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).
Continue readingStorytelling
Adding Streaming To My Multi-Media Creative Life Goals
Since returning from my friend’s wedding, I’ve been streaming mostly Wildermyth (and a little bit of Valheim) when I’ve had the time to actually do a stream on my twitch account. It has been a lot of fun, even if I did spend most of my first two streams using OBS at a horrendous 360p, because I’ve been treating it like I’m reading a story to my audience rather than like I’m playing a game. Sure, there’s some combat stuff that occasionally interrupts the story I’m reading, but that’s usually over fairly quickly. The same is true of the overland movement and map unveiling portion of the game (even if I’ve coincidentally spent way more time managing things than I usually do on account of character hook quests pulling my characters to incredibly inconvenient locations). I spent probably forty-five minutes of every hour trying to keep the character’s voices consistent as I read through storytime and the other fifteen minutes managing mechanics. I’m really enjoying myself, even if it’s pretty difficult to manage audience comments and interactions at the same time.
Continue readingSprinkling TTRPGs Back Into My Life
I’ve slowly begun the process of restoring my Tabletop Roleplaying Game schedule. Sure, none of it will start for another week or two at earliest since I’ve still got a move coming up, but it feels nice to have begun the process of making plans. I’ve got a Pathfinder Second Edition game I’m going to be joining with a bunch of people I’ve never met (I got referred to them by a mutual friend) and I’m working on setting up a group in a fun, rot-themed world I made for a different group (whose game is still slowly happening). There’s no reason I can’t have two games happening in this same world, after all. It’s a huge place and some of the underlying stuff I’ve built into it means that it can support a bunch of concurrent games without running into continuity issues. I dunno if my players in either group will every know they’re playing in the same world (all the ones who read my blog will know as a result of this post, of course), but it’s fun for me to consider this. It’s also very unlikely that anything they do with impact each other since I’m trying to keep the games in this world on a smaller scope than I usually do.
Continue readingMy 1000th Post: Today is the Day Tears of the Kingdom is Released
As this goes up, I am sitting in the parking lot of my local Best Buy. Either in my car or in the folding chair I keep in my trunk near the door. I think my Pro Controller for my switch is dying, since I’m getting a lot of weird input lag and short bursts of unresponsiveness that seems to be getting worse rather than staying the same or getting better, so I’m going to try to get one of the Tears of the Kingdom themed Pro Controllers if this store has any [they did not, but I managed to order one online that will arrive while I’m in New Jersey]. I’m not sure they will, since there is no guarantee that they’ll actually have in-store units of any hardware these days, now that scalpers buy up everything instantly. If I can’t get it today, I will probably wait to see if they ever restock rather than picking up a normal one. After all, I regretted just buying an OLED switch when I wanted one rather than waiting for what I figured was the inevitable upgrade or special edition unit that I just had to buy.
Continue readingMisdirection At The Table
I use a lot of misdirection in my storytelling as a Game Master and as a player in tabletop roleplaying games. It is incredibly fun to put a bunch of information out there, hiding the important pieces behind less important information by taking advantage of knowing that you can only really tell what information is important in retrospect. I usually try to avoid burying what I’m trying to hide in bullshit, since that tends to indicate there’s something I’m trying to hide and I do my best to avoid outright lying about it because it’s not really fair if I’m just going to deliberately steer people in the wrong direction. It is only good, useful foreshadowing and storytelling if people are given the tools and information they need to start figuring things out on their own. Anyone can lie. It takes real skill to tell nothing but the truth in a way that draws attention away from the things you’d prefer people to ignore.
Continue readingYou Should Check Out Friends At The Table. I Just Think They’re Neat.
