Why Are You Like This?

INTRO

It's probably time to elaborate on the question I'm trying to find some answers to with this blog instead of just vaguely yelling about it on BlueSky. This might be a little bit of a ramble, and in a right and just world this would be some kind of sexy three hour long video essay, but just bear with me here because to start off with I'm going to talk about how I'm tackling what might just be the most important question in all of TTRPG fandom:

"Hey Man, Why The Fuck Are You Like This?": The Preamble

In this case, the "man" in question is a catch-all for "a person who tries to shoehorn their favorite game, usually Dungeons & Dragons, into fitting any kind of genre or playstyle" and "like this" refers to "doing the thing I just said instead of finding a game already suited to tell the story you're trying to tell." To answer that question, I need to tell you a little story about myself so you know how and why I'm coming at this question. (If you just want to skip to my thesis, CTRL+F "Hey Man, Why The Fuck Are You Like This?": The Thesis.)

So, I started my RPG life in my late teens circa 2007 playing D&D 3.5. Dungeons and Dragons was, with probably two exceptions, the only roleplaying game I played or knew literally anything about for almost 15 years - except for a very brief stint playing what was probably the first edition of Rolemaster  with some of the grognards at my FLGS and the fourth edition of Hero System with some older college friends, D&D 3.5, and then 5e, were the only games I knew anything about. They gave me everything teenage and early-20s Adam could want - solving mysteries one fireball at a time, killing monsters one fireball at a time, ignoring the Geneva Convention one fireball at a time - you know, the classics. Sure, I knew about stuff like Vampire: The Masquerade, but that was for "those weird LARP kids," and the one time someone invited me to play Fate and tried explaining how FUDGE dice worked I laughed at him until he never talked to me again, all according to keikaku. 

I was just out of college when 5e came out. The jump from 3.5 to 5e was a drastic one, but one that felt good at the time - I had lost the inclination to comb through seven thousand illegal PDFs to min-max my build now that I was a Real Adult and had Real Adult Time Constraints, and plus the wonders of a bounded target system meant that I no longer had to make number go up good - I could just play the game! Heck, the prestige classes had gotten rolled into the base classes so I didn't even have to worry about that much balancing of theming versus CharOp at all, I could just roll and go! What a miracle! Suddenly, all of the people still clutching to 3.5 or, worse, PATHFINDER, seemed like such buffoons! Could they not see the glory of the simplified but just as flavorful builds of 5e? What do you mean there "aren't a lot of options" here - there's so many choices to make that suddenly seem meaningful rather than "this makes my number go up by +1, which allows me to take this other feature"?! No more did you have to have to agonize over how to make a particular set of numbers bigger so that your character could be "good enough to play," you could just choose themes and go! Well, except for playing a Ranger, that was just bad. And then there was also trying to recreate the things from 3.5 that didn't get ported over. And then of course there were the themes that weren't covered that would have to be compensated for. And oh hey would you look at that, there's a funny interaction between how Warlocks regain their spells and Sorcerers' Spell Points and Paladin Smites, isn't that interesting? I bet you could make a really killer build like that and OH GOD IT'S HAPPENING AGAIN.

And so I continued on this way until my friend Jake, whomst I had met back in the heyday of D&D 3.5 CharOp, asked me to help him break down one of the more popular 5e modules to run over a single Halloween for our friends. Jake, someone who had Worked In Videogames and Was Good At Numbers and Had An Addiction To Boardgames, is much smarter than me - and working with him in actually breaking down and writing a module was the first time I actually had to think about how games worked. Sure, I'd DM'd games for ages at this point, and I usually did my own homebrew worlds - but I never, like, peeked underneath the curtain to understand how games functioned at the molecular level. Things like user experience while reading the book, or having good props, or really even considering the other people playing the game with me outside of the fact that they were my friends - we all trusted each other to know the rules, I trusted them to make their own little murderblorbos and they trusted me to give them an engaging story which allowed them to commit righteous violence against the unjust. What more was there to it, I thought? As it turns out, quite a lot.

