Story Pile: Ultra
Content Warning: Rachel Maddow.
Oh and all the Nazis.
A Game I Don’t Know How To Make
I was asked over on my patreon to consider how to make a game like:
A game that can, at least *sort of*, help people who may not be incredibly familiar with each other grow to know each other/grow closer.
Now, this is the kind of open prompt that can invite an answer that I think may feel a bit nice and homey but also, feels a bit of a bullshit dodge from me, the person providing the answer. Because, just as every game is educational, every game gives you an opportunity to understand someone, every game gives you a chance to grow to know someone else and get closer to them. And that’s true, but it’s meaninglessly true, it’s trivially true. If you asked that question, if you asked for that kind of game, then chances are telling you ‘the answer was inside you all along’ feels like I’m just avoiding the responsibility my implied expertise offers.
Plus, this person gives me money.
Which makes me feel decidedly assholey about bouncing on my responsibilities here.
With that in mind, I dedicated time to work out an answer to this kind of game idea, and I got an answer but it’s an answer my current skillset doesn’t really address. I think, knowing what I do about what webpages can do, that this is probably a game that a very skilled person could make run out of, like, a webpage, but I do not know how to approach it.
Let’s just talk about the game as a design and my mentality behind it.
Continue Reading →Defending The Defended
Discourse.
Ahhhhh!
Okay, cool, now you’ve got that out of your system, we can move on.
Continue Reading →Game Pile: Necromolds
Us Beastfolk
I am of the opinion as a designer that D&D settings are more interesting when you consider the diegetic language of the setting, and that language is best served when you do not pre-emptively position players to be racist. It may sound like a lot is loaded into that, but, as I’ve said before, consider the term ‘halfling.’ In the context of a universe, that term is almost certainly a slur, if it’s not a term chosen by the people themselves, since it positions them entirely in their relationship to the other, larger people saying that term. If the term ‘halfling’ is to not be a slur, it needs to be a term the halflings use, and then the question follows: half of what.
I’ve talked about this at length in the article on the halflings, and now we’re moving on to another term that players are going to need that I want to try and make sure isn’t a term that naturally implies every character speaking naturally is a bit racist. That term is beastfolk.
If you’re not familiar, beastfolk is a term used in a lot of D&D settings for ‘furries and near-furries.’ It’s for your anthropomorphic animals, but also for humans with some animalian traits. Often these traits need to be centered around the head; for example, Raptorans are kind of more like elves with wings, but despite having wings and talons, they’re generally not seen as ‘beastfolk.’ In a lot of ways, it’s about the face.
If beastfolk is a term the default observer imposes on the group, then that brings with it ideas of colonialism, the idea that the group doesn’t have a way to centre their own identity, and they didn’t get to choose their own name. That sucks. But on the other hand, I don’t think it’s a great idea to tell the players ‘okay, you know this term that’s in the game books and is in the fiction and is definitely a simple handle for what you, a human, can definitely use to describe these nonhumans? you need to stop using that and now use a more complex term that’s probably not as good.’
No, the solution, in my mind, is to come up with a story.
The story of why the beastfolk call themselves the beastfolk.
The Tiny God Of Christianity
I spent fifteen years in a fundamentalist Christian space, and another five trying to recover from that, reconciling what I was with what I was being shown was okay. In this time, I fervently, aggressively, desperately tried to believe in it, tried to make it so it worked for me because I was terrified of the alternative that was the reality I was slowly coming to terms with.
It was in this time, I keenly began to feel pinched at the edges by the desperate smallnes of the god of the infinite and untouchable universe.
What Do I Think of You?
Serious question.
I’ve been writing for you for a few years now. Who do I think about when I’m writing a post? And what does it mean to write ‘for you,’ for that matter? There’s clearly some personality, some identity I can conceive of as belonging to you, and I know there are things I think of when I’m writing an article.
What is there, then? What do I do when I think of you?
Let’s talk about it.
Story Pile: Arrival
Arrival is a 2016 movie about the individual experience of a very thoughtful linguist lady as humanity contends with the first engagement with an alien first contact, not in the vein of guns and bombs and tanks and planes, the way Will Smith taught us, but instead, the high stakes, deeply intense world of complex linguistic deconstruction without an existing linguistic frame of reference. And it whips, but it’s also like being bathed in wax.
