#ttrpg community

[soulmuppet]

Some thoughts posted on our bsky yesterday that I think are relevant to share here as well. Please talk about the things you like!

If you've got a reddit account talk about games you like on r/rpg. They hate self promo over there but love hearing about new games.

Also QRT self promo posts with your own opinions / pitch.

Also also, play the games! It's fun and shares the experience of new games

[illogarithmil]

Oh cool! Not a huge AP fan but I liked LABN so maybe this'll be fun

Haha "warhammer D&D" clearly the author isn't very familiar with the ttrpg scene, since they are playing 40k this is clearly a game of Dark Heresy etc. or maybe that new D6 one

Oh... oh NO

OH NO

[secretsnowclub]

Taking a break

On Saturday, July 26th, I was filmed for approximately 15 minutes being sexually harassed, verbally assaulted, and threatened while in a train car full of people who just watched. I didn’t see their faces. I haven’t seen the footage. I didn’t turn around. I do not want to talk about it. I don’t need advice. I am not going to write about it.

I was harassed for 2+ years online because I made a video about the alt-right in TTRPGs so you’d think I’d be accustomed to this. But I guess I’m not. It’s a little scarier when they are right behind you.

I’m not okay, and I am taking a break.

I will still run my store and answer emails. I will wrap up/continue any obligations I currently have, including: Armour Astir Fulfillment, .dungeon fulfillment, and so on. I will reach out to the people I’ve spoken too about work before and talk to them personally about that. But for now I can’t take on anymore.

If you want to support me during this break, it is appreciated, but I don’t expect it. I have released a lot of games over the years and I have put them into a bundle/sale. It will be up as a way to support me for the foreseeable future. I do not have another income besides these games, both physical and digital. I have also written a lot of essays on youtube and my blog here which have links to patreon or whatever else. You can also always buy stuff from nerves.store as I will continue maintaining it.

Songbirds is still open for pre-orders. If there is any update on that front I will let you all know. Right now it is looking like a slow process, which was the plan to begin with.

I think that covers everything.

Thank you all for enjoying my work. I hope to be back in the future.

Take care,

Snow

Sale Link: https://itch.io/s/157795/snows-games-for-sale

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@snowttrpg

Store: nerves.store

[zybilna]

I am also getting into it about TTRPG design and anime over on my bluesky btw

[anim-ttrpgs]

A review for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. You can leave a 5-star review for Eureka by going to the top-right of the store page. Just note that this is one of the rating systems where anything below a 5-star counts as negative.

[whereserpentswalk]

This is also why 5e players are so weird with saftey tools. When you demand to be at a table and don't consider leaving to be a valid option, enforcing your boundaries and taking full creative control of the game are the same thing.

So many 5e players have such a hatred for anyone playing another game, that only really makes sense when you realize that 5e culture instills the expectation that you should be able to show up to any table with a character you made without input from the GM and be 100% included.

It's such a toxic mindset to just expect that you have a right to be included in the game of anyone you meet without putting any work in yourself, it's literally just entitlement to other people's art and fun. And it's so common in 5e centric spaces. It's why there's also a weird taboo in 5e circles about banning character options like species or classes, because they don't want to go through the legwork of having to get input from the party before making a character.

It's why they complain about being "forced to learn new systems" because they feel entitled to every table, so the idea that a table isn't playing the exact game they want makes them feel like something is being taken from them. It's not that they can't learn a new system, it's that to a lot of them they feel that they have a right to have your table be a place where they can play 5e. It's the exact same mindset that leads to certain cishet men hating afab people who get top surgery or go on T and/or who don't have sex with men, it's that they feel something they're entitled to from someone isn't available to them.

That's one of the main reasons why 5e fans will be so weird if you mention you play another game to them. It's this "No don't switch to pathfinder you're so pretty" mindset. They've been socialized to feel that they have a right for you and your group to play 5e with them.

Fuck Hasbro for creating such a toxic culture around their dragon game I guess.

[rookthebird]

weirdest tabletop experience i ever had

be me in 2022

download a bundle of tabletop games at 3 am

find a giant pdf labeled "act one"

it's a game played by only exactly three people on different levels of reality.

you also play alternate universe versions of your characters on different levels in reality

secrets in the book are written in mirror writing

the whole book is an in-universe preserved text by someone in a different universe

i am so into this game.

best thing i've ever read.

i tell all my friends about it the next day.

