Enhancing Your Games By Stealing Ideas From Other Game Systems

I was listening to some old Friends at the Table Patreon content (it is so much easier to access now that I’ve got an RSS feed to pull from and am using an actual podcast app to pull it instead of flipping through patreon posts like I just assumed I had to for every podcast I’ve supported prior to March of 2023) and I heard one of the players talk about some of the lessons he has learned over the years from his experience playing tabletop games and taking comedy classes. He said that some of the best advice he’s ever heard was that, after you spend a bunch of time mastering a creative skill, that you should go do anything else for a few months so you’ve got things to pull from when you return to the improvisational or creative skill you’ve learned. The broader context that this came up in was about preventing yourself from becoming too focused on one type of game or play experience. Play a lot of different things and then, when you return to the thing you want to spend a lot of time on, you will be better at it for having enriched yourself with other experiences. This is something I’ve always felt was true of pretty much every form of creative work. Spend some time honing your chosen craft and then spend time learning about a lot of other things so you have information to pull from when creating things. This is why I’ve spent so much time reading about various bits of history, different occupations, and generally learning about how the world works and why it works that way. Everything informs my writing, so the better I understand anything other than writing, the better my writing will get.

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Filling My Free Time

As I go about planning how I’m going to spend my time, conscious of both my need to rest and my desire to fill my day with things I feel are fulfilling and rewarding, I am finding it difficult to strike a proper balance. Since I stopped streaming because I had overburdened myself, I now have a bunch of time available. Sure, it used to be filled with something that I found enjoyable, but it was also frequently more draining than it was restorative. Right now, I’m trying to keep this time clear so I can actually get the rest I need to recover from the past eight months, but I’ll admit that I’ve already begun to think about what else I could be doing with that time. It might seem like this is happening too quickly, but I’m pretty surprised that it took two whole days, one of which used to be a streaming day, for me to get to this point. Normally, I’d have expected myself to start planning what I could do with this “extra” time before I’d even made the decision to stop streaming. I dislike feeling like I failed at something, after all, and it is more difficult to feel like I failed when I stop doing something if I can convince myself that I can now do something else of equal or greater importance to myself. It isn’t more restful, though, so I’m trying to take it easy. And I mean actually easy, not “easy in comparison to my usual amount of effort.”

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A Little Bit of (the Fun Kind of) Horror in My TTRPG Campaign

This upcoming weekend (the one following this post going up), I’ll have my first session with a group of people playing a game of Heart: The City Beneath. I’m pretty excited to play it, since I was so inspired by the game (and the seventh season of Friends at the Table, Sangfielle, where they played it) that I wrote an entire setting for any number of games full of cool decay and horror themed stuff. This group will be playing that setting and we’ll be doing our Session 0 to talk through what adaption work we’ll be doing to get the base game to fit the flavor of the world ni which we’ll be playing. This setting is one I’ve written about here (or at least shared the introductory short story for the Dungeons and Dragons 5e Heoric Tragedy version of it), so I’m excited to get to use it with a group interested in exploring the more creepy, horrific side of things. Don’t get me wrong, I’m absolutely delighted to eventually continue the Heoric Tragedy game when all the players are available again, but I wrote this setting with mild to moderate horror and dark fantasy in mind, so it’ll be tons of fun to explore those a bit more directly with a game designed for horror like Heart.

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Turns Out I Have Limits. I Know, I’m Shocked Too.

I’ve been trying to treat my recent period of rest and recovery like every other one I’ve gone through in the past few years. I’ve taken some time to do nothing, found something that interests me to work on, and slowly pushed myself back into doing things the instant I no longer felt exhausted. Unfortunately for me, the last eight months are not like any other period of my life. I don’t think I’ve ever had as much go on in an eight month period of time. I can’t even really call that period good or bad, though I can say that the negative parts of it make it probably the second worst period of my life. The positive parts don’t really make up for that so much as exist alongside it. A lot of really great stuff has also happened in that time, after all, and none of it cancels out the bad stuff. That’s not how life works. I have had a lot going on and it has worn me thin in more ways than anything but the prolonged abuse and neglect of my childhood can compare to. I feel so out of sorts that I’m not even sure how I should be feeling. All of which means that my usual methods of recovery and moving on aren’t going to cut it. Nothing I’ve experienced in the past is really going to help with right now and I’m only just now beginning to realize that treating the last eight months like any normal period of stress in my life is only going to make things worse.

