What, if anything, was your understanding of the phrase "Group titfuck bonanza"?

From Viv's "Dread" Character Sheet

Previously on D&D With Pornstars: We had a trial. I won. Details.

Today on D&D With Pornstars: A trial excerpt. Because trials are funny.

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[Context: Viv had claimed that I talked with a level of sexual frankness she wasn’t comfortable with etc. ]

(lawyer) MR SELF: Can you please help us understand what you understand to be written in the top of page 2-18?

MR SMITH: Okay. so this is -- you want me to read the whole thing from my pov?

MR SELF: Yes, please.

JUDGE: And what page are you on, two?

MR SMITH: 2-18.

MR. SELF: 2-18, top of the page.

MR SMITH: So, "re, a much more civilized means of communication." V stands for Vivid. That's Vivid's -- Viv's e-mail address. There's a date in January which I actually have a hard time reading. And it says wednesday. “Oh, fine, leave me to wallow in pain and braces and give myself post surgery boob rubdowns." She's referring to her plan to get breast implants.

(lawyer) MS. KRIEGER: I'm sorry, object to his characterization of what she was intending. Calls for speculation.

MR SMITH: Okay.

JUDGE: Overruled. Go ahead.

MR SMITH: Mandy -- then there's —I think like she's sticking out her tongue that -- I think that's what that is. "Mandy is going to school ... you guys get back, and bam, group tit fuck bonanza. Then you will be a lucky guy." Then is in all caps.

And that -- I don't know what that -- [reading viv's email] "Wow, better not have been sarcastic. threatens with thumb of fury. hearts, pretty hearts, xo xo."

Q BY MR. SELF: Mr. Smith, do you here today in 2021 recall seeing the statement you just read to us at the time that it was published?

MR SMITH: Did I read it in 2010 when I got it as an e-mail, yeah. Yes.

MR SELF: Do you remember reading it?

MR SMITH: Yeah. I remember -- I remember -- yeah. Yes.

[You’re not supposed to say “yeah” or “uh huh” at trials, because its hard on the stenographer, but I keep forgetting.)

MR SELF: What do you remember, if at all, was your understanding of that phrase "group tit fuck bonanza"?

MR SMITH: That we were like -- Viv was going to get breast implants and we are all having sex. And that was -- having sex and specifically —I don't know if there's any other way to say “tit fucking” except for “tit fucking”. I apologize to the court, but yeah.

[I looked it up: “mammary intercourse”]

MR SELF: Based on your experience with the defendant, did Ms. Grey seem easily embarrassed or humiliated about things of a sexual nature?

MR SMITH: Not at all. in fact it was one of the things that we liked about her. She's very kind of crude and frank and --

MR SELF: Pronouns. When you say we?

MR SMITH: Amanda Nagy. Ms Nagy and I liked about that she was very frank, open, honest about everything sexual, you know.

MR SELF: Based on your experience as Ms. Nagy's husband, would you characterize Ms Nagy as having been open and frank about sexuality in matters of a sexual nature at that time as well?

MR SMITH: Almost more than any living human, yes.

MR SELF: What about you, Mr. Smith? How open, if at all, were you regarding matters of a sexual nature in and around 2011?

MR SMITH: Very open. I had just published a book called “We Did Porn," which was a memoir about working in the sex industry. So yeah.

MR SELF: Real briefly, what -- tell us -- give us a summary, synopsis of that memoir.

MR SMITH: It talks about how i got into the business out of -- I was a working artist before, and still was, and then working on movies and meeting Mandy and -- Amanda Nagy, Ms. Nagy, and other people we knew in the industry by the time I had written the book. So covered a few years of the beginning at that. It also had art in it, drawings.

Mr Self: Do you remember a song by a Detroit artist named DJ assault?

MR SMITH: Yeah.

MR SELF: That was --

MR SMITH: “Ass and Titties." Viv introduced it to us. We were trying to play a game [Dread], and it was a game where people can be eliminated. And Viv got eliminated first, and so she started playing this song "Ass and Titties." And the lyrics are just "Ass, titties, ass, ass, ass, ass, ass, ass, ass, titties, titties, titties." And she was -- you know, that was Viv.

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Court Update: Another One Down. (Plus Receipts.)

