Stephen Dann

Cats. Space Australia Instagram Photos. A vertiable flotilla of small furry siege agents. Lego Serious Play stuff. Less than serious stuff. Playful stuff.

[stephendann]

Second Kibble Krew says INSIST.

Ask your local human for second kibble today.

[viralfrog]

[dragongirlbunny]

[probablybadrpgideas]

This dungeon has no snares, traps, blades, pits or poison fog, nothing of the sort.

There's just an un-skip-able fifteen second ad every other time you open a door.

­WotC would like to know your location

[stephendann]

After all, what is a mimic but a Limewire delivered LinkinParkmp3.exe?

[sexuallyfrustratedavocado]

everyone talks about how strong and great Aragorn was for refusing the ring when Frodo offered it to him as if this man has not spent his entire life dodging leadership and responsibilities like bullets in the matrix 🙄

[lesspopped]

[ok-fandom]

I woke up out of a dead sleep to make this and then immediately passed back out

[livelaughlacroix]

I raise u 

[awkwordalex]

Trainer Alex wants to battle!

[hirudo-verbana]

I add

[deebyfeeby]

please consider

[velvet-vagabond]

A new challenger enters the stage

[serperoir]

how about…

[duothelingo]

I present:

[annarcana]

[stephendann]

[just-another-cat-blog]

pride month!!!

[lemonsharks]

Is that a miette?

[jeanjauthor]

Pride for you!  Pride for a thousand years!!

[lost-and-cursed]

you COME OUT to miette? you come out to her as queer? oh! oh! pride for mother! pride for mother for One Thousand Years!!!!

[stephendann]

Hunter Planet (3rd Edition) Kickstarter

Hunter Planet 3rd Edition

The All Australian Roleplaying Game is back. Minimum rules, maximum enjoyment.

The best little Australian indie RPG is back for a third edition of chaos, mayhem and completely misunderstood encounters in RPG Australia.

I played this in v2 back in the 1980s, and it was a greatly needed comedy relief in a seas of 1980s grimdark. It's 2026, and this is a the fast place comedy palate cleanser of RPGs - fun, story driven, one-shot friendly, and all about trying to misunderstand your way into more chaos than a koala bears. Give it a goanna, and get behind the rebirth of a wonderful part of Australian RPG history and future.

Plus, it's a genuine family business - the Bruggeman family have been touring the playtests up and down the East Coast of Australia, and it's an RPG with the sons of the father well involved in the project.

And that's all the puns I can think of for the post

[captainragtag]

Can we include darebee.com with ao3 and wikipedia on our list of really good nonprofits with excellent services that we stan?

It's a free, no sign-up, no ads fitness resource created by professionals who view this as activism (fitness should be accessible to everyone), and it's very thoughtful and thorough.

Features I really like:

- all instructions for workout routines are diagrammed on single pages with a clean, easy to read layout

- there's 30 or 60 day programs you can follow if you, like me, don't know what to do. they take you through a rotation of workouts so you're working different muscle groups on different day for a specific purpose

- there's so much variety and there's a filter so you can find the level and your goals and type of workout you wanna do

- you don't need any equipment

- some of the programs are RPGs or adventure stories! How's that for motivation. There's also badges and achievements or something but I haven't looked that closely at how that works yet

- they're nerds. they name workouts after D&D classes. There's a Lannistrr workout, a batcave workout, a witcher workout

- I've only scratched the surface

I'm doing this really easy one to start out

Darebee, darebee, fitness, visual workouts, workouts, fitness challenges, fitness motivation, training tips, recipes, nutrition

[bisexualshakespeare]

If you don't understand from the picture they have an Exercise Library playlist in YouTube so you can see what all the moves look like in motion!

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQSMS0J6JbrKdSOSbyJXaQ_zN_HSSp7zZ

Exercise Library - YouTube

[prokopetz]

Why weren't TTRPGs popularized centuries before video games? Large scale printing for complex rulebooks needed the printing press, but even then, it wouldn't justify taking off as late as the second half of the 20th century

A lot of it boils down to dumb luck. Hobbies resembling modern tabletop RPGs have come and gone before, but none of the ones that came before Dungeons & Dragons ever managed to blow up into a broader cultural phenomenon.

