The Unicorn Thieves

The key to taking the beast is a clattering music which deranges it internally, rendering the mind of the unicorn inchoate and sensitive. So long as the authors of such sounds ply their trade in earshot, the unicorn cannot be calmed, and will act to thwart any kind hand.

The apparel of unicorn thieves is inevitably motley and fucked, clashing poignantly with the greens of long grasses and trees through which their quarry is wont to frolic and roam. They go in groups of at least ten.

Typically thieves will be encountered loudly  returning from a successful chase: the animal ridden by two or three goblins playing bells or awful concertinas, preceded by outriders with flails and horns atop barded hunting destriers and surrounded by spit-rusted tubas, played by hunters with nets, and also fanged hounds.

The din produced by these companies not only disorders the mind of their victim but alerts whatsoever lord or monarch has commissioned the hunt as to the company's success and current location.  The PCs will hear and then see the thieves, and can immediately be sure that a company of knights is on an intercept course to join in custody of the prize.

So long as even one of the band plays, the unicorn will remain in a state of desperate servility, lashing out at any who attempt to protect it. Wealthy thieving companies visit wizards before the hunt, and festoon themselves with wards against the dreaded Silence spell.

The challenge for parties is to not only rout the hunters and stymie such of the lord's retainers that might be coming to meet them, but to somehow destroy or distance the unicorn from the noise, under the influence of which it will relentlessly and even suicidally attack.

And now a word from our sponsor:

Radical Game Critique Isn't

That fucking lone orc guarding that fucking chest in that fucking ten foot room.

Ever since I first started playing I knew exactly one thing about the much-maligned lone orc in the ten-foot room.

That is: if he's there it's because I put him there.

As I've said before, when it said right in the Dungeon Master's Guide that you could buy adventures or make up your own, it never occurred to me why anyone anywhere ever would buy one. I'm pretty much in the same boat still. Even the best modules in the world get rewritten snout-to-tail as soon as I get them.

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When I first started reading RPG blogs and forums, I was struck by two things:

1. God DAMN these people are mad about games

2. God DAMN these people have bought a lot of game crap

It was a constant stream of B1 this and X1 that and WG4 Ripped My Flesh and 3.5 Makes Your Pee Green and 4E Makes You Turn Into A Beeswax Toucher and I just thought Who has time to read all these things? For me the hobby was about: You grab a game off the shelf, you rewrite half the rules (they were written by distant corporate overlords and so suck) and then you start making stuff up.

The level of investment people had in these rudimentary accessories baffled me--and baffled me even more when I got my hands on them--This is Caves of Chaos? A bunch of dudes in corridors? White Plume Mountain has a flying canoe? It was like visiting The Big City your friends have been talking about all your life and finding three matchbox cars and a cardboard box with windows draw on it.

And the weirdest thing was: the more pointed, aggressive and would-be-radical the Internet dork's critique of D&D and its supposed impact on society was, the more accessories they'd paid for. Ron Edwards' critique of D&D as a cargo cult is clearly informed by having swallowed year after year of TSR product and there are angry 4vengers with pixel icons on Something Awful who could drown you in their Old School game collection.

And their message was: These modules taught us! And they taught us wrong!!!!!

This isn't actually a real article. Thank god.

And I just thought: what rich kid buys modules? You draw a maze and put cute stuff in it, you make up some voices and attach people to them--how hard is that? I know 5 year olds who can do that. They were critiquing a consumption-based culture they'd created and I'd never seen or cared about--and that none of the people I played with saw or cared about, like basing their ideas about the game off the quality of a buttskin dicebag they'd bought. Sure there was some inane Vietnam vet behind the register at the game store--but he's as ignorable as the pamphlet-sized pap he was selling. And conventions? Come on. You buy your dice and run--that DIY is the soul of the game.

The fact is, the modern wannabe progressive critique is a middlebrow apologia for having bought the thing in the first place.

It is an uncritical adoption of certain tropes of criticism as penitence for having uncritically adopted the previous tropes offered by the game product.

It is exchanging one failure of skepticism for another.