I spent most of last night (technically the 13th, not the 22nd, since I write these a week ahead of time and then juggled all of this week’s posts around so I could tell everyone how much I enjoyed the Diablo IV beta) watching the Friends at the Table crew (well, most of them) play King of the Castle on Twitch. I participated a little bit, since you can sign up to become a noble in the kingdom playing out on a stream game if the streamer has it set up correctly (and I can’t think of why you wouldn’t, given the fun I had last night), and it was a very enjoyable experience. Between the amazingly accurate Gilbert Gottfried impression, one of the players using a fun voice changer for her roles, and the overall humor of the group, I recommend checking them out (this link is to the YouTube upload of their stream). It was a very fun time and while there will be some loss of fun because you can’t participate in the voting after the stream has ended, it is still a hilarious few hours of a video game that is absolutely worth your time. There’s even a wonderful, friendly troll and a campaign to legalize a plant that makes everyone feel great when they’re around it all the time.
Continue readingGetting Back Into New Stuff (Podcast Edition)
I’ve been listening to mostly the same podcasts for the past two years. To be entirely fair, there’s been a lot for me to catch up on, since I got into podcasts late in general and very late in regards to some of these longer-running podcasts, specifically. That said, I hit a point last summer where I was entirely caught up and had listened to or watched all of the Patreon bonus content I cared for, but I wound up starting a string of full-series re-listens that I’m still working through now instead of trying something new. I needed something familiar and comfortable, so I just listened to stuff all over again. Some of it was nice, since I missed things here or there the first time and a second listen-through cemented the stories and characters I loved so much more firmly in my mind. Most of it, though, was just something I enjoyed to fill the silence of my evenings, combat the tinnitus I’m developing, and drown out the constant thumping, bumping, and creaking of my upstairs neighbors. Over the past few weeks, as I’ve pushed myself to start trying new things again, I’ve finally started making progress on my “to-listen” pile.
Continue readingSaying Farewell To My Last Dungeons & Dragons Campaign
It took us three sessions, a total of about ten hours, to wrap up my last remaining Dungeons and Dragons campaign, but we did it. I got to deliver final lines, talk about the world the heroes built, and finally close the loop on themes I’ve been building for years. It was a hefty, emotional moment for the four of us, as we said our goodbyes to the characters and the world they had saved, that left me choked up. Even if we struggled to meet regularly and it took us two years to get to where we were before we started to wrap things up, we’d still invested a lot of time and thought in our characters. It would have been nice if everyone could have been there, at the end, but sometimes people fall by the wayside and there’s no bringing them back. I just find it interesting that it was the players who learned this lesson instead of the characters (who managed to bring back a friendly NPC using a True Resurrection spell after they’d failed to bring them back during our first year with a pair of raise dead rituals gone wrong).
Continue readingSaying Farewell to My Favorite D&D Campaign
Last night, I sat down with the remaining players from my almost three-year-old Dungeons and Dragons campaign to talk through the end of the campaign. Though we struggled to have more than 1.5 sessions a month for most of that time, we got pretty deep into the paint. This was a world I created back in 2019 and have been running a weekly/weekly-adjacent game in ever since. It has a customized magic system (not THAT customized, but still tweaked a bit), an entire set of pantheons, complex geopolitical and economic systems, and was my attempt to create a “young world” for roleplaying games. I planned to carry the world through many campaigns, playing out its entire history with my friends as we progressed from one campaign to another. Now, as we move toward other systems and science-fiction themes instead of fantasy themes, I am revealing everything I’ve spent so long creating and saying my own farewells to this world as my players and I say farewell to the story we’ve spent time over the past three years telling.
Continue readingLike Most Myths, Wildermyth Is About The Characters
I’ve been playing a bunch of Wildermyth recently. I’ve played through almost all of the campaigns on my own, some of them multiple times with different groups of people, and there’s only one left that I haven’t played at all. At this point, I feel like I’ve got a pretty good grasp on the storytelling pieces of this game, even if I don’t always remember the particulars of every encounter. Throw in a general understanding of the strategy behind the game and a nearly complete understanding of how all the abilities synergize (except for Hero Theme abilities, since I’m still working on collecting all of those), and I feel like there are no real secrets left for me. I’m sure there’s plenty of random encounters I haven’t run into, given my penchant for creating specific types of heroes, but I’m working to correct those biases and hopefully I’ll eventually be able to tick through all the achievements as evidence of my gameplaying breadth.
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