t-oppenheimer

[t-oppenheimer]

At least tumblr has a strong right of exit. I have detonated the games blog. I am going to leave this blog up for posterity. I am not going to continue uploading promotional material on either this blog or @novelnewscap. I wish you all well, and I wish you would look for me on Bluesky, on which I have actual prospects as a writer.

There was a spiteful screed I was preparing to type on here but you know, it occurred to me that I don't have an audience that would be offended. I hope to see you on bluer pasture.

Surprise be mine, but tumblr is not an incredibly hospitable place for fighting game posts, so I'll be changing @t-oppgames 's purpose to be about my gaming interests generally. Fortunately, inspired by @songsandsagas 's blog, I am thinking of making it my solo ttrpg play, and updating there. Hopefully I remember to switch blogs effectively!

If you liked my posting about fighting games-- or just want to see more of me and my writing in shorter form-- Bluesky has apparently become very hospitable to fighting game content and myself. Look for me @t-oppenheimer.bsky.social .

[t-oppenheimer]

Unfortunately, animorphs fanfiction is not praxis.

This site isn't really doing anything for me anymore. Will finish obligations but yannow.

I'm choosing to vague post because the op is probably addled in a fashion. But unbelievable.

[t-oppenheimer]

reposting for salience.

I'm not gonna be the kind of scumbag who tells you to reblog these five facts at one time or else I hate you and want to stab you in the eyes. I'm an afro-american and I have my own problems.

There's a tragedy in that when I was picking out my major for college I had thought it would give me the tools to be right about everything. Actually, I was already right about everything, but it does go a ways to giving me some authority to speak beyond being overbearing. It eats me up inside that I have nothing to offer those brothers and sisters in the strip, nothing to do but to stand aside, offer some pennies and watch their oppressors make it meaningless.

There's a point where it stops even being about "doing something because you know in the future you'll be able to say you did something" and moves into "and so what if I did? I will never meet my own standards because the whole time it was about striving".

If you wanted to know what's happening in the world right now, people have been hollering from the rooftops for decades now. It does seem especially dire now, though. I took too many naps this evening and just wanted to lie it all out like this. Power to the people, survival is your first prerogative. Answer to no one but yourself.

[t-oppenheimer]

We're gonna go back in time and murder Sigmund Freud

I hate the term Oedipus Complex and Oedipus jokes related to deliberate incest so much because like, do they even know how that story goes??

He didn't know Jocasta was his mom. He didn't intentionally seek her out to fuck her. In fact, when he found out that's what happened he was pretty disgusted and upset with that revelation.

But people love to make Oedipus jokes when there's deliberate incest in the case of Game of Thrones and similar situations and it's so frustrating.

[t-oppenheimer]

Surprise be mine, but tumblr is not an incredibly hospitable place for fighting game posts, so I'll be changing @t-oppgames 's purpose to be about my gaming interests generally. Fortunately, inspired by @songsandsagas 's blog, I am thinking of making it my solo ttrpg play, and updating there. Hopefully I remember to switch blogs effectively!

If you liked my posting about fighting games-- or just want to see more of me and my writing in shorter form-- Bluesky has apparently become very hospitable to fighting game content and myself. Look for me @t-oppenheimer.bsky.social .

[t-oppenheimer]

Ahhh the monomyth. I watched a really, really good video on it, but unfortunately the channel went down :c

Do have this archive, fortunately. But I wish we at least know why she left.

I am looking at the hero’s journey and I was scared OoS didn’t fall into it, but it does in a really funny way. As in. The Meeting the mentor part. Instead of like actually being a useful mentor Rory kinda (mentally) just beats the shit out of Hana it’s awesome

[t-oppenheimer]

Renown and a Selection of my Inspirations

The final main class of the game is Renown, and in so explaining this I divulge that a massive influence were those console rpgs published through the mid 2000s, when I was a child. As Hero Quest and subsequently very modern rpg design sensibilities such as those thrust with Apocalypse styled games became expunged, I found the pearl of what I wanted the game to be inside.

