prokopetz - Tumblr blog

[prokopetz]

@pancakes-after-midnight replied:

did they finish the homestuck game

There's two reasons that can't be it:

The Homestuck Adventure Game Kickstarter was only twelve years ago; and

They already fulfilled all the physical rewards for that ages ago. It's almost exactly the opposite of how it usually goes: instead of fulfilling the core product and running out of money for all the fancy physical add-ons they included to entice high-rolling backers, they delivered the t-shirts and tote bags and plushies and whatnot in a timely fashion and then the core product turned into vapourware.

I just got a shipping notice for fulfillment of physical Kickstarter rewards at an email address I have not used in thirteen years.

I could probably dig through my message history to figure out what the fuck this is about, but at this point I'm inclined to let it be a surprise.

[prokopetz]

#tell me youre playing a source engine game without telling me youre playing a source engine game (via @technical-magi)

Look, I'm willing to put up with a lot from a self-consciously meta liminal spaces walking sim. The inappropriate use of ray-traced specular reflection; the clearly asset-flipped androgynous white marble statues; the corridor-that-makes-four-left-turns-without-intersecting-itself bit that was impressive when Duke Nukem 3D did it in 1996 but has since become practically expected – all this I will forgive. However, that wooden ladder I just climbed clearly made the sound of stepping on metal rungs, and this I cannot abide.

[prokopetz]

Look, I'm willing to put up with a lot from a self-consciously meta liminal spaces walking sim. The inappropriate use of ray-traced specular reflection; the clearly asset-flipped androgynous white marble statues; the corridor-that-makes-four-left-turns-without-intersecting-itself bit that was impressive when Duke Nukem 3D did it in 1996 but has since become practically expected – all this I will forgive. However, that wooden ladder I just climbed clearly made the sound of stepping on metal rungs, and this I cannot abide.

[prokopetz]

req'd by @prokopetz

there's a story here i know it

(this is a secondary upload, the first had a spelling error)

text: Great, advice from Mr. "It's Not Cuckoldry If You Fuck Both Of Them"

[prokopetz]

Extremely specific kinks in fiction: I need several thousand dollars worth of equipment to act out an elaborate roleplaying scenario whose particulars are intimately linked to my childhood traumas.

90% of extremely specific kinks in reality: I feel tingly when I hear the word "passport", and for the life of me I cannot explain why.

People tend to throw out the phrase "extremely specific kinks" as though that inherently implies something transgressive, but in my experience, the overwhelming majority of extremely specific kinks are so innocuous that you could see them in public and not even clock them. For every person who can only get off to having their nipples electrocuted, there are a dozen who are volcanically aroused by seeing their partner wearing one specific pair of socks.

[prokopetz]

People tend to throw out the phrase "extremely specific kinks" as though that inherently implies something transgressive, but in my experience, the overwhelming majority of extremely specific kinks are so innocuous that you could see them in public and not even clock them. For every person who can only get off to having their nipples electrocuted, there are a dozen who are volcanically aroused by seeing their partner wearing one specific pair of socks.

[prokopetz]

I just got a shipping notice for fulfillment of physical Kickstarter rewards at an email address I have not used in thirteen years.

I could probably dig through my message history to figure out what the fuck this is about, but at this point I'm inclined to let it be a surprise.

[prokopetz]

The wild thing about being obsessed with your own DnD campaign is that there's absolutely NO fandom content for it except the stuff that you make

Like, what do you mean only six other people in the entire world have heard of Dave the Ice Elemental whose job is Freezer at the Fantasy Starbucks?

[prokopetz]

Crowdfunding spam in my inbox is trying to convince me to back the "world's fastest pocketknife".

[prokopetz]

I think we're starting to dilute the meaning of "terminally online". Like, no, it's not terminally online to have eccentric opinions about a popular TV show – people like that existed before "online" was a thing. Unless we're talking at least an "it's homophobic for gay furries to have rat fursonas because they're depicting gay people as vermin", the onlineness falls well short of terminal.

[prokopetz]

I love a fictional criminal with a complicated and tragic backstory as much as the next nerd, but there's something to be said for "criminals" where it's legitimately unclear what crimes they're actually committing because they spend most of their screen time having slapstick car chases with comically inept trench-coated police inspectors.

[prokopetz]

I love a fictional criminal with a complicated and tragic backstory as much as the next nerd, but there's something to be said for "criminals" where it's legitimately unclear what crimes they're actually committing because they spend most of their screen time having slapstick car chases with comically inept trench-coated police inspectors.

[prokopetz]

i love how you break down rpgs and i really wanna try some indie ones, but i really like crunchy mechanics i can sink my teeth into and find that a lot of the popular ones tend to be very rules light (thats not a bad thing! its just not my thing). do you know of some crunchier ones?

