Traverse Fantasy

I’ve used a bracket system for combat opponents in my home campaign for a while now. It’s been useful to pull stats and moves out of my butt without having to design monsters ahead of time, but sometimes it’s still a bit painful—I won’t extend the metaphor further than it has to go. I don’t like having to refer to the table in my head, and I imagine others wouldn’t like to refer to the table in the book either. The general problem of D&D combat is that ape together strong: many smaller opponents are stronger than one big opponent by virtue of action economy. This is balanced out by bigger opponents not losing strength as they take damage. Still though, you need to know the formula. And I think I have one? This is super similar to my abstract skirmish rules for OD&D/FMC , except generalized and looking at attack-equivalents rather than granularly modifying the output of one attack ("+1 damage per hit dice of health"). I’ve always found that annoying and kind of obsc...

I don’t know who the target audience is for this. As much as I do preach the virtues of the play culture surrounding D&D Fifth Edition , it’s with no thanks to the actual ruleset itself; and most others in this sphere don’t seem to care for either. But I had taken a Tumblr poll with my partner to assign D&D races and classes to each member of the Hermitcraft SMP on YouTube, and it got me thinking about how the latter are… messy. I think it was Chris Perkins who had expressed regret that Fifth Edition had twelve instead of just four classes, because the increased granularity meant that the classes were really finely distinguished on the basis of flavor and specialization. These distinctions could have been relegated to the realm of subclasses, but not only did Fifth Edition not do that: it further split each class into three subclasses anyway. That’s thirty-six picks altogether, leading to awkward twins like “paladin but more magicky” and “cleric but more fighty”. Not that h...

Gee, it sure is boring around here— DISCLAIMER The author wrote this article out of her interest in this hobby, and also to synthesize this with her other interests in literary, mathematical, or political theory. Any criticism in this article was written in pursuit of that interest, and it is not intended as ammunition in factional disputes nor as a personal denouncement of the individuals whose works are being criticized. The author also has no interest in petty arguments on any topics discussed in this article. —aw. Okay. Ugh. I hate when that happens. One summer in college, I took an online STEM Ethics course because it’s the sort of thing required by the school to be like, “We’re not just training anti-social freaks.” Because I’m a different kind of freak, obviously, I wrote my final as a critique of the course’s overarching ideological framework. Stakeholder theory is an approach to business management that a firm must not only consider shareholders in its decision-making, b...

Been having a stressful time lately. These are things I’ve read or seen lately and have had thoughts about (if short). Just need to exorcise. Primetime (2026) by Lance Oppenheim Was okay. Robert Pattinson is fun. I keep confusing Skyler Gisondo with Nicholas Braun. It frustrates me that people keep interpreting it as being solely about how Chris Hansen’s To Catch a Predator faltered by making a spectacle out of (attempted) sexual violence; like that is one thematic axis, but the other equally or more significant axis is about powerful people deflecting from their abuses by pointing at others’ over whom they wield control. Not only is Chris Hansen using his pursuit of justice to deflect from his own extramarital affair, but Bill Conradt (the local Texas politician who committed suicide as he was about to be raided on the show) is depicted as weaponizing anti-pervert politics the same way. Some months ago, I bought shorts from the Bummer Shop, and accidentally received the wrong pair...

There have been a lot of really thoughtful takes on magic lately, centering on significant ritualistic interactions (or even/especially transactions) with powerful beings—and I had just even gestured towards this being an angle for a tabletop Pokémon adaptation. Sorry to say that this one isn’t going to be particularly thoughtful. I realized that besides being sucky when my players run out of inspiration and can’t do magic anymore—for which my special game mommy inspiration has worked well—it feels weird for inspiration to work differently for magic than for the typical case. Magic is just fundamentally a tool, right? Tools make impossible tasks possible, and tasks already possible more so. I already have a rule that using an arcana (item which stands in for some D&D spell or school) as a normal weapon, basically like a cantrip, costs the user no inspiration; and rolling 20+ already gives a free enhancement (like casting at range or targeting all enemies in one area of effect). ...

We love to chase the idea of tabletop Pokémon, or Tablemon if you will. It’s like Pokémon but with your imagination. Who doesn’t want to escape the pixely grid of the video games (or the nasty-looking worlds of all the 3D ones except Arceus my beloved), step between those two-by-two trees blocking the world, and do fun things with those simultaneously cute/cool/lame creatures that only the realm of language can allow? Many such cases, of people trying to capture that feeling or outright adapting Pokémon (in its setting or even its rules) to a tabletop format. It just unfortunately never really pans out. I think this is because Pokémon is structurally difficult for a cooperative game. Pokémon is generically speaking a classical JRPG: you as the player control a party of characters in various situations (especially turn-based combat). Where Pokémon differs from similar games in its genre is that the player themselves has a representative outside of the party of characters: the Pokémon ...

I think I was halfway through a five-hour drive when my mind, keeping itself awake, took a strange train of thought. I’ve joked over the years (maybe not on this blog, but…) that if some consider themselves pro-life and others pro-choice, then Gxd might just be anti-life, in the sense of “fuck them kids”. Like yes, Gxd is said to know (certain) people before they are born and to even form them in the womb; but even besides (just like Adam) the point of personhood seeming to when his breath first enters them, and even besides the Torah considering the death of a fetus to be a crime of property destruction rather than murder, Gxd seems to be just fine killing people of any age cohort including adolescents, children, and infants. No judgment here. Walk with me. I wondered, then, about the plague on the firstborn in Egypt. Now, I do disagree with how most media depict the myth as specifically targeting children—since a firstborn son here is either a present or future patriarch, someone wh...