It happens like this:

You're on the Forge or Story-Games where there's supposed to be a hip and radical dedication to independent game making and publishing,

...or you're on RPGnet where there's supposed to be a hip and radical dedication to remaking games as a safe space for marginalized people,

...or you're on Something Awful where there's supposed to be a hip and radical dedication to joking everything terrible about modern culture to death...

...and you're hanging out and looking for something to talk about with hundreds of internet strangers. So what do you have in common? Well, not much--you live thousands of miles from each other--but there's probably some game product you've all read. So you start talking about it.

And then you remember why you're here--you can't just say you like Shadowrun or even "Meh, Shadowrun, too much like real life"--you are supposed to make a show of being hip and radical (or as much as you can sitting alone at your computer in your nerdforum). So you embed all your ideas about the world into a critique of Shadowrun. Or a Shadowrun module. Or the Shadowrun module after that.

Of course what this critique obscures is: you once thought you needed to buy a lot of Shadowrun modules. I mean, if there's some consumer out there whose mind has been damaged by too much near-future fantasy technoir it's the kind of consumer so used to buying RPG crap they think it's the reason for everything they've ever seen happen at an RPG table.

The radical Hot Take is the tax you pay for having bought and read and maybe even used the module in the first place--a tax which hides an important fact: the more radical thing to have done would be to do the thing every RPG has urged you to do since the mimeographed OD&D first appeared and write your own adventure. Most of these critiques read like screeds on the evils of nightlife by people in AA.

The postcolonial critique of Caves of Chaos is less radical than just not using Caves of Chaos in the first place 'cause its kinda fucking basic.

Perhaps this is the reason for the vociferousness of the accusations laid at the door of RPG products and RPG norms--the people making them are gnawingly aware that the only reason they even have enough familiarity with these norms to make those critiques is their own embrace of them and total failure to innovate or think for themselves.

The Drama Club dedication to picking apart each new piece of nerd media, from Batgirl to Orphan Black, as soon as it hits the ground belies an even greater truth: you'd have to worry a lot less about these things and the supposed messages they send if you weren't so intent on watching them all right away.

The Angry Consumerist Critic is not a radical and the only behavior they're critiquing is that of their own former self. And rather than this having taught them to think for themselves, it has cause them to exchange one bill of goods for another.

Independent thought is so not part of their daily lives, that they actually think games for adults should reflect their values. As if adults should be unskeptical enough that they're learning values from a game.
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I grew up with a blanket punk rock/marxist critique: all mainstream media is sick shit trying to sell you something, handle it with kid gloves if at all. It's all racist and sexist and classist--it's made by moneypeople to make more money. The obsession with divvying every game and TV show into ones Doing It Right and Doing It Wrong has a fundamental philosophical flaw: that the milk from the corporate nipple is ever "right". Nothing Disney does with its princesses or Marvel does with its Thors is going to show up without blood on its hands.

When I critiqued mainstream modules on this blog, the attitude was always:

1. Find out if there are dysfunctional or weird parts of this that aren't part and parcel of what you'd expect from any suck-by-committee corporate design process.
2. There might might be some genuine human gold under the weight of that totally presumed and pointless low-hanging fruit. Occasionally there is.

Indie stuff is worth your scrutiny inasmuch it claims to represent an actual human or group thereof chasing something other than the most money possible. That's a situation where you might expect to see someone Doing It Right. No matter how much your favorite mainstream superhero comic is doing right, the entire background of its production is fundamentally wrong.

If you bought a product by a company that doesn't even care enough about you to put the name of the monster on the map in the place where the monster lives, being shocked that you found a bit of unexamined paleothought in it is like being shocked your McNugget wasn't free-range. Demanding the majors think better is a noble goal, but claiming to have just now discovered the lazy thinking in them shows that you were expecting otherwise.  And expecting otherwise means you are and have always been exactly that most-gullible-kind-of-person who lets that message slip into their unconscious.

It's like a war reporter who lands in Afghanistan and goes "Holy fuck, one of those guys has a gun!". Critique yourself first.

