Jonny Sims

Hullo! Below there!

Jonathan Sims Horror writer, games designer and voice artist. The mind and words behind The Magnus Archives, Thirteen Storeys and Family Business. Herein may be found old ghost and horror stories, read by myself f...

Oh, go on then - Bandcamp Friday and all that.

jonathansims.bandcamp.com

Godspeed You! Stuffed Tiger

I also think that a Jumanji allows for a certain degree of back-and-forth. Even if you're sometimes trapped, you might enter, leave, then enter again, and there may be aome two way bleed. But I think a big thing for a Jumanji you are entering an artificial world.

Lets goooo

Come join!

Exactly. No-ones going stringy and getting pulled into anything!

I've had a surprising number of Isekai/Jumanji debates (tbh any number more than one is surprising), and while there are apparently a lot of nuances to it, the upshot seems to be that if you get physically sucked in its a Jumanji. The sucking is very important.

Really sorry about this, mate, but I'm pretty sure that DIE isn't an Isekai; its a Jumanji.

To be fair, while I also appreciate that, it's a choice by the publisher, rather than myself, so I'll pass your love on to Gollancz!

A new book! By me! About something 'orrible on the London Underground!
It's out in six months and I think you're gonna like it...

Always been very impressed with @demontomatodave.bsky.social's audio work

Look, I really want to listen to this one, so let's get it over the finish line, alright?

Dragonmeeting hard, or hardly meeting dragons, eh?

I always say that how good you are gives you modifiers to the roll and how hard you work affects how many throws you get, but at the end of the day its just a roll of the dice, and its always long odds. And the scary thing is you gotta keep rolling them for your whole career.

Come on, dude, that's like one practice every 2h20m - it's a pretty forgiving timeframe, surely you can manage?

Adulthood is just a neverending series of discovering your own petty derangements, isn't it?

Fucking vandalism. Had to spend some time round Battersey recently and every time I passed the old power station it was a punch in the gut how they massacred it.

If you're not hiring Nate to write words this actual moment, literally what is wrong with you? Golden opportunity to get some syllables off the best word-maniac this planet has to offer.

Truly I have lost the most important wrestling: the wrestling of the MIND

Yeah, we've been watching AEW and really enjoy a bit of Orange Cassidy

I mean, I suppose if you're the only one who's realised the human body has a vulnerability to sledgehammers, that does sort of make you more cerebral than your opponents. Or is the implication that he is using the sledgehammer to assassinate the enemy's cerebelum?

So, me and Sash have been learning about pro wrestling this year, and have been watching old shows as homework and, well, I might be missing something, but it does seem like HHH, who is billed as "The Cerebral Assassin", has the signiture move of "using a sledgehammer"...

Yeah, I'm absolutely not against critique or deep thinking about TTRPGs, it's just some people get weirdly prescriptive and borderline moralistic about it!

Oh yeah, I'm certainly not making an arguement that games can't be better or worse for what a group enjoys, and there are plenty of TTRPGs I think are bad games, but that doesn't mean a group enjoying it are wrong, and 'bad game' isn't synonymous with 'I don't like to play this way'.

And it forces you to believe other people when they say "I like this", which it seems people can really struggle with

Honestly it's so often the use of the word "objectively", or the implication of it, that bugs me in a medium that is entirely composed of big wet messy brains slamming into each other.

Weirdly, this isn't actually a specific subtweet: just seen a lot of posts over the last few months from desigers who've decided their personal taste is the Only Correct way to play or GM a game and keep misusing academic terms to justify such takes.

Like, the most basic aspect of TTRPGs is that its a whole bunch of brains imagining together as a game, meaning every combination of brains will work and enjoy things in different ways. If you don't even understand that, then I think your decrees about Good Design or Bad Design are worth nothing.

New rule: If you can look at a TTRPG table where everyone's having a good time and say "Uh, you're actually doing it wrong" or even "You're actually wrong about how much fun you're having", then I don't have to respect your opinions on game design.