🍁 Levi Kornelsen

Calling the people in charge on their shit is their actual job, and for this brief moment, they're doing it, so hey.

It seems like he's developing the habit of letting the discourse flow by while constructing tiny immaculate explosives to drop on rare occasions.

Which, you know, no complaints.

Getting into the branding thing with some "Okay, what's the point of all this?".

I'd like to see *most* of the people involved in Firefly doing more stuff with those characters in that universe.

But... The ones not on that 'most' list sure do raise an eyebrow for me.

Heads up y’all. Please check your “following” and “followers” and proceed accordingly. Not tagging anyone, just take care of yourself, maybe pass along the message.

Better / Worse can be mildly interesting when the question at hand is "What game for this specific piece of media/pitch?", though the interesting bits are always the *reasons* one is supposedly better, not the pissing contest itself.

It gets boring real fast after that unless it's a total stinker.

Comparing games to each other is often a complete waste of time. Since TTRPGs rely *heavily* on cognitive fit, games can appeal to different minds in wildly varying ways.

Comparing what a game promises to what that game delivers is very underrated and extremely productive.

(And I say that as someone who 100% thinks that work to accommodate that is an absolute good. It's just that it's RIGHT to position it as going beyond, too!)

"Not playing it as intended" is the best I can think of, but it'll sometimes get you a Death Of The Author fight.

Quoting this a second time because I want to note that I really enjoy how this framing smoothly moves the bar on "People will realistically hack your game, what are you going to do about that?" up to "work to accommodate that is an extra effort, above and beyond", without adding backdoor judgments.

I always enjoy Levi's perspectives and resources on game design, and this is no exception.

This is the precise orientation this topic needs.

...Goddamit, it's true.

Instructional Design For Tabletop Roleplaying by Levi Kornelsen Make Your Tabletop RPG Easier To Learn

If you missed the original, that's here:

More Instructional Design For TTRPGs by Levi Kornelsen A follow-up!

It's also up! It's also handy! It's also free!

It's possible this means she won't get on the eventual "pardon everyone" list, which would be delightful.

Trump fires DHS Secretary Kristi Noem after chaotic hearings: Live updates Trump announced Noem would be leaving her role at the end of the month and that she would become a special envoy for a new security initiative, ‘The Shield of the Americas’

Will this fix or mitigate anything?

Probably not, at least not in a major way.

Do you love to see it anyway?

Yes. Yes, indeed.

And it doesn't matter how many softeners come after; by then it's too late.

The reason this idea starts fights is because the *wording* of "playing it wrong" assigns a negative moral valence to the act.

Anyone can make TTRPGs. The barrier to entry is people’s perspectives of success that are encouraged through capitalistic, predatory practices.

No conspiracy or collusion or grand plan is required, only the dead-eyed opportunism of sharks, and tech has that to spare.

Ah, the future, where you will be pressured by massive price jumps to just compute on the cloud, where they can enshitten your life even more comprehensively and shove whatever the techotrash trend of the day into everything you touch to make Number Go Up.

Got my pages set up and notes dumped in for the branding zine; now shaping them into draft starting from the intro.

I swear, the energy involved in getting 6yo up, ready, and on the bus every schoolday is roughly equal to a half-day of manual work, compressed to one hour.

I mean.

I love that quote because it makes me feel much cooler than the reality.

Eventually I get to "Okay, sure, that probably makes sense", and then tend to forget the whole thing, and often the person. They're just... not important to recall anymore.

This leads to rare bits where people have a grudge, maybe even justified, and I don't remember who they are, which is fun.

How I feel when someone blocks me...

Usually I don't notice until much later? When I do notice it, well, usually I'm baffled, as the pic.

Hell, most people aren't ready for "Paul is bad BECAUSE he is a messiah".

The smell is part of the ✨Experience✨