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This might be a controversial take, but I think it's okay for things to be "real" in roleplaying games. Like, sure you can tell your characters secret backstory to everyone in the group out of charactger and trust them to act surprised when it's revealed in character. You can trust your players not to act on knowledge they only know because they were in the room when you were describing something only one of the characters was privy to.

But you can also pass notes, you can take one player aside to reveal secret information, you can refuse to show your character sheet to the other players. You don't need to discuss how you're going to emotionally react to things you already knew.

You can let things be real.

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Have you ever played City of Mist? It is a favorite. Somewhat tangentially, We have been looking into Troika and would love to hear if you have any experience or thoughts.

Haven't played City of Mist, but I keep hearing about it. I will probably check it out some day, but thus far the basic pitch of the game hasn't quite grabbed me. But I have been proven wrong about my first impressions of games and probably will again.

Troika is an interesting game. I have played it a couple of times while playtesting a module my friend @goblincow wrote, and honestly, I dig it! It is a very basic, stripped down fantasy RPG for the most part: a simple 2d6-based system, but what makes it feel special is that it has a lot of mechanics and setting elements that feel baroque on purpose.

Firstly, with regards to the setting elements: the game is great about worldbuilding by implication and leaving players with lots of room to fill in the gaps. And the stuff you discover is weird! There's a sword church! Dwarves are constructed, not born! There are swamp wizards!

And yeah, the mechanics definitely feel at times like they have been made kind of weird and baroque on purpose (for an example: the weird initiative system, having to convert damage rolls to actual damage on weapon specific tables, the whole list of spells and skills) to further sell the alienness of its setting. And while a lot of the mechanics are downright bizarre some of them are actually pretty effective and neat! Like how deep a character has packed a certain item into their bag being a consideration in how quickly the character can get it out!

As written I think the game would work perfectly for old-school style dungeon gaming albeit with weirder, more alien dungeons and I would very much like to try it again! My character in the game I played in was a swamp priest who taught bugs about marriage! Sadly, he died before he could take his beloved lady bug down the aisle. Poor Steve.

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I say a lot of stuff on this blog about "play another game" and I really want people to understand what I mean about that. monopolies are bad. DnD has, through marketing and business decisions and luck and capital, dominated the entire hobby in a way that no other creative genre has ever seen before.

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estrogen could’ve saved her

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Have you played STONETOP ?

By Jeremy Strandberg

Stonetop is a “hearth fantasy” tabletop RPG set in an Iron Age that never was. The players portray the heroes of an isolated village near the edge of the known world. Their adventures focus on dealing with threats to the village and seizing opportunities. These aren’t rootless mercenaries seeking fortune and glory; they’re exceptional people, taking risks on behalf of their friends, family, and neighbors.

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huh cool you hid "fuck terfs" in some art. do you materially support & include trans women though or is this effectively just a bit

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💥DIMENSION 20: NEVER STOP BLOWING UP! This explosive, action-packed, high-octane new season of Dimension 20 premieres June 26th on Dropout. Starring Brennan Lee Mulligan, Ally Beardsley, Ify Nwadiwe, Isabella Roland, Rekha Shankar, Alex Song-Xia, and Jacob Wysocki!

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I’ve had some time to marinate on FH:JY and while I certainly enjoyed a lot of aspects I found the themes of the season to be very…impotent? And I think it has to do with the world building and the mechanics of DnD.

Like, if the theme of the season is rage and how to express it in a healthy manner or allow it to totally overwhelm you, it simply does not gel with the fact that canonically all of the Bad Kids are being explicitly trained to “impose their will on the world through violence”, to quote Aguefort himself.

It’s a DnD game, largely conflicts will be resolved through combat. Which is why we can get the Bad Kids saying things like “I don’t need vengeance, I don’t need justice” in roleplay scenes, and then immediately switching into ‘combat mode’, where, in a season SUPPOSEDLY about rage getting away from you, Riz can say ‘cut off his head so he won’t be Revivified’ about another teenager, and there will be no story consequences.

Because in roleplay scenes it’s very easy to insist you do not need the blade of Ankarna, but vengeance isn’t really about your family or your friends or the people who’ve hurt you who you love. It’s about the people you hate. Your enemies. And DnD demands that enemies be killed.

The story felt unfulfilling because by the time the Bad Kids rejected Ankarna’s justice they’d already used it. Hell, they wound up revivifying the Rat Grinders but explicitly skipping over Kipperlilly. Was that vengeance? Was that justice?

And Lucy Frostblade! She didn’t express any emotions about her killers, her friends. Did the Bad Kids enact justice on her behalf? How did she feel about it? Was it just, in her eyes?

This rant is getting too long but it bothers me how Kipperlilly’s rage and violence is considered “wrong” and “bad” and she’s considered a disgrace to Aguefort when the school is EXPLICITLY FOR making children into violent outlaws. You’re telling me Arthur Aguefort wouldn’t find it hilarious that she threatened someone’s grave with a backhoe to get a good grade? Come on.

