#my parents are like super supportive of me

[ilistentogirlinred]

everyone in my house is shit at communicating cause we're all autistic and both of my parents were raised in homes where no one talked to each other ever so that's fun.

[lumityfication]

one thing about season 2 that i loved was imogen’s unintentional ignorance abt queerness bc she wasn’t vilified for not fully being able to understand what her friends were going through. personally, in my life i’m surrounded by people who are super accepting of queerness but not all of them are queer themselves, and i felt like it was a simultaneously funny and heartwarming representation of those friends and family members. like, you don’t necessarily have to always say the right thing for people to feel supported by you, as long as they know you’re trying and wanting to relate.

i.e. the scene w nick, charlie, and imogen after she yells at ben, when she’s like “everything would be so much easier if i was just into girls!” and they’re like “umm… not exactly but i get what you mean!”, and when she just assumes sahar is straight when she’s actually bi!! very funny but i feel like it also clearly comes from a place of love and support for her queer friends and wanting to relate to them which i thought was sweet. also when she hugs nick after he comes out to her and she says “i don’t really know how i’m supposed to react”… i just loved that moment and her admitting that felt so sweet and honest and realistic.

idk i’m just rambling and i also know that they hinted at her having a crush on sahar at the end but for most of the season she did function as the token straight friend and i really loved how they wrote her character in that way!!

[mulders-too-large-shirt]

the x files au where everything is exactly the same except mulder takes home the child neanderthal from the jersey devil episode and raises them as his own

[sabrinahawthorne]

Sorry to OP, Jack, and Aaron, but it's my turn to hijack. Because as it turns out, I've also been thinking about this, and I have an additional solution: Cultivate a Casual Audience.

I spent most of the latter half of 2024 thinking about this issue, by way of thinking about a more pressing issue for me: how to make a living doing this. I'm a disabled artist who's largely unable to work otherwise, and I'd really like to have enough income of my own that I don't always have to rely on those very supportive people in my life. Eventually, I came up with a plan.* Walk with me.

Imagine that you're starting up a local movie theater, and you're pondering the topic of audience. What kind of audiences do you want to draw for the best balance of profit and taste? It seems to me that you have three options: 1. Pander to the MCUboys. This is a super reliable audience, obviously, and they've got money to spend. The problem with this approach is that you're just further slicing the pie - sure, they're a big audience, but you're only ever going to draw a proportional fraction of them, roughly evenly split with all the other theaters in town, including the AMC downtown. Plus, you'd be tying yourself to a property that won't last forever; it's not sustainable, even if it's profitable now. 2. Pander to the Indieboys. This also isn't a great plan - sure, the indie folks are by far your most dedicated crowd. They'll show up for anything, and they'll do it regularly. But as with all indie art circles, they've been passing the same $20 around for the last decade. It's just not profitable enough to keep your business afloat. 3. Cater to a Casual Audience. As a movie exhibitor, this is easy. Everybody goes to the movies! All you have to do is do stuff other than just movies! Maybe sell food in your lobby space and fill it with seating - now it's a dinner spot, too! Or maybe sell local art, too. That way you're getting the attention of people whose focus isn't on movies, and maybe they'll decide to book a ticket to something while they're here having a meal with their visiting parents.

In my city, the local indie theater does all of that and more; they hold monthly workshops where a local artist teaches a workshop on how to do their weird niche thing. In fact, I did one last year, and it was great! About seven people showed up, and one of them was my mom. But you know something? I made a tidy little profit from tickets, and sold a few games besides.

You may have spotted the problem: that being that tabletop RPGs don't have a casual audience. This artform is stuck between two extremes: the MCU and the gorehounds. As others have pointed out - 99% of people who've heard of this medium at all have exclusively heard of D&D, including a lot of pretty hardcore, invested D&D fans. On multiple occasions, I've tested the waters by asking someone if they play RPGs, with the response being "yeah! I've been playing D&D with my friends for like three years!" and then, when I ask if they've ever played anything else, they hit me with the "there are other games? I had no idea!" It's not just that D&D is the most popular thing; it's that to most people - even those who we would consider significantly invested in the medium - D&D is the only thing. The idea that other games can exist at all is alien to a lot of folks. Pretty scary, huh?