By being forced to consider the actual gameplay experience of other players rather than just going on the baseline assumption that "we're all here to play the game we know with people we like and that's good enough," I began to find that really, there were a lot of things we wanted to do with the story that really just didn't exist within the confines of Dungeons and Dragons. Like, yeah, you could roll your skill checks or whatever, but what happens when you remove the ability to do that? One encounter involved having to puzzle out how to get past a Prismatic Wall, either via deciphering the clues to each layer or literally murdering a companion to get a rod to nullify the spell, and then chatting with a vampire to peel back the layers of what was really going on? (I designed the puzzle half of that, the latter half was all Jake.) Or take, for example, my alternative to having to wade through endless random encounters by instead having little narrative vignettes and expending resources to pass through the castle? Like, technically, legally, these things existed within the framework of D&D but they were not quite what you'd expect to sit down and do at a lot of tables. This was the first time I really ever considered the idea that you know actually it's quite possible to offer a different kind of experience with that game - but of course, I would never use a different system to tell this game, right? It's still D&D baby! This is still a D&D story, so obviously if something is missing from D&D to complete the experience I can just add it on. Or like change some stuff. That's still D&D right? Obviously. God I'm so smart, wow. I'm the only person to have ever thought of this. Except, y'know, for Jake, who has been teaching me about all of this while we do the design work. But other than that, wow.

Fast forward to 2022 - I'm at GenCon, I'm fumbling an acceptance speech for the game Jake and I did, and now I'm exposed to all these other games. ALL THESE OTHER GAMES? Why are there so many games! There are studios I know from their days writing D&D 3.5 content - Green Ronin, Monte Cook, Goodman Games. There are writers around who I...also knew from their D&D content, like Keith Baker. But what's this? Oh right, Chaosium! Those Cthulhu guys! That's a game that exists, sure, I know that one! But then what's this? A...game about collecting sea shanties that requires its players to sing and resolve conflict within the bounds of the song? A game that's kind of like Infinity Train but you play it...alone, and also instead of a train there are castle robots? A game where you...are animals and you go on a journey I guess, but the story is found more in the interaction between the players rather than what the GM has to say? And why do people keep describing their games as running off apocalypse power?

"What the fuck are these people doing out here?" I thought. 

I was 31 years old, and it was about time I learned what there really was out there.

What followed could only be described as a "certainly not to be used to diagnose any flavors of neurodivergence" amount of diving into consuming other games media. I had listened to a few actual plays by this point, all of which had played a critical ro- extremely vital part of being able to rapidly understand how other games worked - sure, all my favorites were doing D&D, but I also got some Monster of the Week in there, and there was that show about sky pirates my friend kept trying to get me to listen to that used some Star Wars game with weird dice as a baseline, but beyond that I really hadn't ventured out. I know I've been making joking and oblique references here but credit where credit is due, the One Shot Podcast (then hosted by James D'Amato and now hosted by Dillin Apelyan) and the Party of One Podcast (hosted by Jeff Stormer) were absolutely instrumental in onboarding me to the wider world of TTRPGs. By being able to listen to actual games being actually played, without having to spend the time learning how to run them/begging my friends to branch out into something new/have to have the mortifying ordeal of being known and go make new friends, I could just go to a booth at a con, look at a game I thought was cool, then go find an example of people playing it and see how a session might go. AND some of these podcasts included interviews with the creators so you could understand the design process? Absolutely mint. 