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found the fhjy postseason interview and what the fuck do you MEAN it was sinister ohhh I'm going crazy. realizing brennan lee mulligan hated these fucking kids this entire time oh my god

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Murph has never looked more like Riz than in this moment

Look at him!! the sharp edge behind the smile, the dorky but somehow cool one-liner, I can see the fangs in my mind

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we as a community did not talk about Mentopolis enough. it was so gorgeous and hilarious and clever and touching and NONE of us gave it the time it deserved. i will fr start posting nothing but Mentopolis if i have to

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gonna vent abt fhjy rn so bear with me for a second. i think the reason i like this season less than i want to is because there was very minimal character development. like don’t get me wrong there was some but there was not Nearly as much as fhsy. like i get wanting to have a campaign with starstruck energy bc they deserve for it to be fun but it’s difficult to balance that with already established characters that a wide audience already adores.

like me personally i fucking hated the balthazar and squeem bit, and i understand they couldn’t have older npcs because they’re too powerful but like. come on. you’re telling me aelwyn couldn’t have popped off a few counterspells? you’re telling me lydia didn’t get a turn womping on porter? you’re telling me the creator of the armor of ayda spell didn’t even get to use it?

also like there are Way too many loose ends here. like what about bucky and kristen’s parents? what about cassandra’s abandonment issues? why did gorgug and zelda break up in the first place? what was henry’s whole deal? what was the real backstory of the ratgrinders anyway? is baron still in riz’s suitcase? what was the point of any of the gilear curse plotline?

idk like i said don’t get me wrong i did still really enjoy the season but i have a lot of qualms with it i think

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"I like it when the rules get out of the way of roleplaying" well I don't. I like it when the rules get in the way of roleplaying. They have to actively impede roleplaying. If the rules are allowing for any roleplaying at all, they are bad rules.

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what's weird about the fantasy high drama is that like. it seems to me like people forget d&d is primarily a) a game you play with your friends and also b) luck based.

I mean it's fine to say that "nothing felt like a challenge" and "they just dominated everything and there weren't any stakes" but like. it's not as if they weren't up against huge threats. they lost the mall fight. the last stand was an onslaught of enemies. they fought a dozen dragons from an airship. the fights were hard. they're just really good. they've had very good dice luck in general this season and are all very high level and highly specialized. fig is gonna beat deception and performance checks. adaine's gonna figure out the arcana. riz is gonna succeed investigations. like. for some reason their strategical competence and wisely picked abilities are. a downside? a disappointment?

the thing about d&d that you need to remember is it's first and foremost a game. it's mostly random and it takes you down weird paths and you're playing to have fun with your friends. the dice are literally telling the story that it's their time, it's their year. they've struggled enough. they've trained enough. they're good at what they do. and in my post about the academic/domestic/personal stressors being the focus, d&d doesn't have any other system to work them out than rolling different skills. that's what d&d is. brennan set specific challenge levels for different tasks and the players strategized to prioritize which abilities they were strongest in. the challenges were there. and the players rose to them. they were both smart in their delegation of responsibilities and lucky with their dice rolls. of which, both are foundations of d&d.

don't mistake them being good players and getting lucky with there being no hardship. just because they smashed through the wall, that doesn't mean the wall wasn't strong. they were just stronger.

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ok ive slept on it i feel like i can talk about the ep better now... basically whats craziest to me is that if any of it was intentional it could be so good. i dont think wed ever actually get a season where the bad kids r protrayed as in the wrong, but if they were a little more self aware the ways that theyve also been overtaken by rage could be seen. gorgug especially, and especially because it was channeled through porter's mentorship, who the bad kids can conceptualize as manipulating gorgug but not the rat grinders. its interesting because esp w/o their favorite npcs this season the bad kids have rlly closed in on themselves and become a lot more codependent, seeming to constantly suspect anyone new of possibly betraying them. which in a meta way makes sense, cuz its players v brennan, but in universe it comes across as crazy paranoid and cliquey and theyre just so unaware of it that any way it could have come across as interesting comes across as frustrating instead. like a lot of what they do and say to the rat grinders comes across as straight up bullying, and they genuinely seem to derive pleasure from putting them down. which again, in a meta way makes sense, but in universe it makes u wonder WHY were meant to find the rat grinders dislike of the bad kids so horrible when the bad kids hatred is justified. even kipperlily at her worst thoughts -- those are thoughts she shared in therapy. are we meant to begrudge a 17 year old girl speaking to her therapist about her feelings? not even actions, literally just thoughts in her head? that she was again sharing, and probably couldve worked through if not for magical interference, confidentially in therapy? were meant to hate ruben, who doesnt even LIKE kipperlily either, who didnt start becoming the person the bad kids seem to hate until AFTER he died and was magically resurrected changed. why? oh because hes an enemy and this is a battle episode and hes on the field. ruben acting in what is quite literally self defense and being told "you were a waste of time" and having no idea whats going on and responding "what do you mean? youre killing my friends!" i swear to god if that insight check on buddy hadnt been a nat 1 i think we honestly would have gotten a whole different episode

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"the ratgrinders, traumatised and manipulated teens, could have been redeemed if that subplot was explored and developed more" and "the bad kids, also traumatised, and in a life/death situation, are not responsible for healing these fellow kids" are opinions that can and should co-exist

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Funny thing is, there is a lot of overlap between people who will say that they prefer games that support "role-playing not roll-playing" and the people who say that the one thing they like about their game of preference is that they can ignore the rules when they get in the way

There is a larger point to be found here but I'll leave it to the reader to discover it at their own discretion