This has come up around the CC and I think it's a common confusion: infectious licenses.

And infectious license is one which says "You can use X to build Y, but if you do, you must release Y under the same license".

There is a perception that this is what CC is and, well... The thing to remember is that Creative Commons is not a single license, but a SET of licenses. It's actually weird they're NOT more popular with gamers, because the licenses are constructed in a manner that absolutely feels like game design, by flipping different bits.

It would be really cool if the current kerfuffle ignited a new round of focus in the value of the *pitch* of a game. I see so many games whose pitch is:
1. 'It's Awesome'
2. Here is one sentence provided as if the appeal is self-explanatory
3. Pages long

Not great. For these purposes, the pitch is the reason that someone would WANT to play the game, and that may be very different from the reason you created the game.

This matters a lot because D&D's position as a default game means any other game is met with an implicit "Why?"

Not entirely sure if this needs to be done, but if it's going to be done, they certainly seem to be going about it the right way.

https://twitter.com/paizo/status/1613673064050352129

The case against is simple: Existing open licenses, especially Creative Commons, are much more mature and usable than they were when the OGL was conceived. Creating a new license is going to be a lot of work and risk for questionable reward.

But that's *definitely* not all.

I enjoy the idea of a D&D-ish game where adventuring is a terrible way to make money most of the time. A response reminded me there are two ways to play it, and I only meant one. This could absolutely describe the desperate, coin grubbing play of a funnel or Torchbearer, but I was thinking more "Yes, we adventure, but our first priority is keeping the bakery running"

One chapter on Klein's "Sources of Power" talks to the idea of stories as sources of power. In this context, "power" represents those tools we all have available to us to make decisions in a complicated world, which meant a very different take on the role of stories. Specifically, he talks about stories as means of processing complexity and conveying meaning. Real world situations are too complex to communicate full models of, so we tell stories to convey and process lessons.

Setting aside the passion that comes up any time 5e is the topic, one thing twitter has made clear to me is that one thing we really seem to lack is any kind of uniform language for which invisible knobs we choose to turn when we play. Something as simple as the DMs opinion on how to handle rests can drastically impact what 5e "is", to say nothing of a thousand other decisions around things like magic items, resources, world responsiveness and so on.

I’ve played a fair number of 5e games at this point, and every time we do a new one, I spend a part of character creation thinking *this* time I’m going to make a wizard, and I take a few swings, but it never sticks because they all feel like trash. Not that the concepts or characters are trash, rather that the game really seems to actively fight me when I try to lean into the things that make wizards interesting.

(Caveat: The game support Evokers pretty well, but that’s never beeen the thread I follow)

Good thread, despite the Beez, which puts another frame on something that you might also see framed as "Failing fast" or perhaps more broadly, being agile. Regrettably, it's often easier said than done.

https://twitter.com/bandanjot/status/1591376832083165184

AND YET

One of the reasons that it's really interesting to study decision making in very high stakes situations (say, fire & rescue) is that the decisions need to be made, and they do not have this luxury. And, frankly, that is probably closer to your day to day.

Well, Crunchyroll kept pushing Rise of the Shield Hero at me, but I'd avoided it because I had heard it was kind of bad. But I needed something dumb for the treadmill, and I figured it couldn't be that bad.

Friends, I was so wrong. Worse, I kind of can't stop watching it, because when it's not TOTALLY AWFUL, it sometimes gets good, and you're left wondering "wait, has it turned a corner, is there something salvageable here?" then it dashes your hopes with *new* awfulness.

The OGL has two very clear and obvious strengths:

1. Strong implicit association with the D&D brand.
2. Recognized and accepted by most of the RPG market.

For other purposes, there are unquestionably better licenses available. And in and of itself, the OGL has some issues. I don’t mention this as criticism of or support for the OGL, rather I bring it up because those two points matter a LOT, and you need to skeptical of any outright dismissal of the OGL that doesn’t account for them.

Unrelated aside from thinking about twitter: I wonder what impact AWS has had on the idea of the value of companies. In the absence of actual servers and such, twitters "assets" are somewhat more portable than they would be pre-cloud. Does that impact twitter's value? Not sure, but it's a fun question. In practice, probably not hugely because the theoretical portability of cloud infrastructure is definitely somewhere short of the reality, but that may also be a function of relative novelty.