I grew up with Disgaea 1 and 2 on the Playstation 2, though I would certainly prefer the latter for reasons which are outside the scope of this writing. On reflection, once that 'edge' was taken off my sardonics took center stage for the tone, and my memories of these games informed the way I described mechanics and the way lines and radii were implemented. Reviewing this, for the second revision of the game I may institute actual line and area rules for square based grids. I don't believe WotC and Paizo have any patent on their rules, so my own cribbing will be possible.

I wonder if my love for jokes like these shouldn't fill a psychoanalyst's notebook. As an important diversion from Nippon Ichi's work, while I embraced the characters being essentially 'bad to the bone', I did take care for flavoring most dynamics in the group as non-hierarchical. It is fine and well for srpgs to have protagonists and mechanically underline a caste system. In my game, however, it is only enemies who are placed in strange and cruel scenarios for the sake of some triangulated benefit! For most characters...

Now here is an easily forgotten relic of the time. I surely forgot it-- only reminded incidentally by watching Hazel's video "Cozy Anime RPGs" (linked and timestamped to relevant section). Yet I was enamored by the elevator pitch and needed to capture that precise energy. A character so self absorbed and entitled that reality warps around their ego? The very highest echelons of represented power for a boutique game system like Mage: the Ascension handed as a justified-in-narrative accessibility option? Just handed off at the beginning of the game? This inspiration must be recaptured.

An aside which I place here because I fear there will be no better place for it in all the world. At the beginning of the game, after receiving your impetus to adventure, the following is said: "You took a small sum of money, hardly enough to be called pocket change really, and dashed outside". Subsequently, the protagonist begins the game with 9,999,999 G. This is the maximum amount of money you can hold and easily enough to purchase every piece of equipment in the game and plenty of consumables as well. Honestly ranks top 5 in my 'video games jokes' list alongside GLaDOS rebuking Wheatly for insulting Chel after having heckled her in a similar way throughout the entire front half of the game. Forgive my digression.

This is where Renown comes from. The effect I hoped to get across is that for a character to reap the rewards of this 'awe inspiring' power, they had to invest disproportionately into it and its trees. This is why characters receive no Luck Counters until REN 2. The ideal is that a character which makes the most of this strange branch of mechanics have less access to the entire rest of the game, they are relying exclusively on the absurd benefits that come with being 'privileged'.

The Renown skill tree is larger than the rest, thirteen skills compared to the eight most get. This reinforces the opportunity for overinvestment and gives plenty of avenues to express the specific 'flavor' of entitlement, whereas most other specialists get their expression primarily through weapon customization. Many rules of the game-- if they do not exist expressly for the purpose-- are subverted by the various utilities Renown offers. The freedom of the privileges (easily compared to Paizo's recent implementation of lore) dovetails directly into contradiction of things like the turn order and limitations of the reserve inventory. The game will inevitably polarize around the utility of the privileged specialist, which I hope meets that design goal.

Now that we have the classes done away, I'll do some basic housecleaning and elaborate on some design prerogatives captured in the first chapter of the book.

[t-oppenheimer]

In sad news for my audience of 20 or so, there is likely going to be a definite termination of my forays into fiction / hobbyist writing. I never cared so much that it never turned up dough. I had a fantasy in the back of my mind that once I got a degree of recognition, I'd give all my work the wings to fly in the world without my interference or litigation anyway. As it stands, writing (or my writing) is a craft which does not stand by itself without volume much, much greater than I can offer while taking classes contributing to a stable-ish career. I will not be sullen if my total reach is only some hundred in grand total, though I wish I could have seen the wonder on their face as they pieced through my ideas.

These are the plans as they stand:

You have seen me post essays breaking down the philosophy of Spray and Pray's design. I intend on releasing it together in one document and releasing it for free, along with releasing all rights to the OBE engine through Spray and Pray as a sort of 'system reference document'. I am still very proud of my working through the puzzle of it's design and I hope that people will iterate on it and maybe make sure those numbers are fun at all.

A friend of mine I will leave unnamed expressed interest in illustrating with me some sort of light novel featuring 'wizard babes in bikinis'. I have left it an outline as they hadn't gotten back to me about it and it would certainly not be the first time I had to shelve a whole lot of effort because I planned around someone who insisted that they could work pro-bono against my desires but never actually had the resources to meet the project. If the collaboration is fruitful, you will know.

