Indie TTRPG designer: Follow the Bones, Brave Spartan, Last Dispatch, What Fiend Stalks the Night? Talks often about game design, hobbyist community, and the philosophy of play. Boosts genre art for inspiration, but only if it has alt text.
Another way to look at that, using their own terms, is that D&D makes a game of combat and pushes social interactions off onto make-believe. Which is fine—that, too, is a design choice—but it's a distinction presented to people who are ostensibly interested in playing a game, interested in playing within a cage.
I don't really agree with the perception that Powered by the Apocalypse-type games are particularly good at genre emulation. I don't even necessarily think Apocalypse World is a particularly focused example of the post-apocalyptic genre, and to the extent that Dungeon World is more faithful to its genre, that strikes me as a liability rather than as a strength. The #PbtA games I like best tend to be idiosyncratic, if not downright bespoke.
@Da_Gut@masukomi It started with two moves on Kickstarter's part a few years ago. The first was announcing that they were planning to move the service to a blockchain infrastructure. The second was that they weren't doing ZineQuest, which led to a number of people in the TTRPG scene organizing Zine Month to make up for the loss. Crowdfundr, Gamefound and Backerkit all had partial infrastructure in place, but capitalized on the backlash to boost their profiles.
@seanbala@fediversereport@theverge@davidpierce I think the way the word "app" gets thrown around in there is potentially confusing, but I do like that it works on explaining the fediverse as a whole before it brings Mastodon into the mix.
@masukomi I haven't played it, and it's marketed as an "adventure game," but Earthborne Rangers looks like it fits the bill: https://earthbornegames.com/
@seedling Same. I think the really broad hashtags are fine, and even useful in some ways (like if you want to mute a subject), but for finding the right audience, it's probably best to pair them with other, narrower tags, like ttrpg + nsr + IntoTheOdd + GMAdvice.
For, ah, y'know… no particular reason—just a propos of nothing really—I've been thinking about how there was never really any consensus on what the R in OSR stood for, but the OS was definitely, definitely "Old School," and that's what brought all the boys to the yard anyway, whether because old school conjured up memories of how they played as kids, or ideas of an imagined past when the hobby belonged to People Like Us, and the imprecision of that term ended up knitting those groups together.
Assuming bad faith on Alexander's part is probably unnecessary, but this article sows enough doubt that I'll be sticking with the term Jaquaysing until someone demonstrates to me that she actually requested that he take her name out altogether: https://diyanddragons.blogspot.com/2024/01/xandering-is-slandering.html
The strongest argument for bad faith, I'd say, is that Alexander is now asking people to update their sites to read "Xandering" after leaving Jaquaysing misspelled for more than 13 years. But bad faith is a slippery concept to hang an argument on. The stronger case here, I'd say, is that Jennell Jaquays public statements all seem to indicate that she just wanted the S in the name, and if she changed her mind about that in discussions with Alexander, I'd like to see proof.
This whole thing is made more difficult by a pretty fundamental difference of opinion over the significance of the original post. Alexander studied Jacquays' dungeons and described some features that made them exemplary. Then he outlined a series of manipulations, based on those features, that GMs could apply to published dungeons to make them better. That, it seems, is what's important to him about the article. But AFAICT, that's not what most others (myself included) find valuable about it!
For me (and, I assume, for others) "Jaquaying the Dungeon" [sic] was significant mostly because it brought attention to some of what made Jaquays' design work special. Until I re-read the original articles a few days ago, I had misremembered "Jaquaying" as referring to a method of designing dungeons from the ground up, not that of modifying published dungeons to make them more Jaquaysian. If that's all Alexander wants credit for, then I guess he can have it. But still…
The original name was almost beautiful. It was a (botched) tribute to a designer whose work Alexander obviously admired. It added to the lexicon a term that actively worked against Jaquays potential erasure from our collective memory. Any change beyond correcting the spelling was bound to seem ungracious. Doing so as Jennell Jaquays' health failed and her family struggled to deal with the medical and emotional costs, even more so.
If my publisher came to me and said, "There's some potential, minor legal exposure to using this 13 year old term you coined in tribute to someone you admire," I'd like to think I'd tell them it's worth the risk. To some extent, I don't even really care what their reasons were. Whatever they were, they mattered more to Alexander than the tribute in the original name, and that's what puts me off the most.
So here's where I'm at:
Designing TTRPG locations to have multiple paths that are not merely cosmetic but actually add to the strategic value of play? That's Jaquaysing.
If Alexander wants to talk about modifying other people's dungeons as "Xandering," he's welcome to it. That's not really something I do, so I have no use for the term, and at this point, I probably wouldn't use it even if modifying published maps were a routine part of how I GM'd.
All well and good, I suppose, though the most valuable part for me is the reprint of an email from Anne of DIY & Dragons explaining HOW Alexander's messaging caused harm.
I don't believe she ever made this point specifically, but one notion that crystallized for me while reading Anne's email to Alexander was that his refusal to revise the spelling of Jaquaysing to match Jaquays' actual name, long before the publishing deal, was an exercise of control over the name. Whether or not he had strong reasons for the refusal (and I don't think he did) is beside the point; the point is that he COULD refuse.
And while I do believe Alexander was trying in good faith to respect Jaquays' requests around what he understand as the issues surrounding her transition, that exercise of control—his refusal to add the S back to her name in the term he coined—gave large swaths of the OSR another opportunity to take the side of a cis man against that a trans woman. It may have seemed neutral because it was her surname, and the effect was likely unintended, but it reinforced a pervasive social imbalance.
If you've ever been curious about What Fiend Stalks the Night, my solo generative folk horror adventure for #Mausritter, now's a good time to snatch it up, since it's included in the latest Solo But Not Alone bundle: https://itch.io/b/2256/solo-but-not-alone-4 There are some great games in the bundle, and proceeds go to mental health advocacy group Take This.
Has anyone gone through on their own and played all of the different Monopoly variants for ranking and comparison? (Not that I would be interested in that sort of thing.)
Meta's anti-harassment and -misinfo tools are largely algorithmic, which means federated servers will likely see those things at higher volumes than Threads users do.
Federating with ANY extremely active server creates systemic imbalances that favor the larger server, and Threads is ~150 times larger than any single Mastodon instance.
Even if Threads were to offer opt-out options in their own settings, there's no way to opt-out of their handling of data from a federated account.
