BESW

Thank you for looking!

@ThomasMarkov It's statistically likely, but I don't have a specific memory of it

(I just had several recommended to me and I wanted to toss them at an interested party if I could find them.)

Some years ago I had a friend who was interested in TRPGs about systems (plurality, multiplicity) but I can't remember who. Anybody still here: are you that person/do you remember who it was?

I'm thinking about things like when a character's not in control, give their player more control; don't try to use in-game solutions for table-level problems; ask players for help distributing the cognitive load

@KorvinStarmast Answers, or conversations in chat.

[wave] I'm putting together a compilation of my GMing tips and table culture recommendations. Anybody who's been around here long enough, is there advice I've given on the subject that stood out to you as worth memorializing?

sale: PAX AUS Sale: The Station by pidj. The Station is available to play at PAX Aus! As a result, I’ve put it on sale for 20%, for the week.

Crowdfunding: Gubat Banwa - Southeast Asian Fantasy Tactics RPG by Joaquin Saavedra. The War Drama Martial Arts Tactics RPG set in the Sword Isles: a Fantasy setting inspired by the refulgent stories of Southeast Asia.

Now I'm tempted to write up my 4e setting lore for the origin of the worm-faced brain-munchers.

@Drakethedragon When D&D says "average damage", that's technical jargon you can't really be expected to know automagically. The term means half the dice's value; for 1d8, that's 4. With a modifier of +3, that's 4+3=7, seven damage is the average amount of damage you'd deal with 1d8+3, so less important characters deal 7 damage without rolling the dice in order to speed up combat.

jam: Tabletop Game Tool Jam hosted by Hugh Lashbrooke. Submissions can be any kind of tool that tabletop game creators or people who run the games can use to make their work easier.

Bundle: The Analog Excellence Bundle hosted by Whimsy Machine with content from 50 creators. A bundle of ttrpg, comic, art, and writing projects, bringing together a diversity of the niche of itch.io.

Essay: "On Design; or, "Are Game Masters Game Designers?" by Jay Writes. A rambling on the nature of GMs and the interactions between rules and design

In other news, I'm running Lady Blackbird tomorrow for a group of friends whose experiences are mostly D&D-only or no-TRPG-at-all.

The farther back into the mists of time I go, the less relephant it feels to what even designers in the OSR like Siew, Nilsson/Nohr, or Capacle are doing right now.

As good as it can be to know the history of the hobby, I'm more interested in its current state and trajectory-- for me the history is just about understanding the context of the contemporary industry.

Yes, but my casual interest never extended to investing in it.

I didn't start until 3e, but the accounts of early history are fascinating--especially when they aren't just trying to beatify certain figures.

I keep remembering the reports that prior to D&D, the TRPG culture of that particular group was more zine-like. A folkart approach to sharing ideas and tools that got swept aside by Gygax & Friends' decision to take a shared creation and claim it for themselves in order to monetize it.

> imagine a world where, instead of following the example of wargames-in-an-envelope, the hobby had followed the path of DIY zine culture that sprung up at the same time: I imagine what we could have had, a history of disposable punk DIY aesthetics.

review: "I Read Fantastic Medieval Campaigns" on Playful Void. Fantastic Medieval Campaigns (hereafter FMC) is an effort to reorganise and clarify the original three books published published by Gary Gygax in ’74.

Crowdfunding: Two-Minute Warning by Cezar Capacle. A thrilling narrative card game that transports you to the heart-pounding final moments of a football championship. Designed for solo or group play, this unique experience takes less than an hour, allowing you to dive right into the action.

itch.io is having another creator’s day: itch gives its percentage of all sales to the creators

I would have been less surprised fifteen or even ten years ago, but a lot of companies are getting much better about working with Guam recently.

So I bought the stuff from B&H Photo instead. I cannot recommend B&H highly enough, they've been a delight to work with for longer than I've been alive.

And when they did get somebody who knew that, they were condescending about how I should've known that all along.

It took me three days on customer support before somebody at Apple admitted that the error message claiming my bank rejected the charge, was because they didn't have an error message for Apple's system refusing to process the charge for a physical purchase if the card's billing address is in a place they won't mail to, regardless of the shipping address for the purchase.

Thank you

Thanks. It was never a situation that was going to end happily, but it ended more mercifully than it could have. And I got to reconnect with some family and that I hope those bonds will stay strong.

(Which was especially nice since the actual experience of caregiving on the continent was rather horrific. Here we couldn't get what we needed but we had support from the doctors, the community, etc. There, you could get almost anything delivered to the house in a day or less but nobody actually helped you.)

@verbose Absolutely, yes. I spent this summer on the continent to help with a family health emergency, and friends I've known for a decade but never met in person were mailing me fancy Coping Tea or using their credit cards because some companies don't accept my billing address.

But then, I come from the era of AOL/LJ/phpBB/etc, when the online spaces where you found friends weren't trying to be the only place you'd need.

I used Discord to gather some of my friends from various other places into a personal server, and also found that it's a good place for certain kinds of conversation spaces that are bigger than intimate friends but shouldn't be carried out in public on social media

That makes sense

@verbose Every user used to get assigned a multi-digit code as their "real" name for purposes of adding friends, but they changed that earlier this year and I was able to snag just "besw" for my new name.

And my public-facing writing projects can be found on besw.itch.io (tabletop gaming projects) and Archive of Our Own (fanfiction, so far just for The Murderbot Diaries; includes some metatextual analysis)

@verbose I should be pretty easy to find on Discord with the new naming convention, if you're ever so inclined.

[wave] Thank you, and good wishes to you as well.

(To be clear, that's pushing against the systems, not the people)

I got tired of pushing, and went to find things that are shaped more amenably from the start.

@verbose It's not litse, it's just se. The arc of my nearly ten years of regular engagement with the Stack trended from excitement about its potential to disillusionment with the fundamental principles underlying its design, which no individual instance can fully overcome--only push against with constant effort.

I was functionally inactive on sffse even before I engaged with litse. My last vestige was rpgse, and for a while I was only in the chat room there regularly. I still peek in every now and then, but most of my activity is on Discord servers now, especially a couple of design/layout servers and a book-fandom server or two.

I wouldn't say litse itself was dissatisfying; the entire SE experience had been making me increasingly uneasy for a long time and litse helped me identify some of the concrete reasons, just by virtue of being such a deep and thorough dive into how an SE site functions.

[wave] The ping wouldn't have worked if I hadn't dipped my head in when I got the notification from that comment you left on my meta post.

I left lit.se before bailing on SE entirely, but working with lit.se's development was instrumental in helping me codify the general disatisfactions which eventually led me to leave SE as a whole.

I got notified about a comment on a meta post

Why go backward and not forward? There's a ton of modern systems which combine the tradition of GM-forward mechanics-behind improvisation with the interceding decades of design learning.