ehronlime
ehronlime
Aaron's things and stuff.
2122 posts
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
Last Seen Blogs
khh-pics
KHH
ijustreallylikegiraffesok
I'm Meg.
skirt-russell
disintegration
yourjadedmuse
maria elaine🌷
ecleto
ECLETO ARTWORKS
Text
A Worksheet Manifesto (Rough Draft)
The Worksheet Manifesto is an attempt to explain why I'm moving my game design toward something I can print for free at the public library and give away. It's not a scold or a call to action; I buy full-color zines and hardcover books, and I support people charging for their work. This is a personal manifesto—an exercise in self-exploration.
The first reason I pursue this is ACCESS. I want people to be able to find and play my games. (Accessibility is maybe a better word for this, but I don't want it confused with the process through which something is made easier to use for people with disabilities.)
Some of the main barriers I've seen are financial (someone can't afford my games), technological (lack of computers and/or printers makes it more complicated to read my games), and international (shipping to someone outside the U.S. is prohibitively expensive).
Combining these three elements, I realized I wanted my games to be cheap or free. The common "community copies" solution on itch.io is much touted, and for good reason, but as I tried explaining the process to friends who weren't familiar with the site (or who flat-out aren't tech savvy), many responses were confused or frustrated. So I've set most of my games to pay-what-you-want with a suggested price.
Going from computer tech to printer tech, my most recent games were laid out in black and white, without ink-sucking textures (although some still have large spots of black in the art--something I continue to consider). Many American libraries offer limited free printing, and I always hope people will "utilize" the printers at their jobs or schools. I want people to be able to easily print out my games and share them at the table or pass them to friends.
And more selfishly, I hate dealing with fulfillment and shipping. It's stressful for me, it requires money up front to print things, and I'm bad at it, which means shipments go out slow, or not at all if someone lives outside of the U.S. Creating a file that's easy to print hopefully encourages people to create their own copies.
These cheap print copies also hopefully contribute to a feeling of DISPOSABILITY. I grew up with comic books, magazines, newspapers, and mass market paperbacks, and I think these cheap, short slabs of culture helped them feel like someone could engage with them without having to be fancy or educated or in the know. (A lot of us gatekeep ourselves!)
Prices for RPGs, like so many nerd collectibles, have steadily risen at least since the start of the pandemic. Crowdfunders often capitalize on FOMO, encouraging people to go all in on deluxe hardcovers with fabric bookmarks or whatever. And if my experience working at a used game store is anything to go by, lots of those fancy editions go right onto the bookshelf, unread. Don't want to break the spine or get fingerprints on it!
And I guess I'm just against consumerism? If someone wants a nice thing, I hope they get it, but a culture of games as luxury items and status symbols is not something I'm interested in.
So if someone has a game of mine and they don't want it anymore, I hope they pass it on, put it in a little free library, or recycle it.
And those dirty little printouts of my games? I want people to touch them and write them. I want TACTILITY. This is partially a usability issue: 300-page hardcovers are hard to find information in, and they're heavy if you have to lug them to a friend's house.
So I try to design games where everything a player (including the GM) needs is on, at most, three sheets of paper. I want them to be able to spread a couple pages out and take in the shape of the game they're about to play. I want them to circle things and make notes in the margins. Moving a pencil around does wild things to your brain, the same way that picking at a guitar or molding clay does. It focuses attention in interesting ways.
And in the end, you hopefully have a personalized article of play. And if you spill beer on it, no one's worried about replacing that $50 hardcover.
Speaking of beer, I want my games to be available to and contribute to COMMUNITY. As the pandemic started, I retreated into lots of online spaces, and those were absolutely vital to my survival. But I lost touch with lots of my friends and acquaintances in my city. I want to reconnect with them.
One of my favorite cartoonists, Mark Connery, is known for drawing little zines and just...leaving them all over. Coffee shops, art galleries, bathrooms. And when I think of him, I think of an artist responding directly to the places around him. Is it sad that some of this work is probably "lost" to all readers other than the person that happens across the zine? A little bit. But I think that comes from a bad part of my brain, the part that wants to own things.