It’s a language nerd movie, but I’d leave the detailed considerations of that to other people, you know, people who are experts in language. I’d recommend checking out Lingthusiasm, which goes in on the movie in depth. I’m going to try and avoid replicating anything they cover here. The only thing I’d point to that stands apart is the way that this movie demonstrates how weak our language is to discuss language we don’t have.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to talk spoilers after the fold. There’s probably some generalities that can give away things ‘about’ the movie, but instead I want to talk about what this movie thinks is reasonable and normal.
CoX: Riprap
Time to time, I write up an explication of characters I’ve played in RPGs or made for my own purpose. This is an exercise in character building and creative writing.
“Ey! Ey you! What’s your matter, eh!?”
They say that Sharkhead kids bite first. It’s a rough town with rougher industries, overseen by outsiders from St Martial and Grandville. Fact is, Sharkhead’s people have to grow up quick and grow up mean, scavengers and scroungers, trying to find some way to wind up in one of the least bad lives.
Fallon’s day job was to shift crates. And the most common thing they shifted was coral from many mining operations around Sharkhead. Do it long enough, inhale enough, and you’d wind up…
Changing.
When Fallon found they could shapeshift into a coral-armoured coralax, they did what anyone else in the Etoile would do with deniability: Go smashing their enemies, while keeping it hidden.
Continue Reading →Veganism In Pokemon
There’s so little interesting stuff you can say about food in the Pokemon universe.
Not that you can’t say stuff about it, but rather that talking about food in the Pokemon universe is a well-worn and kinda boring topic. It was so boring, to me, that when I saw the the final Unravelled over on Polygon was about Brian David Gilbert tackling that idea, it wasn’t until uh… twenty minutes ago that I finally watched it. It’s boring. It’s someting a lot of people have looked into, and it’s been written about for twenty-five years. The second game had a plot point about people eating Slowpokes, after all.
The idea that ‘people eat Pokemon’ isn’t really controversial in the game, and it also tends to bring with it a deliberately muted understanding of what it means to eat meat, or what it means to exist in the world of Pokemon in the first place.
Game Pile: Playing Factions in City of Heroes
MTG: The Tools Of 2022
2022 saw six new Magic: The Gathering sets introduced, and in that, we saw almost twenty four new mechanics with new reminder text, introduced to the game. As someone who didn’t buy a single product all year, these sets interest me entirely because of how these tools get added to my personal toolbox of ‘things to play with’ as I play around at making custom Magic: The Gathering cards.
Let’s check at them!
Towards a Cozier Internet
The number one priority of Google is keeping your attention on Google. This is not a controversial position, it’s not a conspiracy theory. The priority of the systems that relate to that create an intention towards things like a search engine, or gmail or whatever, are all just functions in the name of keeping your attention on Google. They want you looking at them so they can make sure your attention is where they can monetise it, through advertisers.
This command of attention is prime: even just being a trustworthy source of search information is secondary to the command of attention in the name of making money. I’ve talked about the form advertising takes, in that its job is not to sell you products, but to sell advertising to the people who buy advertising, and anything you do is incidental to that goal. This drive towards the retention of attention and serving the needs of advertisers is so all-consuming that Google literally does not care if people paying for their services use them for exploitative harm, like how in 2022, an advertiser made a malware fake version of widespread software package OBS. Google would happily put this above searches for OBS proper, because they paid for it.
Simply put: Google’s not great.
Neither is Twitter, a service I’ve been using pretty much constantly for nine years. In June, I’ll get a notification about my ten years on the site, even though based on the way the API is behaving, the last post I made to it was February 22, and that was something a blog software was handling. It was, for the latter part of its presence in my life, doing a very bad job of what I wanted it to do. What I wanted Twitter to do was give me an audience who I could direct to things I thought were cool; instead, it mostly became about screaming, and demanding why you weren’t also screaming.
Playing With Your Food
Do you find yourself doing this thing in games where you can end them, where you know the game is done, but you keep doing things that let you keep playing?
I’m not talking about games like Skyrim where there’s a whole instrumentation of the game being built around giving you more varieties of tihngs to discover and where you can break ‘the game’ apart into lots of smaller chunks of ‘game experience.’ In that case you can view the game at large as an archive, where the conclusion, the ‘end of the game’ is a kind of unimpressive tome in the whole arrangement of these things, but where the driving play experience you focus on is instead all the stuff that builds up to that point. Nor do I mean something like Minecraft where the game’s ‘end’ is very superficial and expects you to return to the play experience over and over inventing new reasons to want to keep engaging with it. They’re not unrelated kinds of experiences, but I really am referring to something that I’ve noticed in myself when dealing with a particular kind of digital card game.