I am going to do what is in my power to see the first 'part' of Journal's of Caer published. Writing a full gamebook around totally unproven rules is inherently daunting, and although I already have an outline, sudden expenses has hemorrhaged my commission slush fund. I believe I have enough material to go ahead with a somewhat less flashy version of the book now.

At some point when I graduated I intended on publishing some of my undergraduate philosophy essays because-- in case you're somehow not familiar with me-- I have incredible hubris and am convinced that I am often very right and have prescient things to say on everything. It will be as easy as formatting what already exists, only I would want to wait until my undergraduate course work is actually done.

If there is some project which utterly grips me which I know I can complete within a week's time, you may see some free projects similar to Hypnosis as a Social Theory pop up.

If the situation changes, my mind will too. But a constructive murder is being tightened around my neck by the week and by the end of 2026 I will have need to make a plan to either afford medicine, be somewhere I can afford medicine, or shrivel up and die in my own urine in a way which will inconvenience the fewest people.

Spray and Pray: Recorps Corps is already my damaged, fraying at the edges magnum opus. It's a lovely little clockwork devil I know can march proudly with a few tune ups I never had the resources to give it. Please do inform me by whatever means comfortable if you 'get it' whatever that will mean for you.

[t-oppenheimer]

A thing which I didn't work on for half of a year is now free on my itch page, to get a taster of some of my writing.

A free thing is now out!

[t-oppenheimer]

Every time an uncritically held political stance somehow inevitably crawls back onto my feed, in truth.

"... No matter who!" is a form of anti-intellectualism, too.

[t-oppenheimer]

This is true, but I think it is important context to add that it is also engineered! This trend can easily be tampered with both by upsets in the electoral spheres and overt intervention from key actors (likely the OPEC states). Do not take 'normalcy' for granted-- it is never unwise to hedge bets and prepare for turbulence in sane, pro-social ways.

economic growth at a few percent a year has been a great projection for a long time. People say that we're reaching some limit due to depletion of natural resources or we're running out of land or whatever and they've been wrong every time so far, as technology exceeds the limits assumed in their projections. And then for every new technology, well not every one but a lot of them, there have been people predicting it will bring about a new age of wealth beyond all prior expectations (you could call it "radical abundance" to use the title of one of Drexler's books). And they've been wrong every time so far. Meanwhile the economy has kept growing by a few percent each year. The margin between the current economy and the real Malthusian limit is wide, yet growth towards that limit remains stubbornly on-trend, so the people forecasting that growth will simply continue more or less as usual have always been right. ("more or less as usual" includes what we currently consider wide variation, like let's say from 1% to 10% growth; it excludes plateaus as we hit a limit due to natural resources, and also excludes stuff like doubling every 18 months as Robin Hanson anticipates for a robot economy)

[t-oppenheimer]

This looks sweet!

Holding a Halloween sale because why not :B

Up until November 3rd, all paid projects on my itch.io are now 40% off. Or you can get all of them as a bundle for an even more reduced price of $10 USD.

[t-oppenheimer]

I and at least one other person when someone says "I just feel like it wouldn't work in the real world because"

[t-oppenheimer]

All That's Beautiful, The Mental Divide

To proceed apace, no conversation can be had about prominent fantasy rpgs without discussing the original racial science underscoring 'mental stats': the failed hypothesis that there are human beings who are more capable of reason, of retaining information and applying it as well and those who are less. That, moreover, there must be a singular, objective and quintessential trait which is fixed and measurable within any given human and, when all of humanity is honestly and earnestly compared, a Normal distribution will occur. This explicit application of the theory, most thankfully, has become entirely gauche in the imperial core, and the latest rpg material I've read it reproduced is classic World of Darkness material (such as the earliest editions of Vampire the Masquerade). The bastard children of that IQ remains with us today, however.

A key component of contemporary rpg design are inherent opportunity costs. To excel in one area means to have sacrificed in another, and this I do not object to. It creates interesting and engaging design space where a person discovers what compromises they are willing to make to bring their flawed and all-the-more human character to life. I only question "stupidity" as a valid flaw and drawback.

