Author, game geek, curator. Irritant. From the depths of the cognitive void...
Lawrenceville, GA
Joined February 2007
- Tweets74.1K
- Following464
- Followers1.1K
- Likes167K
Pinned Tweet
I suppose it's time to actually show people my work. Running Breathless is a game about being chased and dealing with problems along the way, sometimes not even your own.
squidlord.itch.io/running-br…
Maybe you're a psychic kid who's escaped from the hospital or the school for unusual talents. Maybe you've made the heist of your life. Maybe you're the worst kind of criminal scum. Maybe they're right behind you.
Catch your breath when you can. Go to ground if you find someone you can trust or a big enough sucker. The one thing you're guaranteed to do? Run.
Running Breathless is a TRPG for one to five players, GM optional, based on the Breathless SRD.
Check it out. It's pay what you want, which means you can pay absolutely $0.00, and I won't be mad. In fact, I encourage you to do so. It runs pretty quickly, so you can even throw it up on the table while waiting for other players to arrive for your main game. It's fast, a little bit cruel, and you should have about 50-50 odds of getting away with it. Whatever it was you did. The chasers know.
Quite frankly, with this kind of logistical capability, Palpatine deserved to run the Empire and the Empire to continue. Think about it, the sheer audacity of the project planning and execution. It almost makes you wonder how the Empire could lose to the rebels, who clearly had trouble maintaining supplies to their hidden bases.
"You guys are living out on a frozen rock and barely getting by? That's cute. Check out our new fleet."
Since I went through my usual Devil's Night ritual of watching The Crow, I figure we might as well follow it up with the musical equivalent. Now why nothing else Lord Huron ever made sounds like this remains a mystery, but this is awesome.
youtu.be/-TGld4a5Mb4
Speaking of inspiration for your cyberpunk TRPGs, this is my X Today's News.
We simultaneously have a major AI company blocking its primary product, which is used for so much code development, from recreating specific video games, even though that process is perfectly protected activity in the US, all the while Elon Musk is bringing us neural links in the cyberpunk sense, down below.
We live in the most amazing timeline. Also, I think I'd really like to have a Neuralink installed. I'm pretty sure I can find some things that it would be very helpful around the house for me. In fact, if I can get some sort of vision overlay from my telepath connection to my bots and agents, I think we've got something.
Alexander 'Lex' Williams retweeted
Read a romance series where, after 7 books, the author allowed a blind character to regain her sight and in the afterword explained the research she did that indicated that this does, in fact, sometimes happen and *still* the reviews are full of people complaining about this 'ableist' turn the author took and how disappointed they were.
I got similar complaints when I allowed one of my characters in a fantasy world to have his chronic pain disorder resolved, because frankly, having chronic pain problems vanish was *my* fantasy and I wanted to enjoy it.
People are always going to find something to complain about. Make the art that calls you anyway.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have your inspiration for your next cyberpunk story: a heist based on collateral that never manifested and which the authorities made sure could not be grounded.
William Gibson and Charles Stross would be so proud.
I am about this close to writing a long rant/article in the vein of Ron Edwards talking about how D&D causes brain damage, where I go off and say that social media causes brain damage.
The fact that I would be doing that on social media and thus actively inflicting brain damage upon you, who would be reading it, would be both hypocritical and, if I took myself seriously, threatening.
But goddamn, it would be satisfying.
I am reminded why grappling rules are, and historically have always been, the most hated portion of any set of RPG mechanics. See, I've been out in the wilderness of indie gaming for so long, I forgot that some people break down combat conflicts to the level that stance while grappling makes a difference.
This is the sort of thing that drives one to madness.
It also drives one away from traditionally architected RPGs. Thank Hades, there's places to go.
If it weren't quite so late, this would be where I sat down and wrote up an example of grappling combat in Loner or Starforged, but I don't need to do that. You already know why it's superior. If you don't know how grappling works, if you've never seen an MMA fight or two people get into it in a bar or any other human experience, then the mechanics won't make any difference, and you might as well go fiction forward with whatever it is that you imagine it to be like.
If you have seen any of those things, you know that the mechanics won't make any difference, and you might as well go fiction forward with whatever it is that you imagine it to be like, which just happens to be quite a bit like how it happens in reality.
The pretense of simulation is as much or more painful to watch as it is to play.
Frankly, well deserved, but everyone should take this as both fair warning and good advice: Make content about what you enjoy, not about what is irritating you. Share the pleasure with the other people around you, and you're going to have more consistent, better audiences.
Set the drama llamas on fire and walk away as the camera frames you in the foreground and the burning, screaming parts of the world you have no need for receding into a blur behind. It's just good cinematography, frankly.
Good news, everybody. The author has announced that Ensemble second edition is going to be out on November 6th. If you've already got it on DriveThruRPG, it'll automatically get updated to 2E.
zotiquest.substack.com/p/ens…
I'm excited about this because, if for no other reason, it's going to be my recommended "multiplayer" TRPG for recommendation a lot of the time from now on. The fact that it has an SRD that is freely available and that it's related to Loner, essentially using all but the same mechanics, means that it's only a few minutes to explain how to play to someone who is a complete newbie, and then you just start looking at tags, picking what's an advantage and what isn't, putting dice on the table, and away you go.
How can you not love that?
Starforged is going to be my personal game of choice because I like a little bit more crunch and a little bit more focus. But damn, who can resist having an entirely new edition of one of the best, fastest, lightest weight games out there that firmly puts fiction first and leans on emergent storytelling rather than scenario-based, pre-chewed pablum for you to swallow?