"sounds cool, what's it called?"

i can find no evidence of this game.

i can find no evidence that this game ever existed.

i'm not even sure what bundle it was in.

all my friends develop the theory that this game is a dream i had.

they tease me about The Time Bird Dreamed An Entire TTRPG That Could Only Be Read In A Mirror

i find the game three years later

it's about dreams

anyway if you wished Invisible Sun was weirder you may enjoy Disparateum by Rathayibacter

[sirobvious]

We gotta start telling people “you don’t actually like TTRPGs you just like critical role” more. Like if somebody joined a martial arts class and kept talking about signature moves and catchphrases and power slams and rivals like its pro wrestling that would be pretty fucking annoying to people who like to practice martial arts right

[quinnydoll]

being a GM is really fun because sometimes you can make your players go through some really traumatic Evangelion bullshit, but other times you can force them to go bowling for no reason

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

bad meme

[youarealwaysontime]

do you guys ever think about how Brennan doesn't include bigotry into his worlds and stories UNLESS they are requested or canonized by his players? like with pete in unsleeping city, we deal with his transphobic dad/peers but this is only because ally wrote it into pete's story. sam nightingale is trans, and we see her deal with transphobia from her label, her agent, her mother, etc., but that was sepphie's choice to include that part of the story. kristen is a lesbian and the church of helio being homophobic is part of her story that ally wanted to include.

in comparison, think about characters like riva or fig or timothy or so many others, where their identities are never relevant in any sort of homophobic or transphobic way. they just are. these are queer characters that don't face the same kind of institutionalized bigotry because unless they are important to a character's backstory and made canon by that character's player, brennan does not include it.

the reason i felt like pointing this out is bc I feel like there is a huge population of the d&d/ttrpg community that feel like the only way to make a story or setting "real" is to incorporate real-life or real-world issues into their fictional worlds. which, in some cases, does work. but they are not the only way to do it, and to do it without permission from the pc's that will suffer from it is just cruel and unnecessary. idk. just makes me smile to think about how much of a nonissue representation and queer stories are in d20

he doesn't fuck around with his representation. and I love to see it. there are a bunch of other examples that I'm just not thinking about right now so shout them out in the tags if you think of them :)

[vivtanner]

The despotic fleet, one of the main adversaries of the Dioscorian agents 🔥 The Hidden Isle

[franciscolemos]

Cosmonaut in the dark.

[secretsnowclub]

The moderately researched ttrpg iceberg.

[psychhound]

im preparing to defend my thesis on therapeutically applied ttrpgs tomorrow and im sitting here and pondering ttrpgs and how unique they are as a genre and how you might describe them as texts and objects to someone who's not too familiar

because like ttrpgs (the texts) are very creative and theyre very artistic and inspiring and beautiful and moving and they're also ... instructional manuals. lmao. yknow? theyre Technical Writing by and large unless youre looking at like a lyric game or something. the main purpose of a ttrpg text is to instruct you how to carry out a series of tasks and rituals in order to produce a desired outcome. theyre instructions on how to facilitate a specific experience

and theyre pretty unique in that as a genre (in the writing studies sense of the term - a specific type of creation with shared features, uses, and intentions)

like kind of the only way i can think to compare them to something else is if you had a play script, right

and in the play script you have a description of all the characters. and you had a description of the setting. you know how many acts there are, maybe those acts have titles. the play might give you suggestions on how to design the stage and what props to include. and then as you're flipping through it all the stage directions are there and you know which order things are supposed to happen in

but all the character dialogue is blank

you cant really look at that and say "wow ive been moved by this story" because like. well. the story isn't there yet. it's potentially easy to tell what the intent of the play is - what kind of story it's likely to tell. you can look at the set of characters and reason out what might happen if you put them all together. you might even know some of the actions that are meant to take place in this play because of the stage directions (does someone shoot a gun? do the characters cry? does everyone fall over dead or do they dance?)

but at that point, even though it's creative and maybe even beautiful, this is really mostly an instructional manual. the story hasn't been told yet. there's a lot of room to imagine and generate and create - within the confines of the instructions they've given you. surely this is art, right? but what kind of art is it?

ttrpg texts largely aren't telling a story, they are instructional manuals on how to generate a specific story in the confines of that specific game. beautiful, lovely, creative instructional manuals that are really hard to explain to anyone who hasn't been involved in the experience of generating from one before

but ... yea :) thats the best metaphor i could come up with. thesis defense tomorrow !!