mokiemorty

[mokiemorty]

Comedians in the '70s and cartoons in the '90s: weird how your kids can watch violence and murder on TV but the FCC wants us dead if we say the word nipple.

Internet users in 2025: you didn't warn me that there would be erotic themes in the game you just mentioned which is fucked up because I thought it was going to be a normal "morally struggle with killing people" game but now it's gone too far :-/

[mokiemorty]

Day 226

[mokiemorty]

i bet n doesn’t even know basic info about pokémon related things. he can talk to them so he knows about their rich inner lives but like they aren’t gonna tell him ‘yeah i’m quad weak to rock and i like to set up quiver dance first ^_^’ or anything like that. i know in my heart he does not know what a trainer and battler would need to know because he shouldn’t be a trainer or battler right. what is a hyper potion. he’s banned from pokécenters anyway

[mokiemorty]

They closed the Death Wendy's over a year ago and I'm still mad about it. It was a Wendy's located in the middle of a six-way intersection, requiring many pedestrians to cross the street 3 times in a row in order to get to it

It was one of the city's top ten spots for car crashes, multiple people died there, and the service was terrible. I miss it dearly

[mokiemorty]

AWESOME GUY I GOT TO DRAW FOR MY FRIEND @slashercats HI AWSTEN :3

[mokiemorty]

welcome to my farm where I keep my dark horse my black sheep my scapegoat and my underdog. my canary in the coal mine died ages ago

[mokiemorty]

[mokiemorty]

im gonna kill myself [remembers that suicide jokes make people uncomfortable] uhh [in valley girl voice] im like soooo totally gonna blow my brains out... [waiting for polite laughter that never comes] sorry [remembering that i apologise too much and i need to work on that] No im not

[mokiemorty]

BXLLET TIME!

time for another game breakdown!

BXLLET is a ten page post-apocalyptic cowboy ttrpg. The world struggles to rebuild after catastrophe, but remnants of the past still linger. Can you build something new with the tools of the old, or are you inheriting the sins of the dead?

Mechanically, BXLLET revolves around its namesake mechanic: you begin the game with a single bullet, and can collect more as you venture through the Wastes. These bullets act like experience points, unlocking new unique abilities as your collection grows. But, of course, they're also your most deadly weapon: any bullet fired instantly kills your target. Simple, immediate, brutal.

What does that mean? Well, let's talk about it.

Something that I haven't seen remarked upon much is how combat mechanics are, functionally, a sort of censorship. Real-life violence is fucking scary, it can happen out of nowhere and leave behind a lifetime of pain and trauma. Even "safe" forms of violence, such as a shove or a slap, can and often do turn lethal unexpectedly. When we design game mechanics around violence, even those meant to be realistic or gruesome, we're putting a layer of abstraction between ourselves and the violence being depicted. We're no longer thinking of it as violence, but as a resource exchange, or a risky gamble, or an elaborate puzzle.

And to be clear, I don't think this is a bad thing! It's both useful and necessary to have, you literally can't engage with these ideas without some level of abstraction. But it is an interesting thing to think about, and it's one of the threads that led me to BXLLET. Because, when you strip away nearly every combat mechanic, when you make it all about the choice of whether or not to kill, then you start really thinking about what that choice means.

One of the most basic structures in any ttrpg adventure is "here's the bad guy who needs to be killed and then everything will be fine." And, well, that's not impossible to do in BXLLET (one of the NPC types is "Capitalist" and comes with a whole host of obstacles to put in the way of you marching into their office and shooting them in the head) but the structure of the game pushes you much more towards systemic issues. Even when there's a monster in an ivory tower exploiting the people under him, he exists within a context that's not so easily dealt with. And this goes even more for the people underneath! The bandits and scam artists and dickheads who make up the usual ttrpg combat churn are all recontextualized by this mechanic. You have to start asking yourself "what does it mean if we kill this person? What happens as a result? What scars do we leave behind by doing so?" You have to decide if it's still worth it. Sometimes, it still is. But not always.

Every time I've run BXLLET, it's forced me to think more deeply about the characters and setting I was presenting my players. It's pushed me to engage with them in a very different way, a way that I feel is more authentic because of it. And I'm not the only one! There's a host of brilliant designers who've written supplements for BXLLET, and many of them delved even deeper into this concept than I did.

And hell, that's as good a segue as any to talk about those supplements! It's truly incredible to see what folks have written for this game, ranging from over fifty new PC archetypes to fascinating new locations to whole new settings and even new games! Last I checked, there's at least 50 PC archetypes to the original game's four, and over two hundred pages of material to the original game's ten. Check them all out here:

Thanks a ton for reading all this! BXLLET is currently on sale, along with a ton of my other work! Check it out, and help me pay some moving expenses:

[mokiemorty]

[mokiemorty]

15 years of aeiou

july 17 2010

[mokiemorty]

does anyone feel the layer of plexiglass between themselves and the rest of the world or is that just a me thing

[mokiemorty]

dinosaurs are so aewsome i think they had fucking guns and shit

[mokiemorty]

[mokiemorty]

[mokiemorty]

ahaha you sly dog! you bastard! [getting a little too comfortable] you wretched fucking animal

[mokiemorty]

dinosaurs are so aewsome i think they had fucking guns and shit