As I look at running new types of Tabletop Roleplaying games, I am confronted by the fact that most of my creative storytelling work and experience is fairly comfined to the Fantasy genre. I’ve written, read, and played fairly extensively in it and all it’s offshoots, so I feel most comfortable working within that context. I’ve also dabbled in Science Fiction as well, as you can see in some of the writing I’ve posted here (most notably, of course, my Infrared Isolation series). I tend more toward near-future in my sci-fi reading and distant-future in my sci-fi gaming, but I feel like I’ve explored enough to work in the space in a very general sense. When you drill down into the specifics, though, I tend to feel a lot less comfortable and I’m being forced to confront that discomfort pretty broadly these days now that almost half the games I’m advocating to my players are Mech games.
Continue readingDisinterest and Burnout: The Slow Death of a D&D Campaign
It turns out that not every single one of my tabletop groups is excited about the idea of playing something new. One group, now that Wizards of the Coast has walked back some of their fuckery, is not very interested in playing other games. At least one person in the group found a reason to be disinterested in everything I suggested and while they said they’re willing to consider some stuff if I give them a bunch of information and some time to think about it, I’m not exactly expecting them to embrace anything new at this point. I’ve been running a game for this group for a few years now and I’ve known them for even longer, so I feel pretty confident when I say that they’re not exactly the most flexible group. Historically, they’re one of my most draining groups to run for. Which isn’t to say I don’t enjoy our time, just that I feel like I have to do a lot of work to keep the game going.
Continue readingReturning to the Mines
After a little bit over two years, I returned to Minecraft. Even though I played back in mid to late 2020, I didn’t really get into it much. One of my friends wanted to run a server and wound up setting up a huge number of automated farms to generate pretty much every type of material we could want, all the resources we could trade for, and so many XP farms that we never ran into issues when it came to enchanting things. We even cleared The End and got everyone on the server kitted out with Elytra (a cape that lets you glide or even fly if you use fireworks while gliding) so that travel become easy and safe. Except in the Nether, where there was lava everywhere and one false step could not just kill you, but destroy every item you had. Which, you know, falling to your death in The End could also do, since that’s above a massive, endless void, but you usually had time to save yourself if you were flying when this happened.. It was a lot of fun, but it took a lot of the procedural joy out of the game, when everything became easily available.
Continue readingInfrared Isolation: Chapter 14
New to the series or certain you’ve missed a chapter? You can find the introduction Here and the table of contents Here.
Continue readingWizards of the Coast Took a Step Toward Restoration
Just when I thought we had time to breathe before anything else happened, I got knocked upside the head by perhaps the biggest surprise of them all. After weeks of controversery and a lot of absolutely fucking up their response multiple times, the person representing Wizards of the Coast and Dungeons and Dragons to the Tabletop Roleplaying Game community announced that they were cutting feedback short. In only one week, over 15,000 people responded to the survey they put out about the latest proposed changes to the OGL (this one was version 1.2) and almost ninety percent of responses said they should just go back to the original OGL (that has stood for some twenty-plus years). As a result, rather than continue to let negative sentiment build, they announced they’re not attempting to revoke the OGL, not releasing a new version of it, and are even releasing a bunch of content from their current version of Fifth Edition (titled 5.1 as they work to incorporate a decade of material and prepare it for compatibility with their next major version of the game) under a creative commons license.
Continue readingLooking Toward Future TTRPGs With My Friends
At this point, I’ve talked to almost all of my Dungeons and Dragons groups about the on-going issues with Wizards of the Coast and we’ve determined that we’re collectively moving on to new games. It was nice to hear that the pretty much universal response to the conversation was “I don’t care what we play, I just want to keep playing with this group” since that makes me feel good about the groups I’ve put together over the years. We’ve got a ton of games to play; most people had ideas, suggestions, or an active interest in a game I suggested during my monologue; and I’ve turned two D&D groups into a single Tabletop Roleplaying Game group that I might try expanding to accomodate people who aren’t up for weekly games. I might even do a long day (for me) of TTRPGs by runing two groups in separate parties through the same campaign as allies, rivals, or something else! The sky is the limit!
Continue readingReturning to Animal Crossing New Horizons
As I’ve struggled with falling asleep at night, I’ve returned to one of the games I used to soothe my anxiety during the peak of the pandemic: Animal Crossing. I bought a digital version of the game at some point last year, to ease the disruption I felt during the cold winter evenings when I was forced to leave my cocoon of blankets in order to change the cartridge in my Switch, and then wound up not playing it much more than I had previously. It turns out that even removing the one incredibly minor inconvenience preventing me from playing the game wasn’t enough to get me back into it in a dependable manner. This time, though, I swore it would be different. This time, I needed the calm music and friendly NPCs to soothe my spiraling mind.
Continue readingIn Memory of Being Unkown
Most of my coworkers have been with our employer for over a decade (one has even been here longer than I’ve been alive), many of them starting on other teams and in other roles before making their way to the Research and Development team for which we all currently work. They’re widely known and respected in the company, to the degree that we’ve struggled to get work done over the past year as our smoothly-operating department has been (temporarily) picked apart to assist other teams who were struggling (mostly for external reasons–2022 was a wild year to work in technology and electronics). A frequent complaint at our watercooler (which looks more like a cozy sitting/dining room tucked away in a corner of our lab than a bland water dispenser) is the number of emails they’re included on and how frequently they’re asked to split their attention to help others within the company.
Continue readingThe Line Between Naivety and Forgiveness
Trust, once lost, is not easily regained. The process of losing trust can be anything from drawn out and complex to instaneous and simple, but regaining it is always a time-consuming and difficult affair. We’re seeing a lot of that play out in the world these days, on a lot of different scales. Perhaps the biggest and most difficult to define example is people losing faith in government instituions. A much smaller but still impactful example is the recent loss of trust in Wizards of the Coast. It will take decades to restore trust in government instutions, especially given how every day seems to bring more evidence that the institutions we thought were safeguarding our government are actually just there to serve and protect the most powerful and wealthy among us (not that we needed more evidence to believe that). Likewise, it will take Wizards of the Coast a long time and some pretty extreme conscessions for people to trust that they’re not simply kicking the can down the road with this latest backpedaling they’ve been doing.
Continue readingA Year in Haiku: The Emotional Arcs of 2022
I haven’t had the time or energy to finish the chapter of Infrared Isolation I’ve been working on, so I decided to collect the highlights of my daily haiku from last year. They’re more of a way to do some daily journaling than a proper attempt to employ the traditional poetry format, but the following poems are representative of the year I had, each one of them named after the day I wrote it. It’s kind of funny, but looking back through my collection of thoughts and feelings without context, I can’t remember what about a quarter of them are referencing. It’s nice to see that my pursuit of a simple, quick emotional expression has done just as good a job of managing my general anxiety as journaling did, but without all of the frequently frustrating and depressing details attached to it. Now I can look back at what I wrote and not worry about being reminded of specific troubles. Instead, I can focus on reviewing the emotional arcs of my life over the course of 2022.
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