After a hiatus following the departure of a player (though not caused by the departure of said player), four of the remaining five of us met up to play and quickly discovered we did not have it in us to play our usual game. Live’s been a chaotic mess for all of us and we lost quite a bit of momentum because of when our break arrived. It cut us off from any opportunity to build energy or establish story because we spent the previous full session going through a time skip and our last partial session doing some maintenance and upkeep, so there weren’t any existing strands of story or character to use to pull us into the game again. Additionally, due to some decisions I made while creating this game and building out the world, I’ve been struggling to feel excited about this part of the game we’re in. Some of the NPCs I’d made had begun to take up too much space in my mind because their real-world analogues have become dramatically more prominent in my mind as a result of how the world has changed in the year or so since I spun the bones of this story up. It stopped being fun for me to explore the ideas associated with them and while there was still space for me to shift things and make changes in order to avoid building the association any more than I already had, I was also struggling with how close the world was to our own. Which, it turns out, was also a bit of a struggle for some of my players as well. It’s difficult to enjoy fantasy escapism when we’re not actually departing from the world we are already familiar with. So, as our chatter peetered out and it looked like we’d be just departing rather than pushing ourselves to play a game we weren’t in the mood to play, I pitched an idea for a game I’d had just the day before.
Continue readingStorytelling
Final Fantasy 14’s Stormblood Is Full Of Big Ideas That Went Basically Nowhere
About a week ago, give or take a couple days because time is blurring together and I genuinely can’t remember how long it has been, I finished the Stormblood expansion of Final Fantasy 14. I’ll freely admit that I went into it a bit miffed and resentful because I’d just finished a bunch of storytelling about other worlds, the loss of balance that had a world being swallowed by light rather than darkness, and the sacrifices we make to see our vision for the future come to pass. The game took all that interesting, intriguing storytelling that it had been building towards for quite a while and tossed it all aside to focus on a popular rebel who used charisma and emotional manipulation to gather an army he could sacrifice in order to summon a god to unleash on not just the empire that conquered his homeland years ago but every single conquered people between him and said empire, including his own people. He was clearly cast as the villain in this moment, creating and then betraying a grassroots rebellion, but the story didn’t sit super well with me because, out of all the characters I’d met, his general politics matched closest to my own and yet the game was constantly casting him as a villain. All of which was further complicated by the fact that he was one of the few people of color in the game and had come to represent the resentful refugee who was not content to live in squalor and take whatever scraps he could beg or steal to keep himself alive, often in wars that defied logic and actual revolutionary practice just so he could be horrible and villainous in a way that advanced the plot.
Continue readingChoosing Joy While Listening To NADDPod
One of the podcasts I listen to regularly, NADDPod (AKA, Not Another D&D Podcast), recently started their fourth season (or main campaign, I guess? Though they have talked about changing up the format to do fewer long campaigns and more shorter ones, which really kind of muddies the waters). After all these years of games–main campaigns, side games, mini-arcs, and one-shots–the final member of the group has taken the lead and run not just a one-shot or a mini-arc like most of the others have, but stepped up to run the next main campaign for group. The one guy in the group who hasn’t technically sworn to never run a campaign but has expressed extreme trepidation about it and about not knowing the game well enough to run things has finally stepped out from behind the character sheet and taken a seat behind the GM’s screen. This guy, Jake Herwitz, has always been funny and a great performer (and is, in fact, one of the original founders of the podcast company that NADDPod is a part of), but I was a bit nervous at the thought of him taking over. After all, I hadn’t really seen any of his independent creative work, or anything he’d done outside of the podcast. I had no idea what it was that he would bring to the show that the others didn’t do just as well if not better. Having listened to a few episodes, though, I am happy to say that all of my fears were completely wrong and he’s doing a better job than I ever imagined he could. He might even wind up being my favorite GM for this group, in fact, if he manages to stay the course for his entire run.
Continue readingThe Stanley Parable: An Exercise In Video Game Storytelling
A few months ago, back around the winter holidays, I played through The Stanley Parable for the first time. It was one of those games that I’d had on my Steam wishlist for a very long time and just never got around to actually buying or playing it. In fact, my general interest in the game is what led me to be so interested in one of my most anticipated games of 2025, Wanderstop. Sure, the trailer was great, but I’d been intrigued by the premises of the games that the creator of Wanderstop’s studio, Davey Wreden, had already made and so took a closer look at Wanderstop. Without that, I might have written off the bits I’d seen of the Wanderstop trailer as just another cozy game and ignored it, given how much I both love and hate cozy games these days (love chore-based games but hate the aesthetic that often gets stuff labeled “cozy” these days). But, despite my intrigue, it still took me a while to actually sit down and play the game since I’d heard that it’s a game best experienced all at once and I just didn’t have it in me to stay engaged with anything like that (other than Dragon Age, anyway) until just about the start of the new year. So, thanks to the rest I’d been getting and the need for something to do that didn’t take a lot of manual dexterity (I wasn’t able to do much with my left hand thanks to the burns I’d gotten while making my Christmas dinner), I booted the game up and spent a good few hours playing through it.