Well, here's the twist. It's actually a super solvable problem, and you might be able to do it where you live, for free.

Step 0: First Principles Before you begin, you'll need to iron out your goals and your approach. For me, this is pretty simple - one, I don't talk about D&D. Whenever I'm talking about RPGs, especially to newbies, I straight-up act as if D&D doesn't exist unless someone else brings it up. If I need a standard fantasy RPG that's still in print, I default to Pathfinder, or something more niche if I think I can afford it.† Two, I decide right now that selling my own product is going to be pretty low on my priority list. This is for two reasons, the most relevant one being optics - I want people to feel like I really care about this hobby (which I do, to be clear), and promoting my own work when I could be spotlighting other people's games is going to clock as kind of shady to some people. Because, frankly, it is.

Step 1: Avoid Your Local Game Store Which isn't to say don't shop there, obviously. I only mean that for this little project of yours, the local store won't work. Why? Survivorship bias. Your friendly local game store is, through no fault of their own, the MCU theater. They only pay rent because they sell D&D and Magic cards - and let's be real, Magic cards are the smaller market. Don't blame them for this; they're doing everything they can, and the fact that they can afford to buy stock of Monsterhearts, or Avatar: Legends is a mark of their success. But the fact is, they're the plane that made it back. Their audience is almost entirely D&D-heads. Those aren't the people you're trying to reach. Instead, you're looking for a local art spot. A popular coffee shop that doubles as a gallery; A used bookstore with weekly storytimes and programs for local authors. Somewhere that meets these two criteria: a) they cater to a wide, casual market who do not come here for tabletop RPGs, and b) hold any kind of regular event. Poetry readings, book clubs, anything like that.

Step 2: Talk To The Owners I'll be real - this is the step where I got the most lucky. See, I was about two days into formulating this plan when my local movie theater decided to start hosting weekly board game nights. As in, anyone can show up, bring-your-own-game, play with whoever you like. For free. The opportunity fell into my lap. Even if I hadn't already done business with this place, I wouldn't have needed to bring this plan up with them. They'd just given me a free opportunity. You may not be so fortunate. In your case, then, you'll want to bring your pitch around and see who bites. In many cases, this is going to be you starting up a new event at this location, and that means a lot of responsibility on your shoulders to maintain the schedule, the marketing, etc. The thing is, though – there’s always more going on in your city than you imagine. In my experience, a lot of these local art spaces are pretty bad at advertising themselves, and all it takes is a little searching and some in-person friendships to get you in touch with something you can take advantage of. Maybe your library has some kind of regular mingling event – old-school fantasy geek meetups, or a star-trek fan group who meets every other week at the mom & pop diner. See if there’s something you can ride the coattails of, before you take the leap of organizing your own event.

Step 3: Be Prepared I made a spreadsheet. I have the next six months planned. I don’t go to every game night – instead, I show up every other week. I’m there the full two hours, no matter what. Unless I have to, I never show up alone. I bring pre-made characters, a pre-written module, pencils, paper, dice, and two dice boxes. If I have one, I bring a physical copy of that week’s game. If nobody bites, no worries – I just carry over that game to the next week, ad nauseum, until it gets played. I select for smaller games that I already own. One-pagers, zines, that sort of thing. I also select for games I think are either accessible to newbies, or which I would consider required reading. Lasers & Feelings; Roll for Shoes; Crash Pandas. I also selected my timeframe very carefully. I’d burn out if I prepared a new game with characters and an adventure every week, and people would forget about me if I did it only once a month. So it’s every other week; enough time to not stress overmuch about prep, but not so long that people forget, or quietly assume I stopped coming.

Step 4: Persist Then, I mingle. I talk to people who show up alone; I make a show of being an open table. And I ask everyone I meet: “Do you know what you’re playing tonight?” This step takes patience. A fucking lot of patience. My first two weeks (which is to say, my first full month, real-time), nobody bit. That was due to a combination of factors; for one, it was still January, and the event was pretty dead. It’s gotten better since. For another, I went alone those weeks. It felt kind of pathetic, honestly – but I knew what I wanted, and I was willing to wait for it. And it’s working. My last showing, I came with two friends, and two other people showed up. One of them told me at the end of the night that he had someone in mind to invite along. Folks, this is a long game. A really long game. My plan is to do this every other week for the rest of the year, barring a few things, and my goal by the end of 2025 is to have four, maybe five, regulars. But I know what I’m here for, and I know it’s going to take a while.