And now, a word from our sponsor:

Clue The Movie vs Skipping Rocks

"State tracking" is keeping track of information specific to your game piece that can change--(hit points, demeanor, equipment held).

The more a fiction tracks your state the more RPG it is. That is, the great discovery of RPGs was tracking every single thing about your state (and the world's). It is the main thing. Chess is most an RPG when your pawn becomes a queen--a little story moment has happened.

Games have choices or at least different possible outcomes, pure stories don't. Stories have a sequence of events designed to be interesting in themselves regardless of your investment in a given outcome, games don't.

A game is differentiated from the least-gamey interactive fiction by the possibility of undesirable choices. If all choices make the story interesting it's less of a game, it's just walking up to the shelf and deciding what to read. If I read Batman and Robin #1 and then decide whether to next read the simultaneously-released but in-continuity Robin #1 or else Batman #1, I am not playing a game--I am simply planning my evening. But it's a thin line--for example, the 1980s Clue movie had three endings. You could see any one of them in the theaters and they were all supposed to be entertaining, of course (that is, whatever you were supposed to be getting out of the movie up 'til that point--post-Wodehouse comedy, Tim Curry, each ending was supposed to present more of that--more post-Wodehouse, more Curry). There was not much of a fail state, but there was a little bit of one (one ending might be subjectively worse than another). It was about as not-gamey as a thing could be while still being almost a game.

Compare Clue the movie to skipping rocks: skipping rocks has allllllmost no story ("the rock skipped 2 times", "12 times", "zero times", the possibilities are endless but very limited) but is definitely a game. The fail state is: the rock sinks rather than skipping. It is very very game and only a wee bit story.

So Clue the movie is the extreme edge of story-with-a-wee-bit-of-game and skipping rocks is on the other edge of game-with-a-wee-bit-of-story. All of what we talk about here is in the middle.

Games are characterized by the possibility of frustration--frustration in a novel is nearly always a bad sign. In a game, it's a necessary danger that you attempt to overcome. 

It's important to note that even in the most hippie style storygames you can fail and fail all the time, but the failure isn't necessarily "I died and had to stop playing that character and restart with a new status quo" it's "I got the story stick passed to me and didn't do anything interesting with it".  That is the exciting possibility of failure--one akin to live performance. It is the very possibility of not doing it right and it not being fun for a moment that makes it gamey. 

A game is an experience designed to subject the player to fun via the vertigo of being suspended over the abyss of nonfun. As a roller coaster makes you feel alive by reminding you of the possibility of death. Oh no, what if I die? The nonfun will consume me. I am, therefore, highly motivated to keep on. I am gripped then by a great tension.

Everyone has a threshold for this tension--everyone has a point at which the stakes are so high it's no fun anymore. Like if it's like if you lose this hopscotch match they'll drop trucks on your house and pets and loved ones then you might not have fun even at the funnest game. The point at which the stakes feel so high it goes beyond the level needed to emotionally invest the player and spills over to "no fun because it's so scary" is a subjective emotional preference and, as such, both nothing to scream about and something inevitably screamed about.

Now here's a word from our sponsor:

Bring The Many Claws

Ennie voting is open.

Everyone knows awards are dumb and everyone knows they're useful.

In our world "award-winning stuffmaker" survives a little longer and gets a little more of what she or he wants done before going down than "random unrecognized schmuck" regardless of whether those awards work the way smart people think they should.

When working on RPL with me, Jez Gordon went monstrously above and beyond the call of duty. He had to do it slow and between real jobs and paying attention to his kids. He did it because he wanted to show people how well a little cottage-press D&D book could be graphic designed and because he figured if people could see it then one day we could make that level of awesome the new normal and then he and other people in the field could actually get paid what they deserved. For the first time ever we were going to design an RPG book so a real person can use it.

James, likewise, sent the whole first print run back because the paper felt too thin. The loss was not insignificant. But the idea was: if we do this right, it will show people what "done right" means.

