversation, but you've said that's not what you mean by that; so, what do you mean?
Is "gamifying having a conversation" really the only context in which your games grind to a halt because nobody's bothered to learn what's on their own character sheets and they need to pause to refresh themselves? Or does that happen all the time, and you're simply more tolerant of it in "hitting each other with sticks" contexts than otherwise?
Every time I shitpost about Hasbro's mismanagement of Dungeons & Dragons as a franchise I get people coming out of the woodwork to demonstrate that they conceive of all criticism of the corporatisation of the tabletop roleplaying hobby as an extension of being "anti-5E".
Cross-breeding mechsplo with Power Rangers style combiners and giving each team member a specific use/degradation kink based on which particular part of the combined robot's body their mech becomes.
Ok ha ha yeah legs/feet ha ha head ha ha torso WHO IS GETTING SEXUAL ABOUT SPECIFICALLY ONLY THEIR LEFT ARM??
There are a couple of perspectives we can come at this question from:
It's not necessarily getting kinky about being an arm. Use kink is, broadly speaking, a subgenre of objectification kink which explores the intersection of function and form. What is the "purpose" of an arm? What would it mean to be used in the manner of one?
The lesbian hand fetishists would like a word.
The left arm holds the shield, traditionally. This has very clean mapping onto self destructive and submissive kinks- the shield serves and earns honor by being hit.
Cross-breeding mechsplo with Power Rangers style combiners and giving each team member a specific use/degradation kink based on which particular part of the combined robot's body their mech becomes.
Ok ha ha yeah legs/feet ha ha head ha ha torso WHO IS GETTING SEXUAL ABOUT SPECIFICALLY ONLY THEIR LEFT ARM??
There are a couple of perspectives we can come at this question from:
It's not necessarily getting kinky about being an arm. Use kink is, broadly speaking, a subgenre of objectification kink which explores the intersection of function and form. What is the "purpose" of an arm? What would it mean to be used in the manner of one?
The lesbian hand fetishists would like a word.
what would a ttrpg that prioritizes roleplay and actually functions as such look like? i've played a few that claim to be "rp forward" and every time the mechanics meant to facilitate roleplay ended up impeding it - and meanwhile i've had perfectly rewarding rp experiences in crunchier systems with no mechanical social encounter support at all. is there really a way to build rp into a system that works, or is it just a unicorn idea?
"Proiritising roleplaying" doesn't mean anything – it's a piece of vacuous marketing text targeted at people who've constructed their identity politics upon arguing about the correct way to pretend to be an elf.
The basic problem is that the term "roleplaying" is, itself, not well defined; in practice, it means whatever the person trying to sell you something wants it to mean. Here, for example, by invoking the presence or absence of "mechanical social encounter support" as the distinguishing feature of self-styled "RP forward" systems, you seem to be implicitly defining "roleplaying" to mean "set-piece encounters in which a player character attempts to persuade an NPC to do something for them without resorting to violence". Is this justified? Is playing out the process of hitting each other with sticks not "roleplaying"? Why not?
What most people mean when they toss the term "roleplaying" around in the context of tabletop games is something in the vicinity of "roleplaying is when we do things I'm interested in doing, and not-roleplaying is when we do things I'm not interested in doing". As all game rules are unavoidably opinionated about what player characters ought to spend their time doing – indeed, arguably this is the only thing that rules can meaningfully express opinions about! – the question of "does this system 'prioritise roleplaying'?" is typically reducible to "does this system agree with me about what kind of game I'm playing?". Games are then sorted into "priorities roleplaying" and "does not prioritise roleplaying" based on which side of the answer to that question they fall on for the person doing the sorting.
This is the ultimate root of a lot of this "the best sessions I ever had never touched the rules at all" stuff. For a variety of reasons, many people have genuinely never experienced playing a tabletop RPG whose rules agree with them about what sort of experience of play they ought to be having, and in some cases they can't even imagine what that would look like. If you and the system you're using disagree so badly about what kind of game you're playing that "engaging with the rules" and "engaging with my desired experience of play" are mutually exclusive activities, it's not surprising that ignoring the rules entirely would be your best play.
