Wandering Adventure Party

@Taskerland there's a lot of obvious things to be said about the dangers of dragon game's rigid, procedural aspects being forced upon people who don't choose them consciously, just don't know any better but I think it'd be worth investigating how much of this is reinforced and solidified by bad, self-taught GMing of people who just bought a D&D manual and maybe read some dungeon-oriented blogs and just ran with their assumptions borne of having played Baldur's Gate back in the day.

@Printdevil @Taskerland it really having no special frameworks or mechanics on sporing and other mushroom shit, it doesn't have some elaborate mushroom lore because it's anti-canon play-to-find-out setup, it merely told you that you can play as a mushroom and apparently you can't just pretend you're a fungus in any other game for some reason. /2

@Printdevil @Taskerland the comfort in obeying instructions from a voice of authority is a big thing these days, I wonder if it's due to the influx of new people to the hobby or a generational change or what.

It's like authorial permission for ficton being a selling point for so many games, where they go, say, "this playbook has an off-hand remark that you can be a mushroom orc" and people will go "yooo, all shroomheads must get it, easy recommendation for your fungalpunk needs" despite /1

@Taskerland personally I feel that way about all the itch plankton ttrpgs doing their own pbta-like "carried by hyperbeams" or "snorted off toilet seat" tags like they're assuming their pbta/bitd/osr reskin with 1 new idea is set to become a new tentpole system overnight.

Back when I was more actively peeved by this I've snuck this incredibly passive aggressive line into the imprint of my project that may make it or not to the final product, depending on whether I mellow out by then.

@mrundkvist be understanding, it's a medical condition one can get after inhaling too much moldy dungeon air.

But yeah, the one problem of being an amateur passion industry is that people do what feels interesting for them to design without thinking too hard about it being an externally usable product. It's like with indie videogames where sometimes people get lost in the sauce with cool interlocked systems and forget there's supposed to be space for a human player making interesting decisions.

@mrundkvist I'll give you that, investigative/mystery games are the most content > mechanics slice of the ttrpg pie.

@mrundkvist When I buy games I'm mostly about those juicy rules since I've got enough juice spilling out of my mind I rarely ever run the pre-packaged settings so for me lore and scenarios are a lot of pages that I end up plucking individual neat ideas from.

but but but big caveat here I'm terminally forgebrained and need those rules laser focused on conveying a specific genre or thing I'm thinking of gamifying. Universal systems are something you only need 1 of in your life as a backup option.

Most people who create self-indulgent fake slangs style it after sci-fi TV show lingo, censoring swears and making simple substitutions. I call them COWARDS. Where's my nonsensical in-group shibboleths? Context-sensitive parallel meanings? Unclear emotional charges that can get your ass beat? Idioms with drifting meanings?

If I'm burdening the table with the cognitive load of this bullshit, it's explicitly to let them confuse and bully players who went with undercover cops or offworlders.