I've spent the better part of two years making up for the almost two decades suckling the teat of dragons that may or may not be in dungeons. I've bought way more games than I've read, and thanks to the combined power of ADHD, being able to comprehend podcasts played at double speed, and jobs with a lot of off-the-phone downtime, I've probably listened to more hours of games being played than I have ever played myself. I've been in some actual plays, I've written some other things, and most importantly, I have talked to other people who are also interested in games. With all of this in mind, I think I have a workable thesis to answer the question:

"Hey Man, Why The Fuck Are You Like This?": The Thesis

If I had to boil this down to the absolute smallest concept, I think the root cause of why people are like this is because of the sunk cost fallacy, but like a fractal version where every time you examine what cost is being sunk there are even deeper costs which continue to sink into others. In slightly more dramatic and less legible language, I believe this fallacy to have three core pieces - A Trifarce, if you will.

Piece 1: If the game that someone likes takes a long amount of time to master, they will assume that all games take a similar amount of time to master.

Piece 2: If someone has spent a long time mastering a game, the idea that spending time to master another game will simultaneously invalidate the time they spent mastering the game they already like, and also mean that they won't be able to have fun with the new game until they've spent at least that much time.

Piece 3: People don't want to spend time mastering something they're not sure that they will like, and if their only choices for telling a new kind of story are "master something new" or "reshape what you know to fit," they're going to take the easy route.

The fourth piece of The Trifarce - the missing bit in the middle of the three other triangles - represents everything that is missing that would cause you to grow: a community of peers rather than a group that expects you to be the subject matter expert; the knowledge that things can be any way other than how they already are; ideas that are not your own that challenge your own expectations.

I have one final story about me to drive this home - the day that I stared into the hole in the middle of The Trifarce and decided that it was time to fill it in. (Hah! You thought skipping the preamble would get you out of reading a story? Fool that you are.): 

Shortly after Jake and I wrote One Night Strahd, an offhanded comment he made about a setting with vampires and riverboats took hold of my mind. In his mind it was some kind of a Berlin Wall + Vampires story, but in my mind I saw a generational survival horror game where players controlled not one character but many - and while the general plot of the game would be mapped out, the players would find ways to have their stories of grief and loss while rebuilding society. But, y'know, on riverboats, and also there are vampires, and it's still a fantasy world. A year or two ago, I got some friends together to playtest this - but I had them make D&D characters, because at that point I was still basically convinced it could be just a really advanced way to tell stories inside of D&D like we had done with ONS. It was a story about violence, yes, but more importantly it was a story of community & survival, of amassing resources and unlocking further character options down the path. What I found was that despite being told all of this, the players still treated it like a D&D game. One player refused the premise of the prompt for the session completely - he had spent hours coming up with his character and his backstory and couldn't think of a single reason why his character would engage with the plot as presented. Another player just couldn't buy into the game and kept doing silly things to pass the time because there wasn't enough combat - and then was confused when combat did happen because they were level 1 characters up against full strength vampires. Despite being given a dynamic and interactable world, the players kept looking at their character sheets for answers on how to survive, because they'd spent so much time building these characters, and then were upset when some of them died because if they couldn't beat the creatures in the encounter, why did I even bother running it?

Had I known then about the Six Cultures of Play, perhaps I could have explained the premise better. If I had known about Ars Magica or Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast at the time and could have articulated that I was trying to create a game ultimately intended for either doing Troupe Style play (like AM) or Ensemble Style play (like Zeeb), maybe I could have better articulated the difference in character creation philosophy. If I had played literally any of the OSR/NSR games like Down We Go or Into The Odd I might have been able to articulate that yeah, your characters have abilities, but you should be looking at the world for inspiration on what to do in the moment, not on your character sheet. If I'd played Monster of the Week or The Between before then, maybe I could have explained the idea of defining what you want to do first and justifying it with an ability/move afterwards. But I didn't know any of those things then, and so I was unable to express myself, and nobody had a good time - but it drove me to learn, and I have not stopped. And that missing drive is, I think why so many people remain "like this" - without the drive to improve and look outward, you instead retreat inward and just keep digging yourself deeper into a hole. (And, like, probably spend way too much time writing your own fantasy heartbreaker that just ends up being D&D But Worse But This Time It Has A Thing You Like In It to release along with the eleven thousand other iterations of that each month.)