Aside from whether you think Red & Pleasant Land deserves four Ennies (I hope you think it does, we worked very hard on it and are pretty sure we did some things nobody else ever has), it will probably help all of us us get out more cool RPG books in the future that have that level of take-time-off-your-day-job-to-work-on-it if RPL gets fabulous prizes.

If you liked RPL but you're on the fence about whether it's worth your 60 seconds to click the link and tell everyone you know who enjoyed it to do the same, I'd simply say:

In DIY D&D we are (when life permits) trying to change things a little--change the way game stuff looks and feels and runs and the number of ideas-per-square-inch people expect. The competition this year is fierce and everything we're up against is much much much more familiar to the people who go to Enworld and know what an Ennie is. The award is impressive and useful precisely to the degree of how unlikely it is that this little press goes up against the majors and wins. Clicking the little buttons helps.

Best Adventure

Best Setting

Best Writing

Product of the Year

Also, I suggest throwing in for Contessa for Best Blog--those girls get shit done. 

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What We Learned This Year About The Drama Club

Mandy got out of the hospital yesterday and is recovering. They're feeding her on 12-hour cycles of Total Parenteral Nutrition--a tube of marshmallow-colored goo straight to her heart. She's in good spirits and we'll get to play D&D again soon which'll make me post more ideas about D&D.

Meanwhile we're celebrating of the one year anniversary of the Great Troll War of 2014.

Exactly one year ago today…

…the RPG internet went insane. 5th edition of D&D came out and the conservative elements of the indie RPG scene all piled on to a concerted harassment campaign against the D&DW/PS girls and me.

One year later, everything is fine--contrary to all the predictions, D&D 5 is doing great, my latest game book has record sales and 4 Ennie nominations, and most pertinently, with the exception of a brief, failed attack on Monte Cook, the RPG Drama Club hasn't managed to drum up any trouble for anyone else in RPGs for a whole year.

Their influence is effectively broken--people have been putting out amazing DIY projects left and right without anyone accusing them of hate crimes or fabricating felony charges. It's a marvelous time to be making RPG stuff. But it wasn't easy and took a lot of work.

Of course, they're still there

Four days ago Cam Banks compared you all reading this to the people who voted for Hitler. But like any dumb GW Bush quote ("I know how hard it is to put food on your family"), the cute idiocy is the tip of an iceberg of actual shitty behavior that actually affects things. The behavior is a bigger and more serious thing than dumb words that point to it.

So, for future reference, it's good to collect some lessons learned in the past year about the Drama Club. Who are they? What do they want? How do you keep them from being jackasses in any place where it matters? We've learned a lot.

Comparing the Drama 50--the 50 people most active in this year's harassment campaign--to the 50 people who most actively opposed it, a lot of striking differences emerge:


1. Failed Games

Many of the Drama Club have made games or game products. Nobody in the Drama Club much talks about having played any of these games after they're released. (This is definitely not for lack of talking about what they did that day.) The scene is littered with Kickstarters that failed to deliver or ended up doing worse than breaking even, and a couple of them straight up stole Kickstarter money.  Nobody seems publicly concerned with why this is or what can be learned from it. The only exception is Fred Hicks' game, which is relatively old and gathered a good part of its audience before the recent explosion of alternatives. The only tabletop games that you see routinely discussed as having been played by more than one person among the 50 are 'World games and the recent edition of D&D that they tried so hard to tank--neither of which were made by Club members.

2. Playing Games? Maybe. Talking About Them? No.

This is the most immediately obvious thing--the Drama Club may be playing games but they rarely post actual play reports, ideas about rules or settings, analysis or anything else about tabletop RPGs.

The Drama Club's comparatively few tabletop RPG posts in the past year have been overwhelmingly professional: limited almost exclusively to pointing out that they or their friends released a game or are going to. They pitch fits on forums, but not much--and not as much as they used to.


3. Cutting Off Comments

Comparing the Drama 50 to their opposite numbers, Drama Club members are much more likely to close threads--often even before anything contentious has come up, just as a preventative measure while they're away from their computers or phones.