I certainly don't want the entirety of my own work collected and widely distributed. Some of those things were specific responses to specific times that I've moved past. Some were bad! But I want to keep responding to my specific times and my specific place. I want to give things to friends (even if they just pass them on or recycle them). I want to give a game to someone at a zine fest and have them recognize my name from a zine they read in a coffee shop bathroom. And maybe they'll give me a zine in return.
My last hangup is MODULARITY. First, similar to tactility, I want to be able to give a player only the rules that matter to them. Character creation and basic rules? Here's a page. And once you're familiar with that and we've entered a downtime phase, here's a page with those options. You want to start a farm? Here's a page. I want it to feel like printing coloring pages for kids or ripping out my favorite magazine articles. These are the parts that matter. And if they stop mattering, you can get rid of them.
But I also want modularity on a system level. I want to add a subsystem to game as I think of it. I want to throw in an adventure pamphlet when it comes to me. I can keep them all in a little box, like a care package from my past self, and when it's time to run a game, I can dig around like a verminous animal and build my nest out of the best bits.
In CONCLUSION, I want to reiterate that this is a personal practice, and I'm not criticizing people who work differently. I used to work differently, and in the future, I'll probably work differently again.
This is simply the way I've identified what's important to me, set that up against the things that cause me to stumble, taken advantage of the privileges I have, and tried my best to bring that all together in a way that keeps me excited about my own work.
112 notes
·
View notes
Text
CW Vim Jeturk parental abuse
47 notes
·
View notes
Text
G_Witch staff so brave for having this be Shaddiq's first scene of cour 2
#gundam the witch from mercury#shaddiq zenelli#shaddiq zenelli hot dog man#tbf no one knows it's him
15 notes
·
View notes
Photo
It’s probably been 20 years since I’ve had satay celup. Still fun! https://www.instagram.com/p/CqNI7B8S7WD/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
0 notes
Photo
Tried out Pass the Party Food with the nephews last night. It’s a solid challenge, so needed to adjust the difficulty a bit for the kids. They actually loved playing as Ziggy the dog instead of co-op. https://www.instagram.com/p/CojFYZHS2O2/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
4 notes
·
View notes
Photo
Presented without comment. https://www.instagram.com/p/CojFE2FShfy/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
2 notes
·
View notes
Photo
Happy to find another place with good Sarawak Laksa and amazing char siew, at MJ SS3 Kopitiam. https://www.instagram.com/p/Coi_h9DyvG3/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
1 note
·
View note
Photo
The Outbursts of Everett True was a comic strip that ran in papers from 1905 to 1927, wherein the aforementioned Everett True regularly beat the everliving shit out of rude people as a warning to anyone else who might consider being rude. Men have not only been taking up too much room on public transport for about as long as public transport has existed, but the people around them have been irritated about it for at least a hundred years. The next time someone tries to claim that manspreading is a false phenomenon, please direct them to this strip so that Everett True can correct their misconceptions with an umbrella upside the head.
504K notes
·
View notes
Photo
Collecting birds in Busy Beaks! https://www.instagram.com/p/CofGJjiy0Ra/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
0 notes
Photo
Joining in on committing some minor traffic offenses to have Jackson’s Burger for lunch. https://www.instagram.com/p/CoG6wCXSGL6/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
0 notes
Photo
Yeeeees tried a new chicken rice place near my parents’ place and it’s good. Love to see it. https://www.instagram.com/p/Cn_OSd3SMp4/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
0 notes
Photo
Better portioning for lunch than dinner, actually managed to sapu all. https://www.instagram.com/p/CntheJnSIyf/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
0 notes
Photo
Heroic effort tonight, but once again there was way too much food. https://www.instagram.com/p/CnrQTfZSaC_/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
0 notes
Text
My Top 10 suit rankings for Gundam Witch From Mercury Cour 1:
Chuchu's Demi Trainer
Darilbalde
Demi Trainer
Zowort
Lfrith Pre-Production Mode
Tie - Gundam Lfrith/Gundam Aerial
Desultor (In particular, Olcott's with the yellow stripes)
Tie - Dilanza Sol/Guel's Dilanza/Lauda's Dilanza
Beguir Beu
Gundam Pharact
I cheated by lumping Lfrith/Aerial together, and also the Dilanzas, but it's my list so tough luck. I like the Lfrith colour scheme more than the Aerial's. Same with the Dilanza Sol, cos it reminds me of a chubby Jesta, and the scene with it at the protest was striking.
