FAQ U: What is a Blorbo?

-
https://www.tumblr.com/hashtagloveloses/709450126123466753/it-seems-people-dont-understand-a-glup-shitto-is

This is a friendly response to my friend Sandro's post about blorb vs blorbos! Since people caught wind of the latter term in the TTRPG scene, there has been some confusion about what "blorbo" means—especially in how it relates to another term, "original character". Let me define both and try to go over the nuance between them.

  • Original Character: A character someone makes up. Originally, it was in the context of fan fiction or forum role-play where the character is original with respect to the media property. However, in more recent usage, the characters could be detached from any property whatsoever and are just conceptually fun characters that the creator likes to imagine.
  • Blorbo: Someone’s absolute favorite character from a work of media, that is, one over which they’re completely obsessed. The original phrase “blorbo from my shows” is about a hypothetical blorbo named Blorbo, to kind of illustrate its inherent goofiness as well as the lack of context that observers have when looking at your (Tumblr) posts about them.

It’s not until later that categories of blorbo and OC begin to converge, and never definitionally but just in that a given character might fulfill both aspects (i.e., one could be your OC and your blorbo). This tends to be most common in artist subculture, since artists will often develop character concepts they like to imagine and illustrate.

The fandom-based D&D subculture draws influence from artist subculture, both in that people are drawn to D&D actual-plays like Critical Role or The Adventure Zone to participate in the fandom, and also in that those artists may find D&D to be an interesting framework to conceptualize their own original characters in a widely familiar aesthetic context.

This character relationship trickles down to D&D players introduced to the game from participating in a fandom space. Players create characters in whose shoes they want to imagine walking, to explore situations that engage (and develop) the character's background and personality. This character is both an OC of the player's imagination, and a blorbo with whom they are completely obsessed.

The fun of D&D in this context is to create your own blorbo and put them in an ant farm with other blorbos! Players like to imagine characters with whom they can relate, and through which they can explore aspects of themselves. They have creative custody of their character in the same way that a traditional game master has creative custody of the game world, and ideally everyone works together to develop a situation that engages everyone.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Plagiarism in Unconquered (2022)

-
Image
Ultimately [UVG2E], like UVG1E, are books [sic] that long to be cut to pieces, chopped & screwed and re-arranged and re-organized and repurposed into the collected loose-leaf notes of a GM binder, to be pulled out and smoothly interjected into a Something Else. Noora Rose, “ UVG, UVG2E, and Me ” (2023-06-30) I was originally going to put this post (at least, the commentary parts) through an AI Gary Gygax translator and publish it on a friend's burner blog. However, this is too serious to be treated like a joke, so here it is instead. Staking my name on it, lol. A Something Else Unconquered (2022) is an OSR-style science-fantasy adventure game and setting by Noora Rose of Monkey's Paw Games. Originally intended to have been based on Knave , according to the 2020 Kickstarter campaign , Rose refactored it to be based on Into the Odd instead—although with significant influence from Jared Sinclair's The Vanilla Game . I previously threw Unconquered into my big OSR
Read more

OSR Rules Families

-
Image
So, here’s the thing: originally I wrote this like a fucking research article with a hypothesis, a methodology, and all that stuff. I’m not even a scientific research person. That’s my partner’s job. Not mine. So, instead of walking you through every single step I took, I’m going to take the journalistic approach and start with the big picture before I zoom into it and tell you about the little details. I read, reviewed, and statistically organized 38 different rulebooks considered to be OSR or OSR-adjacent. These include four rulebooks from TSR-era Dungeons & Dragons , as well as ten rulebooks from the 2000s and 2010s. The remaining 24 rulebooks postdate the closure of G+ in early 2019. Please refer to the bibliography at the bottom of this post for more information. After having collected and organized a dataset with ~90 variables, I found the statistical similarity between each pair of rulebooks based on that data. Finally, I ran an algorithm to determine clusters of these bo
Read more

Bite-Sized Dungeons

-
Image
Workbook Now Available On Itch! Bite-Sized Dungeons by Traverse Fantasy Edit: This whole time, I said that a first level dungeon hoard had 100 times d6 gold pieces when it actually has just 10 times d6. This means the average hoard has an XP value of 70 without gems, or ~110 with gems. By extension, the eighteen-room dungeon only has 350 XP without gems, or ~550 XP with gems. That is downright dismal and I don’t think works out with modern play sessions and party counts, so let’s pretend it said 100 times d6 anyway. I just read an article by Yora of Spriggan’s Den about extrapolating a scheme for an eighteen-room dungeon from the procedural generation rules in B/X (1981) [1]. As Yora points out, eighteen rooms is a great size for a mid-to-large dungeon or for a floor of a multi-level dungeon, and the checklist of rooms makes it easy to make sure that the final product has a variety of interesting play interactions. But, being as large as it is, it can still be a tall order on the
Read more