It’s Star Realms, but it’s true of its cousin game, Hero Realms as well.
Story Pile: My Hero Academia, Season 2
You can tell the quality of a shounen series by how quickly it turns to a tournament arc in order to fill out its episodes. Tournament arcs are a break-in-case-of-emergency story beat for any game in the fighting shonen battle franchise, because while on the one hand, they give you structure, motivation, and a clearly defined sense of progression, they are also, ultimately, just a series of disconnected fights where you have to show characters being cool and explaining what they’re doing for mulitple episodes. I understand entirely why an anime might need to do a tournament arc; the manga industry is a machine that eats artists and shits manga, and when you’re doing a shounen battle series, having this kind of chained sequence of fights gives you an opportunity to fill out the audiences’ perspective and demonstrate a bunch of things like you’re filling out a guidebook. They are practical arcs, they are serviceable arcs.
You can also elevate a tournament arc! There are stories that weave (say) intrigue around a tournament arc, or where the rules of the tournament create a different demand on the characters, or if you follow only one character learning about the world through the arc — there’s a lot you can do with them… but they are also predictable and require you to set them up well with an interesting source of tension.
The first half of My Hero Academia season 2 is a single big tournament arc, and it’s shockingly mediocre.
Prototype 23.02 – Bakarina
Okay, okay, I need to do another one of these posts, the ones where I talk about the monthly prototype for February, that was Smooch Month, okay, that means it’s a standard template at this point, complaining about how hard it is to make smoochy games. Oh wait, what do you mean this time I got inspired and had a cool idea and wanted to build on that? Well, snap, what did I make?
Inspired by My Next Life As A Villainess, All Roads Lead To Doom, I devised something that was really nagging at me as a problem. See, smoochy games don’t feel to me like they benefit from being competitive (mostly). I was stuck on the question of, hey, how do I make a romantic narrative game that focuses on a relationship and choices that lead to that, that doesn’t pit players at odds with one another? How then, do I make a cooperative game about smooching?
I did it!
Continue Reading →USP-02: February’s Custom Cards
Few things can create stupid decisions like romance. Across the Palace boats, there are so many conflicting relationships, whether they be romantic or pragmatic or both, and the tempestuous manner in which these relationships are set up, secretly or publically. Of course, there may be some reason why the vampires of these Palaces, eternal and timeless, seem so enraptured by an immediate need to court – but perhaps it’s just the fashion for the time?
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains unsolicited designs of custom magic cards.
Continue Reading →Game Pile: Klotski
If you’re the right age, you might remember this old Windows 3.1 game, Klotski. Hypothetically, it’s based on an ancient genre of sliding block puzzles that may or may not date back to ‘Ancient China,’ which is typically a sign that the people writing the textbook have given up. I don’t know it by its supposedly more original name and turns out that a lot of the resources referring to it as Huorong Dao are in languages I don’t read.
It’s a block-sliding puzzle game that looks impossible at first, but you get it presented to you as if you can get the big central block out. It’s funny how, as a kid, I genuinely wasn’t sure if it was possible to solve. Think about that, there was a time when I thought it was very reasonable that someone would distribute a software package that literally could not do anything but let you play around and get frustrated with it a lot. I figured, because I couldn’t solve it, that the game was a program made to make people like me feel stupid and waste our time.
Don’t wanna talk to you about the mysterious origin of this game, though, want to talk to you about a table.
Continue Reading →How To Be: Link (in 4e D&D)
In How To Be we’re going to look at a variety of characters from Not D&D and conceptualise how you might go about making a version of that character in the form of D&D that matters on this blog, D&D 4th Edition. Our guidelines are as follows:
- This is going to be a brief rundown of ways to make a character that ‘feels’ like the source character
- This isn’t meant to be comprehensive or authoritative but as a creative exercise
- While not every character can work immediately out of the box, the aim is to make sure they have a character ‘feel’ as soon as possible
- The character has to have the ‘feeling’ of the character by at least midway through Heroic
When building characters in 4th Edition it’s worth remembering that there are a lot of different ways to do the same basic thing. This isn’t going to be comprehensive, or even particularly fleshed out, and instead give you some places to start when you want to make something.