If you made it this far, you're a real fuckin' champ and I appreciate you. In addition to the aforementioned James D'Amato, Superdillin, and Jeff Stormer for their superb actual play work, I'd like to shout out Jay Dragon, Geostatonary, Quinn Morris, assorted other humans in the Possum Creek Games Discord, Tony Vasinda and the Plus One EXP crew, as well as my other friends in my Very Secret Book Club - at some point in time, something you've done, something you've said, or some time you've spent being willing to humor my ramblings has helped shape the ideas that I could not yet give proper form and I am made better by knowing you. 

Part 2 of this series will not be anywhere near as long or as unhinged. It will be short, there will be hinges. Like a pet door, or a very small cabinet. But while this post focused on WHY people are they way they are, the next one will be about the implications of that and how that manifests.

The Post-PAX PAX-Packed PAX Post (Unplugged 2024)

 

    Long ago in my previous life as a chiptune music blogger, I used to be the social media person for MAGFest's mini-stage at PAX East. In addition to my MAGFest duties, I would take some time to go chat with developers, play some videogames, and generally just absorb the culture of the event after which I'd write up an article about what I saw and played. With the return of my blogging life, I feel it only appropriate to revive this article series to fit my new form, though this time around there wasn't so much schmoozing and playing games as there was running games and...running games. So maybe this also kinda counts as a review thing? We'll figure it out by the end I'm sure.

INTRO

    Rather than just showing up, going to panels and networking like I did last year, this year I decided I'd run some games. I'd originally reached out to Tony Vasinda at Plus One EXP about running games for them - I have run games at GenCon for Hunters Entertainment and for Kobold Press over the last couple of years, and given both that I am writing something for Plus One EXP that I really ought to playtest but also because they publish a whole bunch of games I really like but never have a chance to run at home, I figured that was an easy shot to line up. Tony recommended I reach out to the Games on Demand folks - Plus One EXP was planning on having a small "takeover" on Saturday evening, but that if I really wanted to run their games, Games on Demand would be the place to do it. And so I did, and I ran games there, and it fucking rocked.

I really have to hand it not only to Brian and Natalya's leadership and all their administrative duties but to all the other GMs who ran things over the weekend. The house was packed pretty much from open to close all weekend. Creators were showing off their games. People like me were running games they just really liked and wanted to share with people. It was a well oiled machine of nerds playing pretend with and around each other and it ruled. Prior to, as I often refer to this to my IRL friends, "pretending to be famous on the internet" and really engaging with the TTRPG scene at cons, I truly never played con games. Playing games with strangers? Not actively curating your playgroup? Disgusting. But actually no, it absolutely rules and I love it. I hope next time around I plan my time a little better so I can actually play in some games too (#foreverGMsquad), but all in all, no notes on management or vibes.

HELLWHALERS

    HELLWHALERS, by Moss Powers & friends as Brewist Tabletop Games, is a game about Christian religious trauma. It's also about doing your best Captain Ahab impression by hunting a whale on the seas of Hell with several other damned souls as a last-ditch effort to seek salvation. As a Jewish person, and honestly not one who has really spent that much time on the religious side of things, I was worried I didn't really have a lot of the in-built Christian trauma to work through that I imagine makes this game hit harder for a lot of folks. For example, all of my Catholic friends I've brought this game up to have all given me the reaction both of "oh yeah, that's that good shit" and "oh, playing that game is going to be pure suffering" and congratulations, after running it I can tell you both things are correct! And I mean that in a positive way! 

    I think HELLWHALERS is extremely mechanically sound, with the necessary nightly gambling portion becoming the Oracle for the events of the following day. The game does make mention of being adaptable for longer games, but in my opinion HELLWHALERS is best enjoyed either as a one-shot or as a very short campaign, for a few reasons:

• The game relies very heavily on player buy-in - if you have players who are REALLY, REALLY into the premise, you'll have rich scenes to play through and longer gameplay will be a natural consequence of the roleplaying - but none of that is in the book (aside from the rewards for roleplaying, that is). If your players aren't clicking, a long game may actually be hellish.
  