It depends on what kind of crunch you're looking for. Indie games tend not to be maximally crunchy in every sphere of activity the rules choose to address in the same way that big names like Dungeons & Dragons or GURPS are because they don't have the ability to throw large teams at the task of designing and writing them, so the rules-heavy ones are typically heavy in one particular area.

For example, Sarah Newton's transhuman space opera game Mindjammer is a Fate Core derivative, so its conflict resolution is fairly light, but it has one of the most baroque character creation systems I have ever seen in a published game – and I'm including shit like HERO 6th Edition when I make that assessment. Everything from a baseline human to a sapient starship to an entire planetary culture can be represented as a character with a character sheet, and you can at least hypothetically play as any of those things.

Conversely, Erika Chappell's flying-ace drama Flying Circus is an Apocalypse Engine game, and outside of aerial combat it plays roughly as you'd expect, with a handful of lightweight player-facing moves and a whole four stats to remember, but then you get into an aerial dogfight and your combat tracker sheet looks like this:

So it's really a question where you need to be very particular about what you mean by "crunchy"!

[prokopetz]

I think we're starting to dilute the meaning of "terminally online". Like, no, it's not terminally online to have eccentric opinions about a popular TV show – people like that existed before "online" was a thing. Unless we're talking at least an "it's homophobic for gay furries to have rat fursonas because they're depicting gay people as vermin", the onlineness falls well short of terminal.

[prokopetz]

I love a fictional criminal with a complicated and tragic backstory as much as the next nerd, but there's something to be said for "criminals" where it's legitimately unclear what crimes they're actually committing because they spend most of their screen time having slapstick car chases with comically inept trench-coated police inspectors.

[prokopetz]

Oh, absolutely. I'm not saying that D&D players who are unengaged at the table because the rules are too complicated or too GM-facing for their liking and would do better with a system whose mechanics are more streamlined and player-facing don't exist. I'm saying that the Venn diagram of those players and players who regard all indie games as too complicated has very little overlap. If, as a designer, you're trying to appeal to the former by addressing the criticisms of the latter, you have misidentified your target audience.

(The same goes for indie game advocacy in general. "Play another game" is a snappy sound bite, but no advocacy that's rooted in talking about the structure of a game – mechanical, narrative, or otherwise – is going to be persuasive to a player who has no interest in engaging with that structure. To them that's all "GM stuff", and therefore nothing to do with them.)

I think a lot of folks in indie RPG spaces misunderstand what's going on when people who've only ever played Dungeons & Dragons claim that indie RPGs are categorically "too complicated". Yes, it's sometimes the case that they're making the unjustified assumption that all games are as complicated as Dungeons & Dragons and shying away from the possibility of having to brave a steep learning cure a second time, but that's not the whole picture.

A big part of it is that there's a substantial chunk of the D&D fandom – not a majority by any means, but certainly a very significant minority – who are into D&D because they like its vibes or they enjoy its default setting or whatever, but they have no interest in actually playing the kind of game that D&D is... so they don't.

Oh, they'll show up at your table, and if you're very lucky they might even provide their own character sheet (though whether it adheres to the character creation guidelines is anyone's guess!), but their actual engagement with the process of play consists of dicking around until the GM tells them to roll some dice, then reporting what number they rolled and letting the GM figure out what that means.

Basically, they're putting the GM in the position of acting as their personal assistant, onto whom they can offload any parts of the process of play that they're not interested in – and for some players, that's essentially everything except the physical act of rolling the dice, made possible by the fact most of D&D's mechanics are either GM-facing or amenable to being treated as such.*

Now, let's take this player and present them with a game whose design is informed by a culture of play where mechanics are strongly player facing, often to the extent that the GM doesn't need to familiarise themselves with the players' character sheets and never rolls any dice, and... well, you can see where the wires get crossed, right?

And the worst part is that it's not these players' fault – not really. Heck, it's not even a problem with D&D as a system. The problem is D&D's marketing-decreed position as a universal entry-level game means that neither the text nor the culture of play are ever allowed to admit that it might be a bad fit for any player, so total disengagement from the processes of play has to be framed as a personal preference and not a sign of basic incompatibility between the kind of game a player wants to be playing and the kind of game they're actually playing.

(Of course, from the GM's perspective, having even one player who expects you to do all the work represents a huge increase to the GM's workload, let alone a whole group full of them – but we can't admit that, either, so we're left with a culture of play whose received wisdom holds that it's just normal for GMs to be constantly riding the ragged edge of creative burnout. Fun!)

* Which, to be clear, is not a flaw in itself; a rules-heavy game ideally needs a mechanism for introducing its processes of play gradually.

[prokopetz]

True, though I suspect that particular tendency of Animusic was at least as much a consequence of the videos being structured as tech demos as it was an artistic choice.

It is in fact very funny that a couple of dudes got so sick of waiting for Animusic 3 that they figured out how Animusic's technique of procedurally animating rigged instrument models based on MIDI input worked, wrote their own software, and started making their own original Animusic-style videos.