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Relief From A Weight I’ve Never Mentioned

I went to get a mole checked out today. I wasn’t super concerned that it might be a sign of some kind of skin cancer since I’ve had it for as long as I can remember, but it has long been an inconvenience at best since it sits right between my nose and my lip. It gets in the way of shaving, of blowing my nose, of wiping my nose, and it can interfere with sneezes if I don’t have them absolutely locked down. It tends to bleed easily, if I scrape or pinch it hard enough and it frequently itches in a way that encourages me to scrape or pinch it. If I shave too thoroughly and indelicately around it, it will bleed the next time I brush against it with anything rougher than my hands. That said, I’ve been living with it for as long as I can remember, so it hasn’t been an issue for much of my life. Only occasionally, less than once a year, will I accidentally cause it to bleed or otherwise hurt myself by absentmindedly interacting with it. It has been easy to ignore as I’ve dealt with more pressing issues because I had the tools and skills required to cope with it in an effective and safe manner.

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A Small Streaming Update

During my last several streams (well, okay, pretty much every stream so far since I got back to streaming following my move), I’ve been playing Ghost of Tsushima. It’s a very good game, but it can be a little intense at times, so I’ve been doing my best to monitor my mental health as I’ve played. I wouldn’t want to stress myself doing something that’s supposed to be fun, but trying to stick to a stream schedule means I have pre-appointed times to play the game for certain durations. Unless I skip a stream or break away from the game entirely, I can’t take much of a break.

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Twitter Continues Circling The Digital Drain

Amidst everything else going on in the world, I’ve been watching Twitter continue to circle the drain. It’s nothing new, for the most part, but it’s still depressing to see it happening. More bills left unpaid, the slow degredation of basic features, the shifts in company policy that aren’t really shifts so much as the company’s owner desperately trying anything to keep people worshipping him, and then, mostly recently, the restriction of accounts to viewing a set number of tweets each day. The latest of these, the 600-tweets-viewable-per-day thing, caused a big stir and the biggest drop in Twitter activity I’ve seen. Now, thanks to the number of people using the site less (myself included), there’s fewer posts, less activity on those posts, and a growing desperation to find something new. A lot of people seem to be moving to bluesky, but the recent release of “Threads: an Instagram App” seems to have complicated matters. By which I mean that it seems to have claimed pretty much everyone looking to move with some notable exceptions, though I suppose we’ll see if they stay or move on the next time something new comes out.

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Talking To An Empty Room: Virtual Meetings with No Cameras

I had to do a presentation at work today. I had time to prepare for it, but I felt a decent amount of resentment that I’d been forced into needing to present at all. The testers at my employer meet once a month (virtually) to watch (or at least listen to) a presentation by representatives from one of the testing teams. The goal is for each team to take turns presenting some aspect of their work in order to foster inter-team communication and provide each other with information that could prove useful in our testing work. While this makes sense for some of the teams, it is pointless for others. It is especially pointless for my team. While a few teams in the Research and Development department work together or work on related products, our company’s diversification means that a lot of us work on entirely unrelated things. Literally no part of my testing work will ever be useful to anyone who isn’t on my team and we already share everything internally, so there’s no point to me going to the meeting. The whole meeting only exists because of a bit of political maneuvering as two people higher up the corporate food chain fought over control of the testers for reasons I can’t fathom. It’s not like either one of them has any actual authority over the rest of us. Neither of them was, is, or ever will be in my management structure. But I still have to go to these meetings and take multiple hours out of my day to prepare a presentation for them, for some reason.

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Nimona Is A Wonderful And Powerful Movie

Last week (when I wrote this), I opted to purchase myself a month of Netflix. I will probably wind up using this month to watch The Witcher and whatever other Netflix stuff I’ve missed over the last few years of not wanting to watch shows by myself (like Stranger Things season 4), but the reason I paid for a month of Netflix was because I wanted to watch Nimona. It hit Netflix on the 30th of June and I knew it was something I wanted to watch, even if I had to do it by myself. I’ve been following ND Stevenson for years and found his posts, comics, and online journaling about his gender identity incredibly informative and helpful. I was excited to see the movie made about the comic that wound up being so unintentionally about his identity and journey, even though I’d never read the comic. It was one of those things that I always meant to read but never got around to reading. Then, when I heard there was going to be a movie I decided to wait until after it came out. I almost broke down and read the comic when the movie got canned by Disney, but wound up being glad I waited when Netflix announced they’d picked it. Now, I’ve watched the movie and am preparing to read the comic (as soon as I have the time required to that, since I’m writing this less than 24 hours after watching the movie).

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