  
• Aside from a few inspiration sparks in a few places, there isn't a lot of guidance for GMs beyond the actual mechanics. I fully admit this might just be because I'm not a Christian so outside of recognizing Hell as A Really Bad Place To Be and therefore Everything Should Suck, I think maybe I lacked context to really make those inspiration sparks catch fire. In a long game, I feel like you've really got to have a good idea of what Your Hell looks like and what will happen, which takes this from an otherwise fairly straightforward pick-up-and-play series of roleplaying challenges and gambling into being pretty heavy on the prep.
  
  
• The endings. I cannot make this clear enough - I LOVE the endings, because they are exactly my kind of bullshit. I was the kid who, after reading Albert Camus' "The Stranger" in highschool thought "wow, I bet reading 'Anna Karenina' and 'The Metamorphosis' and 'Crime and Punishment' and 'The Trial' and 'No Exit' will be a really cool thing to do that will have absolutely no adverse effects on who I become as an adult." Because I was a fool. I don't think I can do a better job of talking about the endings than Aaron Voigt did, but what I can say is that if I were playing a long campaign of HELLWHALERS and was not made clear what the tone of those endings were, I think someone who didn't make the literature choices I made in highschool would be very upset.

    Now, as I said - all of those things are, in my opinion, something that makes HELLWHALERS ill-suited for long games. But for a one-shot at a con? Perfect. Literally perfect. The players who got it, got it. The ones who didn't were still along for the ride and they still got to be awful people who gambled and hunted a whale. It was a great experience.

Buy the game on ITCH or over at Plus One EXP, and if you'd like some actual plays, why not try the one-shot on Moss' YOUTUBE or the short campaign from GAME MASTER MONDAY (also available on your podcatcher of choice).

THE WASSAILING OF CLAUS MANOR

    THE WASSAILING OF CLAUS MANOR, by Mike Martens and Michael van Vleet, was the other game I'd originally gone into the weekend to run. For about the first twelve seconds of explaining the game to people, it appears like it could be any number of wholesome Christmas stories - the players take the role of servants of the estate of Santa Claus and his family and it's your duty to make sure that everyone's needs are cared for to make sure Christmas goes off without a hitch. This would be totally fine and normal were it not for the fact that reading the history of the family members reveals some darker intentions and motivations - and not just petty backstabby things, like "made a deal with an elder god from beyond time and space to be able to deliver everyone's presents" and "sell the family's valuables without being caught so you can fund a service to kidnap naughty children and ship them to the North Pole for aggressive reeducation from a young girl who is Definitely Not Krampus." You know, normal stuff.

   
    Now, I've never played Trophy and know nothing about running it, but I'm aware that The Mikes are old hat at writing Trophy incursions and this was very evident to my players over the weekend who WERE big Trophy heads - they had nothing but praise for it. From a complete outsider standpoint, I will say that the card-based generation of whose problems showed up in what order was very slick (and made all the better by the use of the official card accessories, which Tony was very kind to provide me with to use), but the ability to push problems off onto other players if you wanted to be petty almost never came up in our two hour game! It turns out, people just really wanted to deal with the challenges they were dealt. Actually, to that point, I'd like to address some deviations I made from the rules so that should you find yourself in the same situation you'll be prepared too. I will say though...maybe don't try to run a game in under three hours unless you've all played before - not to say that you can't, but you end up rushing, which led to things like:

• preparing the deck of family to be sure to include any family that players had specialty with due to their tenure at the house, but basically keeping the number of family in the deck to 3 (which was one more than half the players)
  
  
• after allowing all family members to have their first Trouble, removing one of the family members from the deck
  
  
• after those family members had their second Trouble cleared, sticking with one family member to get to their level 4 Trouble
  
