This is random TTRPG thoughts #77
It’s June. Wildfire smoke is setting off air quality alerts, Covid is still a thing, and the director of Homeland security has said the troops are in LA to “liberate it” from its elected officials. The general sucky-ness of the world is causing my brain to want to shut down, but the darn thing keeps booting back up. I blame the coffee. These are random TTRPG thoughts.
Shout Outs
Before we begin I want to shout out everyone who has liked, commented, and subscribed to content on this channel. It helps, a lot. If you’d consider doing those things for this video I would be most grateful.
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With that out of the way, let’s get to the randomness!
Thoughts
- Sometimes when a planned session falls through, there just isn’t enough energy to shift gears to something else. I know there are people who say “never cancel,” sometimes your mental health makes it necessary.
- It appears YouTube really likes videos entitled “My Favorite Game.” I’m glad folks are enjoying it!
- Over on my discord we had an interesting discussion on the concept of the number bloat that’s prone to occur in “roll high and add modifier” systems. I hadn’t realized how much I’d come to prefer games without the old school armor class concept until that moment. It’s nice to learn a bit about myself that I hadn’t realized.
- Kings are great for fantasy role playing games, or even in science-fiction RPGs, but we tossed a King out in the United States. It needs to be kept that way.
- I am amazed by the things people “know” about the history of the hobby which turn out to be either wrong or misunderstood. Reading The Elusive Shift has been a wild experience.
- I made my first character for Skrat’s NUTS. It’s for a weird west game and he’s a professional side-kick. I need to make sure he has a frying pan.
- I had to drop out of the Shadowdark game I’d signed up for at CRIT, but I picked up a Call of Cthulhu game and it’ll be the first time I’ve ever played it. So that’ll be fun. Check out CRIT!
- I have begun tweaking my Sentinel Comics RPG game at CRIT, which should be a blast. I’m going to try writing some more adventures for the system. This first one establishes some things which can be expanded upon and I’d like to explore the world a bit more.
- So you know all the arguments people have in the comments on social media, or through dual stitches on TikTok? The same arguments, involving the same personality types, have been going on since the 70’s. You could take fan-zine letters and drop quotes from them into modern social media, most people wouldn’t even notice. And if you include the same types of arguments involving miniature war games, they’ve been going on even longer. And I’m no uninvolved observer, either. I participate in these as well. We humans are strange.
- I’m going to be doing a lot of reading about gaming while I’m on sabbatical. I’ll be focusing on the hobby’s history, some design theory, and how TTRPGs are used in therapy. Why? Because I want to explore how TTRPGs can be used to help people recover a sense of agency when they’ve experienced it being taken away through events like a natural disaster, or the experience of abuse. Why do I think this would be helpful? Because in the game our actions matter. They don’t always succeed, but they matter. Sometimes, in real life, we need to reminded of that important truth. Our decisions matter.