We may think our society enlightened in our abandonment of IQ, but we are surrounded, indeed inundated, with its descendants. We will keep critique of the field of psychology brief as this is ultimately RPG design discourse, but I encourage the reader to reflect on our society's pleas to engage with archetype making such as the Myers-Briggs, or Gardener's more immediately evocative "Intelligence types". Just like IQ before it, there is no empirical basis and ascribing these ideas comes out to advanced, well funded astrologies.

Consider the Student of War Feature for the Battle Master Archetype of the Fighter class in WotC's most recent product: the essence of a fighter who applies his superior knowledge to his martial prowess. Two additional proficiencies, one of which is exclusively for the ribbon. By personal experience one would be better off using the Eldritch Knight archetype, whose abilities at least actually are guaranteed to key off of Intelligence-- but then WotC has never bridged the martial-caster divide so at that rate consider why one should restrain themselves to 1/3rd casting benefits for nothing but the 'vibes'.

Wisdom and Charisma have both seized upon the domain of Intelligence and all three come away malnourished for it. RAW Charisma's skills have miniscule application in the archetypical dungeon environment. If a facilitator permits any use of Charisma skills to completely bypass a combat challenge, then I am afraid your group is no longer playing Dungeons and Dragons! I don't know how to define what they would be playing, but I sincerely recommend such a group stop engaging in their Calvinball and play Fabula Ultima instead, a game whose mechanics actually support an ethos where combat is a fail state. Wisdom-- I weep for thee-- is sort of a magical defense stat but otherwise just reserves a variety of recollection tasks to Clerics and Druids even though nothing about the mechanics or writing of WotC's products should imply that the practice of any spell caster is materially different than any other. Once again, Fabula Ultima addresses this issue with sterling clarity.

To hell with the whole poisoned tree, I say! The first thing to fix is the whole abandonment that these traits are fixed at all, secured with the Litered progression system which will be the subject of a future writing. These things don't slowly grow with time and effort, but can explode in potential over the matter of seconds depending on the context. This firmly erases all allegory drawn to our unfortunate, real life counterparts inventions of a definite intelligence.

Technical and Beauty are both much closer to personal invention than Athlete and Precise: to prevent Rhetorics as a spell casting ability from becoming dominant, I divided its supposed duties in half. Technical represents those abilities one could obtain in an institution or from theory alone: creation and recollection. Beauty represents skills which are more contextual, mysterious and require an 'x-factor': coercion, negotiation, soothing and performance. Then in combination these both contribute back into a final "Rhetorics" score which becomes directly useful in combat.

Next will be the last word on my classes and that single stroke I might be proudest of: that final niche of "renown".

[t-oppenheimer]

Not that the remarks herein aren't valuable but damn I should assign homework to MY followers.

FMA is fascinating because there aren't many works about what it means to be an atheist and a heretic to a god that you can not only see, but who has personally snatched body parts off of your living body and made fun of you for it.

[t-oppenheimer]

Athlete, Compression, The Physical Split.

So begins the implicit critique of a popular system: What exactly constitutes physical acumen? That is a philosophical question which must be raised whenever we reproduce this trope of Strength, Dexterity and Constitution. Do humans, as they grow and train out, grow hardier and more pain tolerant without endurance and flexibility to match? I would hope that every time someone weight trains they do stretches beforehand and eat bulk carbs and protiens afterward. And while there are people with strength who lack fine motor function and the other way around, these two things are gained in tandem with experience and one is typically only lost in traumatic, disabling events.

So why have these? It's not for the monsters sake-- for although there is something to be criticized with the 'half-assedness' of symmetrical design when it comes to monsters (all player stats but meaningless equipment, level and arbitrary actions) these splits also reveal frustrations. Should amorphous creatures such as the Gray Ooze be infinitely dexterous (they are able to squeeze and bend and flex with little restriction) or not dexterous at all, for having only 'pseudopods' which lack nuanced control at all? According to WotC, the answer is 'mediocre dexterity' because the only time it ever comes up in actual play is "a fireball has been placed on top of me, despite having no where to go and not moving away from it at all would I be able to contort my body so as to diminish the damage I take from it?". Here of course, it having a '6' is literally just space being taken up for a worthless symmetry, the "-2" is what is relevant.