4. They Talk About Mental Illness

Of the 50 most aggressive Drama Club harassers, a wildly disproportionate number--at least 15 of them--have posted about having mental health issues. This isn't my read-between-the-lines armchair diagnosis, this is people openly saying they have clinically diagnosable issues and are seeking care for them or did or have been urged to. That's way more than the folks they opposed, and a big percentage by any count--and that's only the ones who decided to tell the internet.

I hasten to add that I think more "It's salient that The Drama Club members disproportionately see themselves as mentally ill or fragile" than "They only say stuff I don't like because they're crazy".


5. Discussion Is Bad

The Drama Club is basically suspicious or dismissive of contrasting opinions, especially if voiced in public (Soft form: "Clearly there are contrasting opinions here and we'll never sort this out tonight so I'll end the discussion""Twitter isn't a good place to have this discussion" Hard form: "Don't question people"). There's an emphasis on "just listening" even when the voices being listened to are repeating each other and not introducing new ideas. Questions raised rarely get answered.

Which makes most of us wonder: If discussing ideas is bad, why are you posting the ideas on the internet? The sole reason appears to be: to garner support and make connections.

So, for example, when Bruce Baugh announced in July 2014 that he was dogpiling onto a smear campaign
he wanted back "shared  sympathy", not a request for evidence.

The threshold for "insult" is insanely low and no attempts are made to see if the claim that an insult was intended are made before assuming it was.

The ideal Drama Club post appears to be:

Drama Club Member: "I like/dislike this thing!"
Friend: "Me too!"
Friend 2: "Me too!"
Stranger: "Me too!"
Drama Club Member: "Thanks everyone! Hey @Stranger, let's be friends!"

Drama Club members who disagree with each other generally just don't voice that disagreement and sit quietly instead until something they do agree with comes up.

Which is all fine--but it then comes as no surprise that they never get shit done or figured out and their conversations go in circles and they have the same conversations year after year.

The only current exception to this model is Something Awful, where discussion exists but in a constant atmosphere of personal attacks, crazy accusations and zero accountability. If this is the Drama Club's only model for discussion, you can see why they avoid it. They don't seem to have enough experience discriminating between what is and isn't fair game in a goal-oriented debate;a lot of them, for instance, don't know the difference between an ad hominem attack and just insulting someone.



6. Fact-Finding, Decision-Making, and Public Projects Are Not A Thing

This is either a cause or effect of 'Discussion Is Bad' (which is itself a cause of 'Failed Games').
The Drama Club model of on-line collaboration is: you make friends with someone by agreeing with them, then you work together in private, then you release the product of that collaboration. The public online discussion itself isn't goal-directed and the idea that you might actually nail down facts or poll opinions or place opposing views in the same place and test which one is right so you can then take action seems totally alien to the Drama Club nowadays.

The only exception here is, again, Something Awful--fact-finding and decision-making aren't things---but there are group projects.  These group projects are typically group harassment or elaborate in-jokes. So, again, if Something Awful is the Drama Club's only model for public discussions online that actually have concrete results, you can see why they're suspicious of them.

7. Never Call For Accountability For Anyone Inside The Club

Accountability is dealt with in three ways:

1. If a target who's perceived to have done wrong is outside the Drama Club (a famous company, a well-known game designer, game, or simply a non-Club indie designer)--post publicly about it, collect agreement, attack anyone who disagrees as horning in on your important discussion with their clearly bad-faith evil-outsider dissent.
2. If the target who's perceived to have done wrong is inside the Drama Club, quietly stop talking to them and say nothing about it and let them do it over and over again.
3. If someone outside the Club calls for accountability for anyone inside the Club, accuse them of harassment.

The last exception to this pattern was when John Stavropoulos called out Ben Lehman for lying about rape ages ago. This immediately immersed John in a shitstorm of harassment and there are many Drama Club members who still back Lehman to this day--including financially via Patreon.

8. There Aren't Standards of Behavior Just People You Like Or Don't

Innocent Until Proven Guilty, If You Make An Accusation Be Prepared To Defend It, Don't Lie, Apologize If You Make A Mistake, Don't Troll, Don't Give People Shit Just For Liking A Different Game are rules that many Drama Club members might subscribe to in theory, but in practice there are no consequences for breaking them.