So, the magic of resilience is that barring a business decision to do so, twitter is unlikely to shut off - eve in a disastrous way - so much as it is to just kind of degrade, even if it gets fire sold off. This intrigues me because the non-technical damage may last longer. Which is a roundabout way to get to thinking about twitter post elocalypse - specifically, what does twitter look like when it becomes a place of explicitly negative value for brands?

I spent a some time working in a network operations center in Silicon Valley back in the very early oughts, and while I learned many lessons in the role, the biggest was an understanding of how *constantly* and *profoundly* the internet is breaking at all times. There are reasons essential to the nature of the internet that keep that from messing with us too much, but it's also useful insight into almost any very large, very complicated system, specifically that's it's probably breaking right now, and very smart people are fixing it.

Because it's in the air re: RPGs
* I'm pro emulation
* I'm genuinely skeptical of novelty for its own sake
* I play games for fun.
* This doesn't mean they can't also be art
* It just diminishes my interest in those particular discussions
* Folks who disagree are still cool And the non bullet version is this: One of my absolute LEAST favorite lines of RPG discussion is anything that is rooted in the idea that the really fun time someone had playing a game is somehow *lesser* because of made up criteria.

Pulling this one out of a great thread from last night, because this particular point resonates very interesting with Gary Klein's writing on mental models & decision making. I'll assert: The more sophisticated your mental models, the less real pure randomness feels.

https://twitter.com/SidneyIcarus/status/1590503803123806209

To unpack a little bit, this idea of mental models is that when we consider options to make a decision, we frequently "game them out" in our head to see how we feel about the outcome, and compare that model to the fact & situation to make a coherent story.

I will call out, it's worth drilling into the thread, as the details unpack, because it speaks to the very key question: If you're an existing Affinty user, does this upgrade merit the spend.

https://twitter.com/RPDeshaies/status/1590338049141256199

This is not a one-size-fits-all question. As an example, I have been using Affinity for a long time, and my initial spend has gotten me many upgrades and improvement, so for me the question is not "is this version worth it" but "Have they earned a re-up?" (spoiler: yes)

Dang, it's been coming for a while, but the v2 of all the Affinity apps have dropped. $100 gets you Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher on Desktop and iPad, which is a heck of a deal if that's your poison.

affinity.serif.com/en-us/ I have been absolutely clawing at the walls for Publisher on the iPad, so this was an instant buy for me. For more reasonable folks, I am not sure if there's any immediate pressure to upgrade, but I haven't played around enough with the newness to really judge.

One curious thing from discussion at the end of our Sprawl game was that while we enjoy PBTA games as a group, we almost never return to them. As we talked about future play that could have happened, I remarked that we hadn't used up the characters, but we had used up the game. This isn't meant in a critical way, to be clear. Nor is it something that is automatically true of all PBTA games. But it's definitely a pattern I felt, and for me it's the double edged sword of the same structures that make these games so great.

One other things that comes from watching too much anime of mixed quality is that defensive actions are genuinely cool and exciting to watch/imagine, but are annoyingly hard to implement well in an RPG. A big part of this is because while defense is cool in the moment, it can make things very boring over time, because it can really stretch out a scene.

But another big part is the specific D&D model of ablative combat.

Ok, just stumbled across Bluelock. Is it as atrociously evil as it looks or does it subvert itself at any point? I ask because from the 2 episodes I've seen, it kind of scans like sad man-rage at the existence of Ted Lasso pressed into an anime, and I'm in a "this is so bad, there MUST be more to it" kind of place, but that instinct has not always served me well.

There's an old joke-but-also-serious idea in project management that at each layer of reporting, you pad the estimate by some percentage. Whether this is a cynical ploy to appease management or a practical acknowledgement that estimates are flawed is up to the reader. But it's on my mind as I look at scrumbut projects where leadership is of a "Yes, I know agile doesn't give timelines, but we need one, so stop being a purist" variety, and the agilist is being asked for a schedule, but without the armor of lies that comes from Project Management