Rob Donoghue

Huh. Random thought.

Are any of the tabletop boardgame emulators any good for mocking up a non-physical prototype? Like, if I had an idea for a board and a deck of cards, does anything offer a virtual way to do that which is not much more work than my usual arts & crafts solution?

I think my least favorite part of recording video is that brevity is already enough work in text. I was definitely not prepared for this medium.

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I do gotta say that if anyone had told teenage me that someday I would be prepared to personally bail out an entire high school but the woman who made The Matrix did it instead I would definitely have been like “ok somebody needs their meds adjusted”

What an absolute real one. Thank you, Lilly 😭

'Paints a vivid detailed backdrop'
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I am pretty sure this does not mean what I think it means.

Yup. At its most benign it incentivizes strategic incompetence

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YouTube video by Evil Hat Productions State of the Hat - February 2026

A much better "State of the" than that other one. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz3i...

So, I discovered this week that bluesky makes it MUCH easier to download your history than X did, so I’m in the process of seeing if it might make for a leas painful way to extract my own threads for blogging. Fingers crossed.

This is a practice and policy that came from local policing -- police and prosecutors can lie to people (witnesses, suspects, etc) and they can pretend to be anyone they want. They can recruit informants who are coerced into cooperating.

This this this this THIS

It’s unfair, but I absolutely see the pattern in myself. It’s so easy to see a swing and a miss and imagine what might have been.

I think our disappointment when we don’t see it has a habit of rendering the middling into something bad in our eyes.

I think, ultimately, there’s this interpretive step where we look at someone apply a mechanical widget to their game and judge whether it feels like a good match or if it offers some new spin on the idea that improves the game, because those are the things we WANT to see.

True enough, but in that case, the hammer is more of a symptom than not. And a fairly minor one when compared to, say, using D&D for Neopets.

Yeah, that’s the really tricky part. If someone used a hammer and it was a bad match, it’s really hard to distinguish between a lazy choice and a failed experiment.

This is all subjective. I think that Quinn and I are in agreement on what the upsides and downsides are, but neither of us really KNOWS what their ratio is. So, as humans, we rely on our intuitions on that, and they differ a little, but that’s not really a big deal in the grand scheme of things.

And if you don’t know what I mean, try writing a post about clocks and wait for the snark to rise.

I am also kind of skeptical of the idea of chasing a hammer purely because it’s popular, because the kind of people who would do that are also the same people who would be super sensitive to the hipsters rolling their eyes at your decision to use a ”cool” thing.

Jumping from hammer to hammer might be trend chasing, but it is also how you build a deep toolbox.

People *might* use hammers for bad reasons, but judging those reasons is more of a mirror than a lens.

Because using a hammer is also an indication of willingness to experiment and a curiosity about other people’s ideas.

This is a good thread, but I admit that I think I’m a lot more bullish on the virtue of hammers.

I absolutely get the concerns that people might just pursue “new hotness” and implement these things without understanding, or forcing a peg into the wrong shaped hole.

And yet…

I saw a passing remark sneering about RPG theory foolery earlier, and after I finished flashing back to 2006, I think some part of me decided to respond to that by during up the dial on my bullshit. :)

Yeah, it's one of those things that I have taken for granted for so long that I occasionally need to remember that it needs to be stated out loud for folks who haven't heard it.

For all I love tense personal drama and tight social ties, sometimes it's just easier to have a giant dragon poop fall from the sky.

So...yeah. I'm lazy. I'll own that.

So, yes, I COULD run. farm game that is strongly grounded in the farm, leaning into the specifics of management and the drama of intense personal relationships in a time of scarcity.

It would probably be an awesome game.

But it would be EXHAUSTING.

It is VASTLY easier to come up with fun, engaging ideas when the range of materials I have to work with is wider. And kitchen-sink games like D&D are all about giant buckets of material.

Because, all theorycrafting aside, I also have to RUN and PLAY games.

That means coming with new, interesting things on the regular. Often, it means coming up with a LOT of things, knowing many won't ultimately matter.

This is work.

Within the sphere of gaming, my opinion has moved a lot over the years. I genuinely am a big fan of making your game what it's about and cutting away crap that you "Have to" include in favor of things that actually work for YOUR GAME.

And I still feel that way, but in a different way now.

But, as in fiction, it can also be used in purity arguments. Bullshit like, If you're playing D&D in some manner other than X, you are playing it wrong, or you should be playing another game.

So, again, valuable, but fraught.