Everybody is judged basically on a "How much do I like you?" basis and there are no hard lines. Drama Club-dominated forums all have "moderator judgment call" built into their rules and many Club members have expressed the idea that no matter what someone you like does wrong, there should be no consequences and even if someone you don't like does everything right, they're not entitled to confront or address the accusers because…well because you don't like them.

Which, again, is fine--people are allowed to like people or not--but they then still maintain the fiction that their disagreement is based on some kind of principles rather than just, y'know, dude likes Cannibal Corpse and that freaks me out.


9. Refusing To Own Positions

Club members repeatedly claim they don't even grasp the concept of people not having the same ideas as them. Many have been saying "I don't know what I did to piss everyone off" for a year. Uh…you publicly expressed support and lent credibility to a bunch of legally-actionable libel? And still do? If you believe it: own it, say you believed all the crazy conspiracy theories you said you believe to thousands of people on the internet and defend that position. If you don't: apologize and do better. And if you genuinely don't know--why would you not just ask rather than constantly perform your ignorance? Pretending you can't identify the source of conflict is just weird, but weirdly common.

Outside the Drama Club, the usual way to refer to controversies is to say what you did and defend it or, at worst, refuse to talk about it. Inside it, simply pretending you didn't do anything anyone could even theoretically have disagreed with is a viable option and nobody inside the Club questions that choice.


10. Do Nothing To Concretely Support Progress

In the wake of the complaints about The Strange, a pair of great Native American designers got hired to work on the game and put out a fantastic new supplement, Contessa, the female-run gaming con is making big waves and just got nominated for an Ennie, and trans artists like Scrap Princess and Gennifer Bone have put out amazing products in the past year. You'd think, in a community supposedly obsessed with improving things in tabletop, that these things would be front-page news on the lips of every Drama Club member. They really aren't--they're mostly occupied wrangling about whether Sense8 is feminist enough or showing each other dog pictures.

The Drama Club doesn't do stuff like: see which companies are hiring the most women in creative positions, examine demographics to see who is playing what how often, test whether x or y game attracts more marginalized people as players, routinely review games produced by marginalized people as they come out or, really, do anything else you might expect from an activist group other than get angry and type when they come near something they don't like.


11. Volume and Tone Are Policed More Than Accuracy

None of them have taken Zoe's excellent advice to heart:

The fact that someone talks a lot and whether they swear or not while doing it is more important in evaluating them as a voice than whether their claims can be proven or matches known facts. When a Drama Fact is proven to be wrong, it's dismissed as unimportant.


12. The Conservative Demographic

The Drama 50 are more often white, more often male, more often straight, more often parents and more often religious than their counterparts. They don't like to acknowledge this.


13. Actively Avoiding Solving Problems

If a Drama Club member has a problem with someone else, they never contact them to try to resolve the issue--they simply announce it to the rest of the Club and let hatred take its course.


14, They've Been On the RPG Internet A Long Time

Most of the Drama 50 have been complaining about games online longer than I've been blogging, and on average far longer than their opposite numbers.
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This All Makes Sense...

...but only under exactly one set of circumstances.

If you assume that the Drama Club is on-line for the same reason people in the DIY D&D scene are--to improve and share their experiences playing RPGs with their friends--few if any of these choices or tendencies make sense. You can't learn or get shit done acting this way.

However it also doesn't make sense if you assume the Drama Club is on-line in order to improve the gaming scene by making it more diverse or fair--in fact in that scenario their behavior makes even less sense. Either I was wrong last year when I assumed that the reason the Drama Club tolerated such shitty behavior was because they were pursuing a big-tent-for-change model or they just suck at it. People who prioritized activism would pretty much do the opposite of everything that characterizes the Drama Club: they'd talk about playing games a lot, they'd be concerned if the games didn't work or attract new people, they'd be really worried about facts because those are the basis of effective action, etc.