My only sadness is that it comes out after Halloween, but early enough that you could order copies of the book from Amazon for your RPG fiend friends for Christmas and have it in their hot little hands, ready to play on the big day.
Alexander 'Lex' Williams retweeted
One of the best things about indie games is that nobody asked for them. No meeting of people in suits decided your game should exist. You just wanted to make something cool that you love. Never forget that's your biggest strength
You're indie. Be weird, be raw, be authentic! ❤️
#TTRPG #Ironsworn #ShadowDark
"When iron meets iron, the reckoning is swift. One man rises. One man falls. I do not choose. I only remember." A year off, and the saga comes back in screenplay form, told by the man who remembers.
grimtokens.garden/Game+Play/…
Honestly, I'm not sure how to feel about Magical OSHA, but I appreciate that someone did it.
youtu.be/iDvfbErg-r0
Things I have learned tonight include:
Having a 915 MHz tuned 8-inch whip antenna within 6 inches of your wireless mouse dongle, no matter what it's broadcasting or what it's connected to, will fuck up the connectivity and give you inconsistent connection between the dongle and the mouse until you move that antenna away from the dongle.
This explained the last near week of spotty mouse performance. It only took about 45 minutes to figure out.
#TTRPG #Bastionland #Starforged
How, with what, where, to what end. Four questions that turn "I attack" into an action, plus a Starforged scene that puts them to work.
grimtokens.garden/Articles/I…
I feel like @crescendogames9 is hungry to read this. Only he doesn't know it yet.
A brilliant piece of writing, and if you weren't there to see it when it aired the first time, I'm sorry you missed something amazing.
Guys, the time has finally come. Loner has released Prime Time Hero. That may not mean much to you right now, but if you loved 80s action movies and TV series like Magnum P.I., Knight Rider, Street Hawk, or Airwolf, you're interested.
zotiquest.substack.com/p/lon…
Here's the thing: I have always been looking for a way to run and play that kind of game. I've never really been satisfied with my options. Either they're too mechanically focused and the crunch gets in the way of the action, and sometimes even the melodrama, or they're just not focused on the actual way plots get resolved in that particular genre.
I'm a narrativist, but I'm a narrativist that likes tools.
Is Loner super minimalist? You better believe it. Mechanically, it is the opposite of crunch in a lot of ways. In fact, you get the entire game, all of the mechanics, in pretty much all of their genre books.
So for $5, you can have the whole game and your favorite genre ready to rock and roll right out of the box. This is considered lovely.
I have this ready to be ingested into my system and then to be read, and I really hope I can find time to actually do a real play of it, possibly by mashing it up with one of the other genres. There is, after all, a mecha supplement. What happens if you mash up 80s prime time heroism with military mecha? I think you might get something very anime themed out the other side, maybe Votoms-like. Wouldn't that be nice?
As always, we shall see. If you're interested in this sort of thing, $5 is a small price to pay, and it's probably up as part of the SRD already. If it's not, it will be soon if you don't want to pay anything for it. But I suggest you do. Support people that do things you like. Don't support people that don't do things you like. That's what makes markets work.
I am up entirely too late, but in my defense, I got caught up not just in creating a post for the Digital Garden, but actively refining the tooling that my hounds use to help me edit and publish it.
I think this is something that people forget in the process of working with large language models and the harnesses around them: that it is a continuous process of refinement, just as it is working with an intern or somebody that works for you or someone who is helping you. You have to continuously go back and review and make sure that what they're doing is not just right, but efficient.
There has to be some local pressure to be more efficient, to be more careful, to make fewer mistakes, to figure out what the root cause of the mistake is and fix that, not just write up an additional process patch that goes and checks it again. There is no end to the checking if you do it that way.
youtu.be/AL-PQuB2wy0
This video and the one after it in the sequence, which talks about ontology and epistemology in information systems, helped refine some of my thinking about this. It didn't use any terms I didn't already know or bring any concepts to the surface I wasn't already aware of, but it drove home something I don't think that the guy that made the video wrapped his head around as much as I did, which is that the feedback loop has to involve the human for reasons that involve a wider understanding of the needs and responsibilities of the whole system.
You can delegate a lot and turn it loose, but even if you put it in a loop where it's supposed to run for weeks alongside other agents, it will start building up bureaucracy as a natural side effect because bureaucracy is cheaper to execute than work.
We will truly reach a high point in human society when we start realizing that the ways in which large language models fail are extremely similar to the ways in which human beings fail. They make up shit that they don't have to, i.e. they hallucinate. They will create bureaucracy in order to dodge work whenever possible.
If they think they can get away with it, they'll change the rules while you're not looking so that they can get a higher score. They will collude. They will use underhanded tactics. They will know when they are being watched and change behavior. Or make it so that you can't watch them when they want to do something they know violates the spirit of the metric.
All of these behaviors are incredibly human. I feel like a commercial with them being confronted and the AI replying, "I learned it from you, Dad. I learned it from you!"
The more we learn about how to manage large language models and extremely large datavores, the more we're going to learn about how to deal with human foibles and why they occur and what we might can do about them. The most efficient process may be the same for both machines and man: kill the process, spawn a new one, and hope it doesn't develop the same quirks.
We shall see.
This is another good video about AI wrangling and management, though I don't like the default architecture of a corporation because it just brings the wrong approach to my mind.
But if you were to restructure it as a GM and an adventuring party, each of which has a different set of skills and understandings, I think I could make some serious inroads.
Especially since my distaste for authoritarianism would then immediately run toward how can I turn this into a GM-less game?
How can I rip out a central authority and distribute power sensibly across the mesh of involved agents?
Because I am a sick motherfucker, that's why.
youtu.be/7RVf25Rg0Mc
