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zedecksiew · 3 months

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BLOGGIES 2023 BEST BLOG POST OF THE YEAR

On 31 January 2024, the tabletop-roleplaying-game community voted for the Best Blog Post Of 2023.

Contenders were drawn from the winners of four categories. Links, as well as their very excellent acceptance speeches---more exhortations and manifestos, really!---found here:

Theory

Gameable

Advice

Review

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Anyway---you voted. Results were very close; I was constantly worried about a tie. Nevertheless, a winner emerged:

Congratulations are in order, and an acceptance speech follows.

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(Like an idiot, I didn't plan for, and therefore didn't have the time to make a bespoke prize for the overall Bloggie winner. So they'll just get a full quadtych of lino prints. Fortunately these don't look too bad together!)

PLATINUM BLOGGIE FOR BEST BLOG POST OF THE YEAR:

🔮Re-inventing the Wilderness: Part 1 - Introduction🔮 from SachaGoat

Sacha:

As an (award-winning) blogger who only started 6 months ago - I want to use this "acceptance speech" to share the 5 steps that will start your blog: 1. You don't need a cool blog name. screenname(dot)blogspot(dot)com is probably available - you can move it later if you think of a cool name. The trick here is to set it up so your ideas can go live as soon as you're happy (or tired of editing). 2. Post something. Dust off your notebook (or note-taking app) and turn those musings into a structured post with paragraphs and context. Don't have anything ready to go? Take your latest game session and write a play report or spotlight a specific moment. This will take less time than your ttrpg prep. 3. Share it! With your gaming group, ttrpg friends, community discords, xwitter/bluesky, reddit, forums etc. 4. Don't worry about the rest. I don't have a fancy blog template. I've yet to compile a sidebar or blogroll. I don't have a newsletter or patreon. 5. Continue. Your readers will contribute with comments. You will be shared in community newsletters. Peers will write posts inspired by your posts. Your ideas will be used at another gaming table. (And if you're lucky, you can win the next BLOGGIES.) If you've shared your prep with a fellow DM… if you've contributed opinions on a ttrpg discord or forum… if you've read a blog post and have a thought that builds on it… if you have any tabletop advice or ideas … 👏 Start 👏 a 👏 blog This finally brings me to the "thanks". Winning the 2023 BLOGGIES is such a wonderful welcome to this creative niche. Many thanks to the creators who encourage the community to blog (especially around June 2023, I can actually see the thread that motivated me to start). I also want to thank a community whose collective enthusiasm and support nudge me to release the next post. And finally, everyone who voted for my post over the amazing nominations this year - a huge thank you.

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On a personal note: I am really thrilled at this final result.

The BLOGGIES can come off as clique-ish. Voting is public, but "public" on the Internet generally means a circle-jerk between subculture friends, a popularity contest.

This thing began as a jokey riff on those best-tweet-of-the-year polls over on Twitter. While Prismatic Wastelands grew it into a celebration of OSR blogging culture, it still has NSR / POSR inclinations---the specific community soil it sprung from.

As host this year I tried to extend the BLOGGIES' reach. Canvassing for nominations outside the OSR space got a couple of indie-RPG designers on the finalists list. Am proud of that; we have much to learn from each other.

I made prizes---hoping that, one day, with enough dangling carrots, these awards will eventually be tasty enough for non-POSR cliques / communities to attempt a takeover? We'll see.

Ultimately: I am glad to water this sapling and watch it grow slowly. Community is made by growing trees, not building greenhouses.

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SachaGoat snagging the final win is a vindication.

Sacha's blog is new. We don't share any Discord servers. We've never spoken, hitherto; the first time I messaged him ever was to tell him he'd won the Advice category.

The BLOGGIES fulfils its purpose: to introduce folks to quality blogs; to preach the gospel and importance of blogging. Its shade is spreading.

I'm glad to get to know Sacha and his blog. (Obviously it's been added to my must-read list!) I am honoured to be passing the torch: Sacha has agreed to host BLOGGIES 2024.

Thank you, everybody. Here's to growing trees.