So what does the Drama Club want? Only one hypothesis I can see matches all the facts (feel free to propose your own):

The Drama Club is not about games, the Drama Club is not about activism, the Drama Club is a support group.

"

In case you haven't noticed, I have a very short fuse. I am almost always stressed out or angry about something, and gaming and g.txt are pretty much my only outlets because that's damn near all I got...

Yes, I'm probably biased toward SA because they're the only place that actually gives a shit about anything I have to say about the hobby and g.txt is the only release valve I have for getting mad about the hobby.

"

-S.D., Drama Club and Something Awful member

Basically, the Drama 50 are this guy. They see themselves as constantly in crisis all the time.

These are lonely, sensitive, often unstable people who have had traumatic experiences in life--many of which are connected to games--and the primary and transcending purpose of all of their online interactions is to connect with other people who feel the way they do about games and pop culture not so that they can improve their games, not so that they can help other people, but so that they can feel less sad and less isolated.

They are talking to each other in game forums because they have nobody else to talk to--the online network of people who know enough about their niche hobby to hate the same things as them is their support system. And the hating is neither an attempt to solve or even protest a problem--it is therapy.

Once you take this into account, not only does their behavior make a lot more sense, the range of behavior they do accept from each other and don't accept from anyone else makes sense. For example, when someone Pulls a Fred Hicks--that is, they make an attack on someone and then refuse to provide support or evidence citing "mental health reasons"--most people would wonder: If they're so worried about their mental health, why did they make the attack in the first place? And why don't their friends discourage them from starting debates they aren't mentally well enough to engage in?

The reason is: the accuser withdraws from proving their accusations for the sake of their mental health but they also made the accusation in the first place for the sake of their mental health. Fred accuses Kingdom Death of being sexist because the game makes Fred uncomfortable and so it makes Fred feel better to make that accusation, Fred's friends back him up not because they (or anyone) can prove the game is sexist, but because it makes them feel better to support Fred in his attack on some random outsider. Everyone feels better because they're not alone in being made uncomfortable.

Whether or not they're nuts (I have no idea), they feel nuts, and calling them on their shitty attacks is seen as missing the point, essentially...

They are offended and alarmed when you take their statements seriously enough to fact-check them because even they do not take their statements seriously. They're not statements, they're cries for help--and how can you question a cry for help?

Ben Lehman accuses George RR Martin of actually wanting women to be raped because it makes Ben feel better to voice that forceful, insane idea instead of something dull-but-plausible like "Hey the way rape is used as a plot device in Game of Thrones bothers me and might unconsciously reinforce some bad ideas for some people somewhere I guess someone should do a study and write a paper". Fellow Drama Club people don't question Ben or point out how toxic that accusation is to any useful discussion of representation because Ben's in the support group and they're in the support group and just ignoring how insane that is does more to promote quiet and calm and mental health than addressing it. Not "Taking the Inventory Of Anybody Else" is a classic maxim of 12-step programs all over the world.

A white guy named Tom Hatfield can accuse someone with more women of color in his game group than are in the entire Drama 50 put together of trying to keep women and POCs out of gaming and nobody calls him on it because they accept that making the public accusation itself is a form of therapy. The accusation (technically criminal though it may be in several jurisdictions) is simply an extreme form of an expression of a feeling--"I don't like that porn guy". Supporting him is not actually about supporting the idea, it's supporting the feeling "I don't like him either". Calling Tom to account for it is gratuitous and cruel--you're getting in the way of Tom's therapy, mannn.

Drama Club members claiming they don't know what they did to piss everyone off when everyone paying attention knows what they did is support libel is not seen by other Drama Club members as evidence they're nuts or mind-numbingly dishonest, it's seen as sensibly choosing the path of the least resistance and most mental health--if you keep pretending it didn't happen, you don't have to think about it, and not thinking about all your problems at once is actually a fairly solid technique for staying sane at least in the short-term.