  
• liberal use of stacking skills, Twists, allowing other players to assist, and giving extra Dark dice to their pool as the story got weirder and weirder

    Like I say, there was very little use of the Duck mechanic because people genuinely just enjoyed the prompts they got such that they wanted to do whatever they could to resolve them, but of the two groups I ran over the weekend, the one full of Trophy players got super into Cooking Someone's Goose near the end of our session and that ruled. I'm becoming much more a fan these days of "let the player narrate a wild and wacky thing, then roll for it" kinds of games as opposed to the crunchier games I used to play, and Wassailing definitely lets you get as wacky, petty, or gruesomely inventive as your mind will allow. Definitely worth playing.

If you want to buy it, you can grab it on ITCH, over at PLUS ONE EXP, and if you want to watch some actual plays I recommend THIS ONE from Kat The Lore Mistress and THIS ONE on the Plus One EXP channel. 

MOONLIGHT ON ROSEVILLE BEACH

 Because I am what one might refer to as "calendarically challenged," when I saw Richard Ruane asking if anyone wanted to run Moonlight On Roseville Beach during Plus One EXP's Games on Demand Takeover, I went "Oh yeah! I can do that! I'm only running 10 hours of games over the weekend, I can do four more!" In addition to driving five hours up to Philly. And five hours back. In one weekend. It was fine, but lord was I tired.

    Anyway, so Roseville Beach. Like it says on the top of the book pictured above, it's a queer game of disco and cosmic horror. Frankly if that's not enough to sell you on it I don't know what else I can do for you. On the other hand, if you need a more pointed description, it's a game that focuses on very strongly thematic playbooks, building a dice pool to handle challenges as they happen, and otherwise having everyone at the table build a narrative together along with placing very strong emphasis on relationships. I'm aware that this is not a new trend in games, necessarily, but I feel like this game is in conversation with a few other games like Monster of the Week, Triangle Agency, and The Between with regards to the narrative and mechanical impetus to honor the character's reality while also tying narrative prompts to the mechanical implementation of the game. I feel like the longer I talk about this the more in the weeds I'm getting but perhaps more succinctly I can say: game good.

    Because I only had one game of Roseville Beach to run I was really anxious to make sure it was good, but I needn't have worried - three of the players had actually been in the same boat as me insofar as they had bought the game LAST PAXU and hadn't had a chance to play but were very excited, and the other two players were two younger...friends? ("Harold, they're lesbians!") who hadn't heard of the game before but were very interested in playing. Everyone had a wonderful time building out their characters from the premade characters we had to work with, and even though out story ultimately ended up on a cliffhanger due to time it absolutely felt like we squeezed every ounce of juice out of those four hours of gaming. It was a deeply fulfilling experience.

    If you are hot and sexy and have good taste, you should prove it by buying the game on ITCH or on PLUS ONE EXP. If you want some EXCELLENT actual plays, you should either go for GnomeAnne's miniseries or the one over on The QueerXP (on SPOTIFY or whatever podcatcher you use)!

THE HAUL

    As to what games I came home with - I was very grateful to Moss for gifting me the cloth HELLWHALERS sic-bo board (and some sea glass beads, not pictured) for running the game. Likewise, very thankful to Tony and the Plus One EXP crew for giving me physical copies of The Wassailing along with its expansion and its various accessories. I was not expecting to be able to get my copies of Brindlewood Bay & Nephews In Peril that I'd funded through the The Between hypetrain, but so I did. And straight from Jason Cordova, no less! Jason, Alex Rybitski and Bran Lavigne all twisted my arm, beat me up and took my wallet to get me to buy the copies of Trophy Gold/Loom + the Trophy Character Creation Cards. With my funds only barely left intact, I meandered my way over to the Stockholm Kartell, was only slightly an embarrassing fan (we'll get to that in a second) and finally bought a copy of MÖRK BORG along with the FERECTORY expansion because I definitely needed to get a copy of DARK FORT, which was included. It is probably a good thing that I'm poor right now, because had I not been I would have spent a lot more money on a lot more games and I would have ended up having to rent a trailer to drag behind my car to get them all home.