#bloggies2023 #blogs #ttrpgs #community

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theresattrpgforthat · 3 months

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Not a request, but of all the recommendations you have posted, how many have you actually played? Are there any that you haven't played you are interested in but don't have the time to play or people interested enough to play? Are there some games you have recommended in the past that you really didn't like or regret mentioning in hindsight?

Hello friend! According to my spreadsheets, I have recommended about 1160 different games, and played just over 60 of them. So I suppose I've played about 5% of the games that I've talked about on here, and since I've been playing games for 6 years, that averages to about 10 different games per year!

That being said, my game playing hasn't been static. I started with one system, then branched out to three, then more, then more, until 2020 when I really kicked off. According to my records, 2023 saw 30 different games hit my table!

I'd like to think that at this point, there are game systems that I'm familiar with, such as Forged in the Dark, 24XX, FATE, and the Cypher System. This means that I'm much more comfortable describing games within these families, even if I haven't played them myself. I'd say my biggest weakness is in the OSR family, because I struggle to run these types of games and haven't played in many either.

As for games that I regret mentioning - there are a few games in past recommendations that have AI art in them. I've tried to refrain from recommending games that have this art, but a few of my early recommendations were not as well vetted. There's also the Thousand Thousand Islands supplement that I mentioned in a Non-Western Fantasy recommendation that isn't necessarily a regret but not one that I will recommend again, but that has to do with a legal dispute between the creators, which arose after I mentioned the supplement.

When I build my recommendations, I try my best to put forward a number of games that might scratch the itch the requester is looking for. I don't know any of y'all well enough to know for sure what you'd like, which is why I usually try to put forward at least 3 options that might work for what you want.

I'm always going to run across more games than I can play. I've managed to narrow down my personal game goals to a Games That Intrigue Me folder on Itch.io, which you can peruse if you like! Some of those games might never find the right group but at least they're easy for me to find! There's just under 200 games in there.

#mint speaks

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r-rook-studio · 1 year

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And another campaign wraps...

Tonight, my Friday group ends our Big Eyes, Small Mouth campaign.

Our plan for the next campaign was to dive into the latest edition of Unknown Armies, but since the GMs for that game wanted more time to pick up books and plan, we wanted to do a short isekai-style campaign that would bring our favorite characters from across several previous campaigns. Those included games run with Urban Shadows, Monster of the Week, World of Dungeons, Masks, some OSR systems, Solar Blades & Cosmic Spells, CJC's WitchCraft, Night's Black Agents, City of Mists, and Good Society. We decided to go for approx. 6 sessions, and chose Big Eyes, Small Mouth since we'd hoped a point buy system would make porting characters from a lot of different games and settings doable.

It's been a lot of fun, thanks to the GMing skills of Justin and Sebastian. As someone who's very much a character creation person, though, I'm still thinking about how far I've fallen away from my own-time love of point buy. It's time-consuming and there's the constant sense that you're in an exam and there are right answers. I don't always mind time-consuming character creation, but loathe the idea that character creation should require system mastery. City of Mists does a good job of asking you to spend some time, energy, and thought on character creation while ditching the system mastery BS.

BESM's current edition tries to make this easier through kits and templates, but those are difficult to select from while still learning the rules, and are even more difficult when you're doing a short campaign with a specific focus. I poked at the rules to get something resembling the character I was modeling: the were-raven Caz from our Hudson Highlands-based Monster of the Week series. But there are several powers and abilities I tried to pick up that just never made sense in the rules, and we've gotten 6 sessions in having avoided trying to use them.

In play, the basic 2d6 task resolution works reasonably well, but bonuses are so big and wild that it's hard to know when something is likely to succeed or likely to fail, and I'm simulationist enough to think characters should have an easier time figuring out when something is a wild risk and when something is a risky but doable task.

Overall, it was exciting to get to try out BESM, a game I'd been curious about for a couple of decades without ever really trying to sit down and play it. I definitely wish we'd tried something that felt less like early Champions/Hero/GURPS in character creation, though.

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