It all makes sense if you think you're constantly in crisis all the time. (And you think outsiders never are, because otherwise they'd be in the Drama Club, right? This is why there's so much emphasis on how much pain it causes Drama Club members to be called out on their shit--there's a failure to grasp that their attacks might have caused pain to begin with. That's pretty much a characteristic of all conflicts ever--both sides feel pain. Presumably the constant crisis mentality cuts off empathy for everyone else.) If a guy's dying in a ditch you don't give him static about that antisemitic thing he said last week, right?

Nobody is taken to account for lying or talking out of their ass because having their corner of the internet full of true and useful things is not a priority--making sure whoever said a thing feels supported and happy and good about themselves is the priority. Only then (which might take decades) can we address the difficult question of whether they're full of shit or not.

This is why discussion with the Drama Club always breaks down and they will never accomplish anything--the Drama Club's words aren't meant to reflect any reality anyone (even other people in the Club) can see or test, they are simply crystallizations of various frustrations. Doubt is never taken as a responsible, good faith attempt to solve the problem, but as pointlessly kicking their cages. Validity is not the point, validation is.

There's literally no fact that could emerge about any of their targets that would dissuade Drama Club members from their attacks because no matter what happens, they themselves will still be terrified people in need of a kind of emotional support that only other terrified people can give them--so it's hard to see how any of this will ever change. They are troubled, they do bad things, they cannot succeed, they have no incentive to stop hurting other people, they never will.

The best you can do is know what's wrong with them and avoid them like the plague.
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I Got Nominated For A Bunch of Awards So Cam Banks Compared Me To Hitler

Sorry I've been posting light--Mandy's been in the hospital again a lot (they've decided to feed her through her heart, which is strange and dangerous but so far ok).

Anyway, it's nice to wake up to see Red & Pleasant Land and the 5th ed Player's Handbook both got nominated for 4 Ennies each! RPL got noms for Best Adventure, Best Setting, Best Writing and Product of the Year.

Contessa also got nominated for Best Blog, so congratulations to Stacy and the crew.

The Ennies require self-nomination, have a small group of judges, and can overlook small publishers, so this is as much a measure of LotFP and the DIY D&D scene's growth since the year Vornheim lost Best Supplement to a bunch of dungeon tiles as it is of anything else but, still, it's a nice thing. I hope to see more stuff like Deep Carbon Observatory, Yoon-Suin and Slumbering Ursine Dunes up there in the future.

Of course these nominations are not a nice thing for everybody. Like, for example, failed game author and RPG drama club weirdo Cam Banks. Remember, this is twitter, so to get the tweets in chronological order, read up from the bottom:

So, kids, while I'll appreciate it if you vote for Red & Pleasant Land, just be aware that doing it makes you like a Nazi.

Red & Pleasant Land:
Identity. Heritage. Xenophobia.

Fantastic Damage

I was thinking there should be a robots-in-the-city game that does for underground hip hop and electronica what Vampire: TM did for goths. I haven't written or more importantly drawn it but it did get me (and False Patrick) thinking about robot games.

After thinking about it way too much, basically I decided the one thing robot games need to have that others don't is hit locations.

Here's some work toward that:

Each body part has an armor die: d4, d6, d8, d10, d12 or d20. Beginning PCs will probably have a d4 in most everything and maybe a d6 or two.

Every weapon has a damage die: d4, d6, d8, d10, d12 or d20.

Body parts used as weapons (punches, kicks, headbutts) generally inflict damage equal to their armor rating. So if your arm is armored up to d8, it does d8 damage when you punch people.

Combat works like this:

Attacker rolls the damage die of the weapon you're using and chooses a body part to attack.

Defender rolls the die of the armor for the body part being attacked.

If the defender rolls high: no damage.

Attacker rolls high, it inflict a number of criticals on that body part equal to the disparity in the dice.

This then requires cool d100 critical charts for each body part, but that's the basic idea.

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Also probably want to work in a mechanic where if you give up your attack for the round (or maybe accept a penalty) you can first roll an Agility Die (likewise rated from d4 to d20) to avoid the blow. Beating the opponent by a little means you shift the attack to another limb (or a shield) beating them by a lot means you dodge altogether.

This means the defender is often rolling as much or more than the attacker, which actually seems appropriate for mech combat.
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