Continue readingI Slayed The Princess And All I Got Was This Collection Of Neutral Thoughts
This review spoils some of the details of the mild-to-moderate horror game Slay The Princess, a game best-played with as little information as possible for your first time, and features non-descriptive discussions of violence and bodily harm.
Continue reading1500 Is A Lot Of Blog Posts To Have Written
This is my 1500th blog post. I wrote it yesterday because I’ve been struggling to keep up my buffer and, in my haste to at least get a post taking up Draft space on my blog so I’d have something to work on between coming up with the idea a week ago and it getting published (which has resulted in me not doing any work on it until the day before), I forgot to put together something for the big one five double-zero! Aside from being a large number of things to have written, there isn’t much significance to the number aside from this being a specific personal goal I set. You see, 1500 blog posts guarantees that I’ve written at least a thousand blog posts since I started this whole thing back up a few years ago. That’s a pretty significant number, considering that I haven’t missed a day (aside from planned breaks) in that whole time. I’ve posted some of these later than I’d have liked (mostly because I forgot to fix the scheduled post time but once because I just didn’t have anything written until partway through the day), but I haven’t missed a day that wasn’t planned ahead of time. I’ve had to reduce my scope by no longer sharing things on Saturdays, I’ve circled the drain of topics and journaled my misery for a while, but I’ve never missed a day.
Continue readingA Blast From The Past: I Started Rereading Cucumber Quest
One of my favorite webcomics from back in the day was the webcomic Cucumber Quest. I say “back in the day” because it’s one of the first webcomics I started following, once I found out about webcomics, and I followed it right up until it stopped updating in 2019. The creator has posted some additional information about it on their patreon since then, but they’ve not worked on it in a long time (due to burnout) and I am not expecting it to ever continue. I won’t say that it will never continue or that I don’t think it ever will, only that I’m not expecting it to. Sometimes things are good and fun and you love them, but the circumstances of life prevent them from ever being brought to a satisfying conclusion. Sometimes all you get, in the end, is A conclusion. Which is kind of fitting, given the general themes of the story and all. It might seem counterintuitive to recommend a webcomic that stopped updating almost six years ago, but it is still a story near and dear to my heart and easily worth your time even if you will have to eventually cope with the lack of a “proper” resolution. I’d even go so far as to argue that maybe thinking about the story and sitting with the feelings of it ending before the story wrapped up might be the sort of thing that triggers some important introspection. Regardless, it is lovely, it is well-drawn, it is moving, and it does my favorite thing a story can do with a fantasy setting: stand it on its end and make you think about the standard heroic fable tropes you went into it expecting.
Continue readingFixing One Problem So I Can Work On The Rest
After a few sessions without much in the way of stuff to work on, my physical therapist and I decided to change our appointment schedule to every-other-week (starting with a three-week skip due to scheduling issues). Since I stopped taking that medication that was making me physically miserable, I’ve had fewer and fewer problems that I’ve needed to work on with my physical therapist. At this point, as I’m coming up on two months off the medication, I’m still dealing with some lingering stuff, but most of what I’ve got going on is due to the physical demands of my job and the somewhat uneven muscle usage those demands result in. Other than stretches and starting up my exercise routine in earnest again, there’s not much to do for now. Thus the every-other-week appointments. We’ll let some time pass, see if getting back into my exercise routine helps fix my lingering problems, and then hopefully either end our appointments or set me up with a better workout and stretching routine and THEN end our appointments. Either way, I suspect I’m less than half a dozen appointments from being done. Which is great, let me tell you. I still remember just how awful last fall was, even if a lot of those days blur together in my memory, and no matter how tired or sore I feel nowadays, I can take comfort in knowing that it will pass in a couple days if I stretch and get enough sleep. And destress a bit. I’m still struggling with that part, but I always have so I doubt I’m going to fix it any time soon.
Continue readingWrapping Up Part 1 of Final Fantasy XIV
There won’t be any direct spoilers for the final plot points of Final Fantasy XIV’s A Realm Reborn in here, but I’ll be gesturing at it broadly. It’s not a surprising twist or anything, but I felt I should at least disclaim that, even if I’m writing about stuff nearly a decade old at this point. After all, I just started playing the game and would have wanted to avoid spoilers, so maybe you would too. Anyway, skip paragraph three if you want to avoid spoilers (this is paragraph 1).
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 32
I’ve been thinking about the stories that video games tell, the ones you find within them, and the way that some games lack any kind of storytelling in favor of simulating a person’s ability to choose to do whatever they want. All of these kinds of games have their own places in the broad field that is “video games,” but I was preparing myself to write about why I prefer games with stories to tell and had to set that blog post aside because I’m too worn down by life and everything to really get my thoughts together like that. I figured I’d write a Tired and Sad post instead and realized, as I dug around for a topic, that the game I’ve maybe written the most about is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Which prompted the thought that maybe I prefer emergent storytelling since that game has almost no story to tell you. Not because you have the ability to choose things (well, you’ve got the ability to choose to do them or not, which is maybe the easiest choice to give to players), but because the whole game is so focused on creating little nuggets of story that only emerge as you play and explore and find them for yourself.
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