Emily Care Boss @Emilycare@dice.camp

A lone gnome warrior trudges through a rainforest seeking his morning coffee—my first ever mini & latest office mate, his elemental plane of greenery courtesy of @Emilycare!

@McGravin @helloalexroberts @denaghdesign

@Emilycare and I have been trying to get there for the past few years, but inconvenient sick days have foiled us until this year. It was a great chance to see a lot of Canadian folks I generally only get to interact with online. And apparently the con roughly doubled in size this year. All of which made it a rather exciting experience for me.

I see a lot of energy in that con's sails & some capable, clever hands on the tiller.

OH CRAP ONLY $5 BEFORE I HAVE TO START MAKING SHOCK:2 NANOGAMES!

I dare you to force my hand. I DARE you.

https://www.patreon.com/Joshua

As part of my New Year's resolution to get my games and whatnot in a new venue every month, I've put my whole catalog up at https://epidiah.itch.io/

Here are some of the deets: https://dig1000holes.wordpress.com/2018/02/28/digging-1000-holes-on-itch-io/

I'm dancing in the California sun, visiting with family while 2017 dies, doing some professional reflecting on the past year & thinking about the coming one, as you do.

After the terrifying #Patreon hiccup earlier this month, one of my projects for 2018 is to give folks as many options as possible when it comes to where they can buy my games & fiction. So I'm going to try to get everything from Dig a Thousand Holes up on at least 1 new online store or funding platform for every month of 2018.

A friend of mine who makes really good adorable RPG characters is in a tight money spot. You can donate to them here and get an RPG character icon drawn in your honor! https://ko-fi.com/adaser

Another awesome #Epimas offer, this time from a bunch of other designers: The One Time Journal of Findings in RPG Design!

https://scablandspress.itch.io/the-one-time-journal-of-findings-in-rpg-design?_utm_source=1-2-2

@Cheekbones84 #Epimas is decentralized this year: https://plus.google.com/+EpidiahRavachol/posts/cJFTaEVAQfQ

I'm going to announce my personal Epimas this Monday all over the place. But some folks already have promotions going. Such as @Emilycare: https://twitter.com/emilycare/status/936636084011847680

Does anyone else want to participate in a panel about the Forge at the upcoming Living Games conference, May 17-20, 2018 in Boston? It's primarily a larp conference, but the organizer would be interested in a panel about "the Forge in dialogue (or lack thereof)" with other role-playing traditions, discourses, and communities. @Emilycare, we were just talking about this!

@randylubin Yeah, it was revelatory when I played! You set up the space with each location being a folder that has info in it, and when you visit you can change the info. A dragon destroys the market? Change the market to "THIS LOCATION IS A SMOKING RUIN". You can leave messages "tacked to walls" for others, etc. The only downside is, as written, it requires a bunch of GMs. Definitely influential for me!

I wrote about running a Viking larp for my friends and some differences between larp and rpg embodiment. https://gnomestew.com/player-perspective/tabletop-vs-larp-embodiment/

The Experience is a wonderful example of the network effect of human pattern-matching, how we will collectively build meaning out of semi-random inputs, the same "magic" you see in a cohesive improv Harold or a really good game of Fiasco. In The Experience the inputs and affordances are very uncomfortable and vaguely unsettling, and what emerges reflects that.

Last night we played Banana Chan's larp The Experience, which involves a recording camera on a tripod on a lazy susan. You have to turn it toward you before you speak, which does three things brilliantly: 1, it guarantees no one talks over anyone else. 2, it infuses the whole atmosphere with deep paranoia and 3, it provides a semi-edited artifact of play. Plus it is a good game.

Reposted from birdsite:

Anna and I have both been laid off, but we're turning it into an opportunity. We're ramping up our freelance work so we can start a business.

I do writing, creative direction, design, and system development.

Anna does writing, editing, and proofing.

Hit us up or share please.

@Emilycare Contemplative play! I like that idea. So this could be both imagined and actually play?

Right, so anything fiction (or any medium really) can illuminate, can also be examined through the lens of an RPG system. There's value in that.

If you know how to read a game while holding in your mind the promise of playing it, even if you don't actually intend to—even if the very rules you're reading will prevent you from playing it—if you can hold that possibly false promise in your mind while worlds of understanding can open up to you.

It's that "lie" at the center of it that interests me. The "false promise" of play that makes it all possible. I'm throwing quotes up on these because the language is perhaps too harsh.

In "reality" it's a fiction. The same sort of fiction that allows you to care for a character in a novel, even though they're not real. It seems like a complex one considering it's a fiction about possible future fictions you might create, but we're actually fairly adept at handling this sort of fiction.

I know how a short story might pull off the same trick. I spent an embarrassing amount of time in school learning that. And I know that an RPG text can use some of those short story techniques. I personally try to employ as many of them as I can when I write my RPG texts, if for no other reason than to justify all that time I spent learning them.

But I love how an RPG text can do it by saying, "Roll 5d6 for your Prowess, counting all 1s rolled as Troubles" & leaving wondering what it all means!

Part of how RPG texts pull this off, I believe, is akin to the appeal of a good math puzzle. Not just a puzzle with numbers, but the sort of puzzle you encounter when learning new math.

More concretely: Learning a new game is like learning linear algebra—it's opaque in the beginning, but as the patterns become apparent there's joy to be found in recognizing & applying them.

There are certainly other metaphors that apply just as well, but this one really sings for me personally.