For example, tabletop American baseball simulators that use rules tech very similar to that of modern indie tabletop RPGs – complete with d66 rolls and Big Stupid Tables full of increasingly improbable random events – have been around since the 1880s, and by the mid 20th Century, dedicated players were using them to simulate entire virtual leagues in a way that would be instantly recognisable to modern indie RPG fans as a form of solo journalling RPG. Robert Coover's 1968 novel, The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop., dramatises the hobby in a way that strikingly pre-figures the later Satanic Panic's fearmongering about D&D players becoming so immersed in the game that they lose touch with reality – pre-dating D&D itself by over five years.

It never went anywhere from there. Such games still exist, but the hobby remains insular to this day; it just never stumbled into the right combination of time and place to grow beyond its roots. And it's not even the first time a niche hobby had approached something like modern tabletop RPGs and just never taken that final step. We can speculate about the whys and wherefores, but ultimately, a lot of it – ironically, given the subject matter – boils down to a cosmic roll of the dice.

(One of my favourite counterfactuals is speculating what the modern tabletop roleplaying hobby would look like in a world where it kicked off half a century early by growing out of tabletop American baseball simulators in the 1920s rather than historical wargames in the 1970s. Imagine!)

[passerkirbius]

A curious question: do you think there's anything in the demographic argument? That the reason TTRPGs broke through with D&D was because the Baby Boomersin thr US were the youth demographic, and that demographic just happened to get big enough to move from niche to industry?

Although now I think about it, maybe it's just that D&D came out during the hegemonic reign of the US? I mean, it's all almost certainly still "luck", but I am curious if you have any thoughts on what that luck actually represented...

[stephendann]

I'm going to say that "luck" here is the confluence of photocopiers, desktop publishing and mass access to cheap printer toner.

One thing I feel we really overlook in the TTRPG timeline is the ability of the players to have their own resources - a photocopy of a character sheet makes a difference to the player. Yes, mass production for books and source materials and manuals existed way earlier in the game, but that jump from mimeograph, typing on carbon paper, to pressing a page on a glass and getting non-destructive copies changed things in the 1980s

Then Aldus PageMaker launches in 1985, and suddenly there's a narrow window renovated into a hallway to self publishing, and personal replication of the materials

Plug in the widespread adoption of home printers and hey, it the things you need for a homebrew to go from Prohibitively Expensive into Potential Feasible, and that's my suggestion for where the Luck dice landed for the TTRPG boom

[datasoong47]

Not so sure about that. Hand-writing out a character sheet, while a bit more time-consuming than photocopying, wouldn't be that hard. Erasers might be an issue, though. It would be more tedious to keep track of changing stats without an eraser (though in principle some kind of tokens might work - imagine representing hit points with a pile of metal tokens that you add or remove from)

[stephendann]

I mean, I started my first games with a character sheet in an exercise book, but as far as a scale difference maker goes - the photocopier is unparalleled for making access to small run productions, and it's the most visible difference in the timelines for why something that should, if it was supported effectively by hand annotation, have kicked off much earlier.

It's a bit like the spike in zine culture really finding a home with the photocopier, and then the desktop publisher to printer to photocopier pipeline enabling small mass production.

That's my theory on why it popped off despite the mass production capacity for the books pre-dating the era

[toskarin]

have you seen the lord of the rings movies? the practical effects look great, but there's also an amazing digital serkis

[stephendann]

Bandit J Rogers about to drop the album of their little cat career.

[mevil]

[stephendann]

Congrats, you've discovered the taskbar icon fish. Looks like you've got a task manager, file explorer, adobe reader, microsoft word and an VLC fish in there.

[prokopetz]

Why weren't TTRPGs popularized centuries before video games? Large scale printing for complex rulebooks needed the printing press, but even then, it wouldn't justify taking off as late as the second half of the 20th century

A lot of it boils down to dumb luck. Hobbies resembling modern tabletop RPGs have come and gone before, but none of the ones that came before Dungeons & Dragons ever managed to blow up into a broader cultural phenomenon.