Pathfinder has tried to touch on this in some ways. My favorite example is the Armor Training trait exclusive to the Fighter class: this gives that character an incentive to maintain all three physical stats to emulate "the peak of physical acumen" by allowing dexterity an increasing benefit to one's strength build as they level up. One could even find a narrative springing from this unique aspect: The whelp who was once a mere town guard who knew how to keep a spear level at their waist and little else grows to find that the rigidity of their training and equipment maintenance proves more a hindrance than a boon. As they begin leveling, they tinker (or have someone else in the party) tinker and modify their equipment to work in ways only that fighter can use, and soon their plate armor isn't just any plate armor, but theirs, with the lion codpiece whose teeth functions for blade catching.

But that is that game and I am to discuss my game. Poison and disease is not a major element of the game, so Constitution is rendered almost completely vestigial. Strength does seem to be an objective thing (there is a difference between being able to dead-lift twenty pounds, two hundred pounds and four hundred pounds) but what justifies Dexterity? After sitting with it for a very long time: too much.

Dexterity controls how well one points a bow, swings a thin bladed weapon, picks a lock, sneaks across a hall and flies in the air? Preposterous. Especially in WotC's most recent products in which strength no longer holds the domain of weapon damage and modifications to your Constitution score no longer directly alters your maximum health value, Dexterity controls a disproportionate amount of the character's total acuity. This stat needs to be broken down.

The easiest angle to go about that would probably be to split fine motor control from gross motor control (you don't hear that one every day!). The strength and coordination of your arms, legs and back can be trained wholly separately from your dexterity between your fingers and... yeah, mostly your fingers. Now hands are central to the human experience so that's okay: the actual problem is likely our imagined "body" stat has is that it is almost exclusively about sports and sports related mobility. Acrobatics, maybe throwing and run speed?

Here, we can connect our "Body" stat to what remains as "Strength" because, as established before, these two seem to be trained in tandem such that there is no meaning distinguishing them. This is the summary of an "Athlete" and thus we have the final result of that thinking. But now fine motor control is only compared against directly, and has no control over secondary stats, the way Athlete determines AC.

Does anyone still have their 2014 5e DMG lying around? You might remember in the proposed "New Ability Scores" that no one ever adopted at any table. I kid, but what I say is not far off from the truth, for nothing else in the game supported either option, all implementation was by facilitator decree. If there is ever one singular sin of the most recent edition of Dungeons and Dragons, its enshrining their facilitating players to 'kinda wing it' as-- even more than a replacement-- the cornerstone of game design. In that ignored section is the ignored concept of a 'sanity' ability score which unlike the honor score is designed to support a theme plainly impossible with the game's progression. If I was an ninth level wizard and a cosmic horror tried to grab me, I'd simply teleport.

I do share the boilerplate objection to 'sanity' mechanics: tying mental health into a binary 'are you fucked up or Normal™?' is not representative of a very serious phenomenon which touches too many people to treat so lightly. Remember the tone of my game: satrical and brutal. What if instead of the Lovecraftian horror situation where you see exactly one (1) biracial person and go "WHAT THE WHAT?!?!?!?! BLBLBLBBL PFFFFFF KOOKOO; KOOKOO-- POLLY WANNA CRACKER" we went in the total other direction. A character who just loses their nerve and says "In this situation, I would fold." Throws their hands up in frustration, or decides this struggle isn't worth it and walks out of the door. It's not that you lose what you once had in a fit of irrationality, but in light of what you just witnessed you suddenly gain rationality and reconsider the stakes you actually have in this. If we maintain this 'nerves' idea, then what is strong nerves and what is weak nerves? One of the first things to go when you are frightened is your control. Fight, flight or freeze, goes the wisdom. When you jump you're liable to throw your pencil in the air, and when you're trembling you can't hold a pencil steady. This is what we tie with fine motor control to create "Precise".

We butchered conventional wisdom to place a new series of mechanics together which is easier to explain and work through while maintaining value for both and simply working. Ah-- but what we did to wisdom, and the other two, is a topic for another post.

[t-oppenheimer]

Oh, so you have a solution? No... no you just wanted to demonstrate that you're so much more clever than either the average, scandalized commentator or activist trying to do something? Okay, I'm gonna slot you riiiiiight here.

(The "nuance troll" styled anti-intellectual)