5 notes
·
View notes
Text
Showcase Zero 2022
We did a cool (I think) thing this weekend with my regular playtesting meetup group (Playtest Zero! Tuesdays and Thursdays every fortnight!) and did a showcase of games that we've playtested in 2022.
Each participant did a short 5-15 minute presentation related to one of the games they playtested last year, and either talked about the process of designing their game or some other design topic related to their game e.g. designing ambivalence, designing for worldbuilding from small details up, designing a single set of questions, designing to reflect a culture, designing to evoke a feeling, designing to fit constraints.
I thought it was really cool, and I'm looking forward to doing it again next year :)
youtube
9 notes
·
View notes
Photo
Muahahahaha https://www.instagram.com/p/CncCwGTyRDq/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
1 note
·
View note
Text
My Favourite Tabletop Games I Played in 2022
Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands - Violence Erupts
I wrote about playing a one-shot of Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands and trying out the new Violence Erupts minigame in a previous issue of the newsletter. Then, I used it more as a jumping off point to muse about directions to push the Blood mechanic in Spectres of Brocken and about providing scaffolding for play.
However, now I just want to gush about how I really, really love Firebrands and the new minigame slots right in so perfectly and plays expertly with the themes that I love in mecha fiction, of the outsize reach that mechs, that technology, allows you and the tragedies that ensue. It also helped me push through some design ideas in Spectres of Brocken, and that's the best thing a game could do for a game designer. I've seen some more previews of updates to Firebrands through Vincent Baker's Patreon and that has me really excited for the new edition, so there's a high chance (pretty much a lock, tbh) Firebrands will return again on another end of year favourites list.
Wingspan
I finally played Wingspan this year lol. It had a lot of buzz when it released in 2019 and I figured I would eventually play it at one of the many boardgame meetups that I attended but I somehow managed to always find something else new and exciting to play and put off Wingspan because Wingspan would still be there for me, since it was so popular. Well, I managed to put it all off until 2022 and yeah it's pretty good! Jeannie loves birds a lot, so it was the perfect game for us to play together, and she's the undisputed Queen of Birds.
Reach of the Roach God
Someone could accuse me of bias since I was paid to help out with playtesting a couple of adventures for Reach of the Roach God (City of Peace and Spider Mountain Temple), and to that someone I would say, tough shit - the adventures are really, really good regardless.
It's also been quite a while since I've run fantasy adventures as I've been running a Beam Saber campaign since 2020 and I've been playtesting a mecha game, and it was just really nice to get back into that mode. I felt incredibly comfortable and supported doing it with the Reach of the Roach God adventures as it drew upon a lot of folklore that we were already familiar with, and the various random generators and bits of writing did so much to make the places and people feel so alive. I'm incredibly excited to see the final book and run the adventures again once they've gone through the refinement process.
Spectres of Brocken
Well, well, well. If you read my December newsletter reflecting on 2022 you already knew this was coming. I love Spectres of Brocken so much. I feel so lucky I get to "playtest" this game, which is just an excuse to play this game over and over with cool people. It's not a perfect game, to be sure, but it feels like the perfect game for me. It's got all the weird little mechanical toggles I like playing with, the types of scenes I like playing with, and all the themes and timeskips and tragedy and mechs that I could want.
Honourable Mentions: Mr. Face, Parks: Nightfall, Crisis, A Worried Guest, Stand Up! Hero!!!, Oldhome: Children Chasing Giants, Oldhome: Trip to Turtle City, Iseguy, DaDaGang, Depths Unfathomable, For The Other City, Corps a Corps, Meanwhile, In the Subway..., Da Xia, Stealing The Throne
#tabletop games#ttrpgs#boardgames#mobile frame zero#firebrands#wingspan#reach of the roach god#spectres of brocken
8 notes
·
View notes