For example, tabletop American baseball simulators that use rules tech very similar to that of modern indie tabletop RPGs – complete with d66 rolls and Big Stupid Tables full of increasingly improbable random events – have been around since the 1880s, and by the mid 20th Century, dedicated players were using them to simulate entire virtual leagues in a way that would be instantly recognisable to modern indie RPG fans as a form of solo journalling RPG. Robert Coover's 1968 novel, The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop., dramatises the hobby in a way that strikingly pre-figures the later Satanic Panic's fearmongering about D&D players becoming so immersed in the game that they lose touch with reality – pre-dating D&D itself by over five years.

It never went anywhere from there. Such games still exist, but the hobby remains insular to this day; it just never stumbled into the right combination of time and place to grow beyond its roots. And it's not even the first time a niche hobby had approached something like modern tabletop RPGs and just never taken that final step. We can speculate about the whys and wherefores, but ultimately, a lot of it – ironically, given the subject matter – boils down to a cosmic roll of the dice.

(One of my favourite counterfactuals is speculating what the modern tabletop roleplaying hobby would look like in a world where it kicked off half a century early by growing out of tabletop American baseball simulators in the 1920s rather than historical wargames in the 1970s. Imagine!)

[passerkirbius]

A curious question: do you think there's anything in the demographic argument? That the reason TTRPGs broke through with D&D was because the Baby Boomersin thr US were the youth demographic, and that demographic just happened to get big enough to move from niche to industry?

Although now I think about it, maybe it's just that D&D came out during the hegemonic reign of the US? I mean, it's all almost certainly still "luck", but I am curious if you have any thoughts on what that luck actually represented...

[stephendann]

I'm going to say that "luck" here is the confluence of photocopiers, desktop publishing and mass access to cheap printer toner.

One thing I feel we really overlook in the TTRPG timeline is the ability of the players to have their own resources - a photocopy of a character sheet makes a difference to the player. Yes, mass production for books and source materials and manuals existed way earlier in the game, but that jump from mimeograph, typing on carbon paper, to pressing a page on a glass and getting non-destructive copies changed things in the 1980s

Then Aldus PageMaker launches in 1985, and suddenly there's a narrow window renovated into a hallway to self publishing, and personal replication of the materials

Plug in the widespread adoption of home printers and hey, it the things you need for a homebrew to go from Prohibitively Expensive into Potential Feasible, and that's my suggestion for where the Luck dice landed for the TTRPG boom

[thememedaddy]

[ithinkitstimeweflyback]

[stephendann]

But is it cash money of them?

[mechanomorphic]

queer muppet moments i would make happen if i was in charge of the muppets:

the electric mayhem (minus animal bcs hes their kid) arent a polycule, theyre monogamous. but specifically they break up and date each other one at a time. they have a chart.

animal is genderfluid. this is mentioned exactly once bcs kermit calls her he and she starts yelling "SHE/HER!" kermit corrects himself and the show goes on

rizzo made out with gonzo once but he still considers himself straight bcs gonzo is not a guy, he's a whatever. gonzo agrees with this

uncle deadly dated tim curry. it did not end well.

actual emotional scene of gonzo talking about how he feels abt gender. no jokes.

kermit: no matter what, gonzo is still gonzo, and we're always going to support gonzo no matter what gonzo decides- gonzo: kermit. i still use he/him

statler and waldorf wedding episode. theyre divorced by the next

beaker trying to ask bunsen out on a date. in the end it turns out bunsen thought they'd been dating for years.

miss piggy hanging out with drag queens

related, miss piggy starting to present butch and kermit being Really Into It. hes embarassed abt it

pepe begins a story with "when i was a little girl...."

janice decides to start using just she bcs "like, i could never be her"

rowlf mentions having a husband. even kermit is like "??? since when??!"

actually i change my mind. genderfluid animal is mentioned a second time when dr teeth is calling for instrument and mic checks, he turns to animal and yells "animal! pronoun check!" "HE/HIM" "alright!"

[irisbleufic]

Swedish Chef neopronouns: bork/bork/bork

[thisusernameisunique]

Dr. Teeth: mic check

Mike: here

Dr. Teeth: pronoun check

Animal holds up an auction paddle with their pronouns written on

Then everyone else raises their paddles