I’m cultivating a casual RPG market in my town. Because that’s really what we need, isn’t it? This is a really niche hobby, but it doesn’t have to be. Wizards of the Coast have proven, in their own slimy way, that RPGs can appeal to a huge array of people, if they’re given an open door. If you care about de-monopolizing this hobby and opening it up for more artists to be able to make a living, then our goal needs to be generating a casual gaming audience that isn’t funneled through the filter of D&D to get to the other side of indie. They need the opportunity to try out the medium from other angles. And if you’ve got the time, energy, and inclination, I think you can give it to them.

*This plan won't work for everyone. In fact, I suspect it won't work for most of us, for one reason or another. I think I'm pretty lucky both in terms of the support network I have in my private life, as well as some of the material & geographic resources at my disposal, and this solution requires all three. But I hope that some of what I outline here is transferable to other people's circumstances as well.

†Hey. Hey, look at me. Look me in the eyes. Pathfinder is indie. No, stop. Look at Me. D&D is the only mainstream RPG. I'm not kidding, and I'm not exaggerating. Please, please understand that you and I are the kinds of movie fans who think Reanimator is mainstream, okay? We're the indie freaks who are passing that $20 around. We have a tendency to lose perspective on what the average normie has heard of, let alone played. I'm begging you not to discourse about this in the notes.

Art Communities and TTRPGs

I recently read an article by @toyourstations (which you can read here) about art revolutions, both online and in physical space. It makes the point that art communities online are generally fairly insular, rarely reaching out beyond a small circle of other artists. To combat this, the article argues that you as an artist should find a way to exist in physical space around people who are not in your small group and share your art there. It's a topic that I had been thinking about a lot lately as I've been making a conceited effort to connect more people in the indie ttrpg space and encourage more community amongst artists.

I've noticed a trend that relates to both of these topics. It seems to me that people in the indie ttrpg community online rarely interact with other's works. I see in other art mediums an outpouring of interaction on even the most sophomoric works. Yet amongst ttrpg writers, I see posts of well made projects with little to no interaction or feedback. This is purely subjective and my experience may be skewing my view on the topic but it seems to hold true.

I have a few theories.

This is obviously a fairly small community, but there are at least other artists here that would have opinions about the projects they see. Are people scared to interact; to give criticism, both good or bad? You would think in such a small community of creator/artists that people would be sharing ideas and writing critique.

The most cynical theory is that creators don't want to boost up other projects as they see them as competition. There is a feeling that there is only enough oxygen in the room for one or two projects to exist and you don't want to lift up other projects when it may result in the starvation of your own.

There is also the time investment. It takes time to read and interact with ttrpgs. Playing/testing them is a whole other level of commitment. But there must be some people who at least read or skim projects. Why do they not leave comments. Does it really come down to the size of the community? Are there just not enough people interested in projects outside of their own?

----

I do feel that I need to state that this opinion is not a reflection of my personal project's engagement. I am fairly happy with how they have performed considering my size and reach. This frustration is mostly a product of seeing other projects and artist gain zero traction when I think their projects are worthwhile. This also goes beyond Tumblr as a platform. Obviously there are a million factors that play into this, but I think a community initiative to engage more with smaller works could change the landscape of the ttrpg community online.

[lightblueminecraftorchid]

the 14 year old edgelord in me keeps trying to compose deep poetry about coming to after dissociating. calm down babes. we’re all good here.

[shot-by-cupid]

My issues are on full swing tonight I am going thru the motions so can I just say how much this scene BREAKS MY HEARTTTT. I am going to put my head through a wall.

LIKE. Literally all he wants is for his stupid fucking dad to hear him out to have his back to take him seriously. All he wants is his approval. You can even see him like. Hesitate a bit before asking

Like he had to THINK about it. I am so. So certain he knew what the answer was going to be and he still went for it because he NEEDED IT. Like you don’t understand.

AND WATCHING HIS EXPRESSION FALL.