ADAM'S TIME AS AN EMBARRASING FAN

    PAX Unplugged 2023 was one of the most important conventions I've been to in the roughly 17 years I've been going to cons. I was scared, panicking, and frankly not expecting anyone to give me the time of day because aside from fumbling my way into an ENnie thanks to a very talented group of co-conspirators, I'd done basically nothing of note at that point. It turns out I needn't have worried, because the creators I met then were extremely welcoming and it really set the tone for my 2024. The bar for 2024's PAXU was, understandably, very high, and therefore I was still unfortunately anxious. It would probably be very gauche to namedrop everyone here, but suffice it to say I spent some time telling some folks how very excited their work makes me. In particular though, I am thankful to Johan and Pelle for suffering through me talking to them about how fascinated I am by MÖRK BORG despite only just buying the game from them, because it ties into the stated premise of this blog. With the preponderance of _ BORG games, I've been interested in exploring them because it looks like their baseline framework is drawing a lot of people to it to hack it into all different kinds of genres rather than making their own games with their own identities. The idea of "silver bullet" systems - ones that people try to hack to do something vastly off of the original premise because they know the system well rather than going for an established game that already does whatever they're looking for - is something that has fascinated me for a long time, so hopefully I'll get to exploring that here in 2025.

    Anyway. Beyond fanning and fawning over at the Stockholm Kartell, I was very thankful to finally meet Alex and Bran and Jason over at The Gauntlet's booth as well as running into B Narr a few times! For those of you who were not a part of The Between's BackerKit experience, the print run fundraiser for The Between included a number of expansions from the core setting, one of which being called "Blood And Coal" and is being written by Alex and B and Wes Franks and Lin Codega! I had a wonderful time chatting with them throughout the weekend on what to expect - as someone who's wrapping up an Old Gods of Appalachia RPG actual play and who had promised that I would run "Blood And Coal" at every con I was at for a year once it comes out, to say that I am gnawing on the bars of my enclosure while I wait for its release would be an understatement. The fact that Bran had the booth looking as great as it was is a testament to the fact that everyone needs a good event planner in their employ, and of course getting to chat with Jason IRL was an absolute joy.

    

    Unfortunately, this panel was the only panel I had time to go to what with all the game running over the weekend. Fortunately, this panel fucking ripped. You'd think that talking about why you tell sad stories would be, at the very least, not a pleasant topic to speak on but honestly I found myself nodding along to everything. I think folks' backgrounds were varied enough on the writer/actor/player spread that every person had really cool things to say about the topic, and while my sleepy mind may have lost most of the particulars of the conversation (god I hope it was recorded somewhere), I can tell you that it has been rotating around in my mind ever since the panel ended. Also, this was my impetus to start listening to The Heart Is A Dungeon, and of course by the end of the prologue Rahrah had me sobbing in my car on the way to work so I'm gonna say I think they know what they're talking about on this topic.

12/12/24 EDIT: Had I been but slightly more patient, I could have included this embed of the panel! I didn't realize it was being recorded! Go watch it and have feelings about it.

OUTRO

PAXU 2024 fucking ruled. I then immediately drove home and smashed up the bumper of my car. 

Truly, my life is a rollercoaster.

Anywho, below is a picture of what my TTRPG shelf looks like these days (minus the two D&D shelves) after adding my haul to it. If you've made it this far and think I might be fun to play games with, uh...if you see something you want to play, let me know? I don't mean As Content - like, yeah, sure, if you want me on your podcast to play a game that would rule and I would love that but I more mean, like, hey, are you passionate about games and want to play one with me? Hit me up on BlueSky at @iknowadamseats.bluesky.social. 

Stay weird out there.