In this light, your question of "what would a system that really prioritises roleplaying look like?" translates to "what would a system that actually agrees with me about what kind of game I'm playing look like?", and that's not a question I can answer unless you're willing and able to get a lot more rigorous about what you mean when you say "roleplaying".
Predictions for Dungeons & Dragons under Hasbro's management in the coming years:
Uma Musume style horsegirls introduced to the Forgotten Realms; setting's lore revised so that they've always been there.
Advancement rules now stipulate per-session XP bonus based on lifetime D&D Beyond purchase history.
Compendium of exclusive feat trees for specific gender and sexual identities. Bisexuality receives no feats of its own, being mechanically implemented as "half gay"; the resulting synergies are disgusting.
Editorial error in revised Dungeon Master's Guide accidentally refers to Dungeon Masters as Hasbro's employees.
"Noble savage" coding of barbarian class walked back, refocused on European folkloric touchstones such as the Ulster Cycle; all barbarian characters become Irish stereotypes.
AI-based DM service trained exclusively on work of Ed Greenwood launched; withdrawn a week later citing "guiderail issues".
Expanded discussion of navigating player expectations frames "not showing up at all" as a valid playstyle.
Dragon-blooded sorcerer subclass revised to state that one of the character's ancestors was "very good friends" with a dragon.
Cross-breeding mechsplo with Power Rangers style combiners and giving each team member a specific use/degradation kink based on which particular part of the combined robot's body their mech becomes.
I feel like some porn artists get so focused on making their OCs Cool™ that they forget to make them look like they're enjoying themselves. It's tough to get enthused about a twelve-inch cock busting a load the size of an American movie theatre soft drink when its owner's o-face looks like it was designed by DreamWorks.
I love it when you can look an an artist's OCs and immediately know exactly which localised Japanese RPG about hitting dragons with sticks they used to design them.
Folks in the notes are taking about taking visual inspiration from well-known JRPG character artists. I'm talking about when you can tell which specific version of Monster Hunter the OC in question used to live in.
The purpose of Wizard Garb is a sort of combined aposematism and Müllerian mimicry with respect to other magical critters. Spell selection varies wildly, so not every wizard is an immediate threat, but how keen would you be to snack on something when there's a one in twenty chance it knows how to shoot lightning out of its ass?
A problem with the whole Important Queer Media™ discourse is that a lot of folks don't seem to be able to parse "Important" as anything other than a moral judgment, and it's really not. Art is a dialogue. All works are in conversation with other works, and sometimes, works that have merit are deeply in conversation with works that suck. Acting like we can't talk about the latter at all is essentially demanding that we imagine an alternative universe in which those works weren't part of the conversation, yet somehow we ended up in the same place – and while alt-history may be a fun intellectual exercise, it's not a great critical lens.
Game which initially appears to be a linear puzzle-platformer in which each level contains a series of "permanent" upgrades that only work in the level in which they're obtained, except halfway through the game you gain access to a mechanism for altering which level a given screen counts as being part of, and surprise – it's a metroidvania after all.
Look, it's very simple: deviation from the norm is always bad, unless I'm the one doing the deviating, in which case I'm a brave iconoclast and it's the Masses who are wrong.
There's a thing in Classics studies where you'll read surviving descriptions of Ancient Greek automata which attribute all manner of near-lifelike behaviour to them – then you look at the reconstructed plans for the automaton in question, and it's a device with roughly the sophistication of a wind-up mouse.
The broad consensus seems to be that the authors of such descriptions are exaggerating for clout. For my part, I look at all the people in the year 2026 who've managed to genuinely convince themselves that LLMs are not only sapient, but smarter than they are, and I think: hmm.
Look, I get what you're saying, but sometimes you've gotta reach for the low-hanging fruit. Let's get you a proper meal, refill your meds, and unfuck your living space as best we're able; if after that you still want cute girls to kill you with axes, you'll be in a much better physical and mental place to pursue that goal.