Another thing to remember is that 4e characters tend to be more about collected interactions of groups of things – it’s not that you get a build with specific rules about what you have to take, and when, and why, like you’re lockpicking your way through a design in the hopes of getting an overlap eventually. Character building is about packages, not programs, and we’ll talk about some packages and reference them going forwards.
With Frame Fatales running, I wanted to talk about a character who has a strong presence in speedrunning, and a character that owns a special place in the heart of the community, and a character who helps people feel connected to something.
I figured what better to do, than look at a Link.
The Fastest Woman In History
Who is it?
I thought this was a pretty simple question. It feels like the kind of thing that if you punch it into a google search, you’d get a card which mentions this person moved at this speed at this time and they had these genders and you’d have to dig to page 2 to get a good result that wasn’t just mimicking that.
Man, search engines have gotten bad.
Anyway, no, I didn’t get a good answer punching it in, but I did wind up finding a bunch of interesting questions, thinking about it!
Continue Reading →February Wrapup, 2023!
Smooch month draws to a close, and with it, I understand, the ending of Winter in America. That’s got to be rough, having a smoochy romantic-vibes event when you can’t go outside because the icicles are forming on the walruses, or whatever happens in places that are cold. My whole life, I’ve only ever seen Valentines day as a thing that happens when the sun is raging high and the beautiful botanical gardens are second only to Places with Air Conditioning to go do something special with someone you care about.
Where was I? oh yes, a roundup of articles I wrote this month and reasons you, you, you might want to check them out!
Story Pile: Eat, Play, Love
Alright, we’ve talked about some anime and some interesting indie media, why not talk about the most tedious, boring, mainstream thing in the world? I recruited Fox to talk to me about the movie Eat, Play, Love, produced by the Hallmark channel.
Just so you know: It’s not a good movie.
Frost Fatales is Happening!
Or at least, it will in a few hours from when this gets posted.
Frame Fatales, if you’re not familiar, is a speedrunning marathon event run by the same crew who run Games Done Quick. It’s still a charity speedrunning event, it uses a lot of the same bumpers and plans, but it’s also designed to be a space to showcase and present runners who fit into the categories represented by the simple premise of ‘women.’ That is to say, anyone who’s a woman, whether trans or cis or gender nonconforming or nonbinary.
Continue Reading →4e: Group Flirts
Sure, let’s call it that, why not. That’s not going to be completely incomprehensible.
The skill challenge represents one of the many pieces of 4th Edition D&D technology that was underappreciated in its time and misunderstood in hindsight. The Skill Challenge was a tool that let the DM run a non-combat encounter with the same kind of group engagement that the game’s combat system normally demanded; it has a failure state represented by eventual failures, but it also serves to let players platform their own choices and express how they do things. Skill Challenges in the simplest form are ‘the group needs to succeed on X possible checks before they fail N possible checks.’ The system isn’t necessarily all that groundbreaking, but the Dungeon Master’s Guide bothered to explicate a bunch of useful, good ideas about their execution.
There are ideas you might realise are fiction first and fail forward in the 4th edition D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide, but they’re not called that, and people don’t seem to remember what these books were like. What skill challenges let you do was explicitly call for a moment when many people are trying things at the same time, and get to negotiate the fiction of what that means, what kinds of things people are doing, and how their skillsets are expressed. It’s a great system, and I wish more people were familiar with skill challenges, especially in how they do something D&D does well (induce and encourage all players to engage with simple rules tools) and patches something it doesn’t tend to do well (encourage spaces of free creative expression).
Continue Reading →Game Pile: Eyes On The Prize
Hey, Fox and I played a TTRPG about making and maintaining a fake marriage!
Shirt 23.02 – Steddie Things Shirt
First up, the design! On a shirt!
Second, the design on its own so you can look at it!
This design is something of a proof of concept. At first, the idea was that this was an idea I could port to a lot of different sets, where an identifying Ship Term (in this case ‘Steddie’, but I also considered Soriku) is surrounded by a love heart of phrases that are meant to relate to experiencing these characters in their lore space. And this is a design type I want to make more of (now I have this first one done), but at the moment, this design took a long enough time to make that my ambition to make a bunch of these ran into a wall.
The thing that may surprise you is how hard this list of text to add to this turned out to make. To make this kind of word clouding work well, I need a big variety of textwith different weights, and I had to construct this cloud myself. That meant that I also had to make the title in the middle the way I chose to. If I needed 300+ words with different appearances and weight, I was able to get to a whopping fifty.