Like. You can literally SEE YOU CAN *SEE* how HARD “you’re bringing your brother down with you” HIT HIM YOU CAN SEE IT. YOU CAN FUCKING SEE IT. He internalized that shit I can TELL. And that quiet little ‘thanks for your support’ before he goes to his room CRYING SCREAMING THROWING UP CLAWING AT MY SKIN I AM SICKKKKKK I am sick. Poor baby :(

[confused-alpaca]

anxiety problem: too anxious to go to thing on my own

solution: get someone to go with me to thing

anxiety problem: too anxious to ask someone to go with to thing

solution: ??????

[stabbingandorbeingstabbed]

someone walked into me having what i thought was a private but very loud breakdown at work about the family cruise my parents are requiring me to go on for my dads retirement next may bc i have never ever wanted to go on a cruise in my life and the cheapest solo room for the one they picked is fucking $1600 for a 100sq ft closet and that's not even including airfare to get to miami OR wifi YOU HAVE TO BUY A WIFI PACKAGE to have reliable internet access what if i just fucking kill myself instead <3

[yaristari]

Part 2 in my series of rewatching my favorite 90s/early 00’s shows. (click here to see Daria’s sketch)

Home Movies is such a delight. The dialogue is fantastic, and the vibe of making your own little cinematic masterpieces out of cardboard and dreams as a kid is spot on.

It’s made by Loren Bouchard and Brendon Small. Loren Bouchard then did Bob’s Burgers, which shares the voice actor of H. Jon Benjamin as Coach McGuirk here and Bob Belcher in Bob’s Burgers. Brendon Small (who is also the main character in this show, also named Brendon Small) went on to make Metaloclypse.

[lilliemadoka]

wip where im just fuckin around with a new brush lol. won’t finish because I low-key hate it. anyway this is technically oc posting

her name is callie meteno and she’s a pokemon oc!

[mar64ds]

i think the way sans wholeheartedly supports papyrus through everything is really sweet but also very interesting for both of the characters, because i don't think sans is trying to humor him or is 'afraid to hurt his feelings' like many might think, i think sans fully trusts papyrus's own decisions and if he's ever wrong he can figure it out himself and grow from it, if anything sans really respects papyrus's choices, he doesn't think papyrus is making a bad decision by trying to be a royal guard, his brother knows himself best. papyrus also... doesn't have that much support from anyone else, sans is his only family and he barely has friends at all, i think for sans it's more important that papyrus feels supported than anything else, like i said, if papyrus is wrong about something? that's alright, he'll be okay, he'll learn from the experience, and his brother will be there for him. but for this situation, it's more important for papyrus that his brother believes in him when nobody else does than being told he's being 'naive'

[merriclo]

i feel like we, as a fandom, don’t utilize A Link Between Worlds (outside of the existence of Ravio) enough. we should talk about Gulley and the blacksmiths and irene and the fact that Legend would likely say stuff like “blew his stack” and “thataway.” albw is a great game and offers lots of interesting avenues to go w Legend’s characterization.

[toxicity-2003]

I'm gonna start saying no to things that physically hurt to do because "pushing through the pain" does not give me pride or mark my place in society

[sieglinde-freud]

if awakening ever gets a remake in the next twenty years or so my number one want is same sex marriage + still having kids but my number TWO want is a scene after lucina’s judgement where whoever is robin’s kid confronts lucina. bc like from a player’s stand point, or really even just from robin as a character, its really easy to understand lucina’s thought process, sympathize with her, and forgive her. but if you’re one of the future kids, you came back in time to save your parents (and the world i GUESS), and your friend decides that your parent, yours specifically, is expendable, thats kinda fucked up!! her thinking is valid and potentially correct from a logical standpoint, but looking at it from like morgan’s perspective, it might feel selfish or unwarranted.

but my other thing is, unless robin’s second kid is lucina (or they dont have one), i think using their other kid over morgan would be more impactful if only because morgan lost their memories of the past and doesnt have as strong of a connection with lucina as say, someone like gerome or cynthia does. if its chrom!morgan then yeah, theres the connection, but otherwise wouldnt it be fucking wild to see the perspective of someone who went back in time with their friend who promised to go back and save the world, only to find them pointing a sword at your fucking dad? literally insane where is this confrontation. number three want is fix chapter two’s map design

[ladyseidr]

and what if i finally decided on a fc for anna / mrs. em.ily. what then. ( do you love her )

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...