I like this design! I like how much better I can make the next one, too.
If you want this design, it comes in three flavours, the mixed colour version, the pure red version, and a pure white version.
How To Be: Inu-Yasha (in 4e D&D)
In How To Be we’re going to look at a variety of characters from Not D&D and conceptualise how you might go about making a version of that character in the form of D&D that matters on this blog, D&D 4th Edition. Our guidelines are as follows:
- This is going to be a brief rundown of ways to make a character that ‘feels’ like the source character
- This isn’t meant to be comprehensive or authoritative but as a creative exercise
- While not every character can work immediately out of the box, the aim is to make sure they have a character ‘feel’ as soon as possible
- The character has to have the ‘feeling’ of the character by at least midway through Heroic
When building characters in 4th Edition it’s worth remembering that there are a lot of different ways to do the same basic thing. This isn’t going to be comprehensive, or even particularly fleshed out, and instead give you some places to start when you want to make something.
Another thing to remember is that 4e characters tend to be more about collected interactions of groups of things – it’s not that you get a build with specific rules about what you have to take, and when, and why, like you’re lockpicking your way through a design in the hopes of getting an overlap eventually. Character building is about packages, not programs, and we’ll talk about some packages and reference them going forwards.
Smooch month has rolled around and that means it’s time to, once again, break out the rulebooks and try to find a way to make another Ranma 1/2 character in 4th edition D&D.
CoX: Astray
Time to time, I write up an explication of characters I’ve played in RPGs or made for my own purpose. This is an exercise in character building and creative writing.
Bryce Oxton was a biology nerd in the Kings Row Community College’s Access Program for supertech lab qualifications. After school, he volunteered his time at the Praetorian shelters as a social worker, using his niche expertise to help design containment and care for super science Powers Division problems. That’s why he was there in the lab that wasn’t his, dealing with the accident that wasn’t his fault. That’s how he wound up the host of the corrosive, toxic, aggressive STRAY symbiote.
He didn’t choose to be a tentacle catboy – tentacle catboy power was thrust upon him.
And, he has found, tentacle catboy powers bring tentacle catboy responsibilities.
Continue Reading →Story Pile: My Next Life As A Villainess: All Routes Lead To Doom!
This year has reminded me of something I truly, truly love about anime as a genre: You get a self-contained story idea, usually something with a bunch of familiar anchors, and then says ‘okay, now here’s the idea we’re working with in this space.’ You get useful, familiar tools for telling a story (so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel to communicate ideas), and then that lets the story highlight what parts of it stand apart from the standard patterns.
Here’s your standard template: an anime that tells the story that plays out in your typical otome game dating sim, where the characters are divided easily into ‘the ones you want to have sexy stories with’ and ‘the ones who are rivals or hindrances to your sexy stories,’ set in a magical mid-fantasy kingdom where you get fancy outfits, princesses and magical colleges, but also there’s no conspicuous mention of plague or weird pooping habits. Then, there’s the also-standard form of it being a story focusing on a single individual who is from our world, an isekai story, or if you’re familiar with the Christian media space, Narnia-likes.
Here’s your twist: The world she’s in now is the world of a videogame she played when she was in our world, she knows how this type of game works, like the things that signal you’re on the wrong track, but she’s not in the role of the hero of the story like when she played it.
She’s the villainess.
And the villainess, in all the routes of the games, is screwed.
Ukyou And Tarou
Ranma 1/2, as may be expected of a gag sex comedy manga that ran for a decade, has a huge cast of characters. There are a host of characters who show up for exactly one story, such as some of my favourites, Herb, Shinnosuke and Ryuu Kumon, even if their appearance stretches across multiple issues. I guess I should mention Rakkyosai at this point because hey, remember Rakkyosai? No? Just me? Anyway. Technically, the near-final arc of the story, the Phoenix Mountain Arc, features a bunch of one-hit-wonder characters too like Kiima and Saffron, and oh, hey Pink and Link are in that basket too. If you haven’t read the manga, you must trust me this is a kind of impressive, like I’m doing some strange kind of wheelie on a type of vehicle you don’t understand.
Fundie Dating
I feel like this probably could afford to be a dread month theme, but hey, it’s smooch month so let’s go with it for now.
Content Warning: Religious dating in a church environment. Some mentions of domestic abuse.