 

I Won.

So, I had a trial in Los Angeles against Vivka Grey—one of the people who dogpiled on my ex’s hoax—and I won.

This video’s a report on what happened.

Everything I’m about to say has receipts, including video footage of Viv repeatedly getting caught lying at the end:

• This was a civil trial in LA, I sued Viv for defamation (that is: for not telling the truth) and then she countersued for defamation, saying the same about me. The two cases were mashed into one.
• This whole process took years, so Viv could easily have gained leverage by filing criminal charges after I sued her, but she knew that wouldn’t fly because she was lying.
• The trial itself went on for over a week—nobody came to support Viv and—besides my ex, Viv had no witnesses except 2 of her boyfriends I'd never met.

It was very strange. Viv was out on social media claiming this is a huge trauma and everyone should support her and literally not a single person in Los Angeles could be bothered to show up and sit on her side of the gallery.

(I do want to say I appreciate very much the folks who came out to support me at trial and especially people who took the risk of testifying—hopefully they all know that.)

Anyway, everybody says it's almost impossible to win a defamation trial in the US--but we did.

However, there were some strange impediments to what we could do at trial:

• The judge put a time limit on how long we could go—I’ve heard from other lawyers this is semi normal.
• Our side was meant to go first. (This is also normal)
• So that meant our witnesses went before Viv’s witnesses.
• Now comes the weird part: The point all of our witnesses were making—Sara, Frankie, Michelle, me, etc,—was that Mandy and Viv weren’t honest or reliable people and their stories weren't true. However, in the middle of the trial I was explaining how Mandy was mentally deteriorating and the judge interrupted and said something like “this isn’t proper impeachment, a witness has to testify before you explain she’s not reliable”.
• This was rough—it meant what people who knew Viv and Mandy had to say were basically discounted. So much of what Viv and Mandy said was treated largely at face value, as if no-one contradicted it. It was really confusing.

Lawyers have told me I could’ve appealed the whole trial on this basis, but we won, so that would’ve been weird to spend all that time and effort to appeal a trial you won.

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Even discounting our witnesses, Viv and Mandy’s emails and Facebook messages proved they weren’t telling the truth pretty much immediately.

For example, when they claimed I forced Viv to move in with us we had lots of emails and other communications proving both:

• Viv was enthusiastic about the whole thing —including completely redecorating the living room 
• ...and Viv moved in while Mandy and I were in Montreal, so we couldn’t have forced her to do that.

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It was a total shitshow—Mandy admitted to perjury under oath and her own lawyer fired her so she had to get a new one and Mandy and Viv also made a number of contradictions in their testimony, all from the record:

• Mandy clearly stated multiple times that Mandy herself initiated every single time I had sex with her, and that our sexual encounters always ended when Mandy had an orgasm. 

• Nobody has been able to explain how this fits with the rest of Mandy's story.
• Mandy ex said that you shouldn't believe Michelle's testimony because quote, "She's a stripper they all lie".

• ...and then immediately admitted that yes, both she (Mandy) and VIV were also had both been strippers.
• Although Mandy had testified under oath that every thing Viv accused me of was something she knew to be true, when she was cross examined, Mandy turned 180 and admitted that actually a lot of these things Mandy actually hadn't heard me say or seen me do firsthand. 
• She was just saying that she heard from VIV that this had happened and so believed it and repeated it.
• So her testimony completely changed.
• Mandy also admitted to destroying evidence:

• Mandy and Viv completely disagreed about whether they ever had sex.
• Mandy very strangely is claiming that this girlfriend that she went out with from September until the spring and who lived with her never had sex with her.
• 
  
  
  
  
• ...and Viv says straight up several times that she had sex with me and Mandy--you would think this by itself would pretty much impeach them as witnesses.
• Although Viv claimed under oath that she I had pressured her to have sex with people "of my choosing" she then dialed that back as well.

• Between the two of them, they basically dialed back every damning statement they made in one way or another. 
•  Viv claimed--again weirdly and I don't know why--that I forced her to use sex toys, and she didn't like it and then admits how excited she was to get new batteries to masturbate with her...sex toy. 

• People from the game industry may remember that Mandy claimed I wrote a Tumblr post in her name that was defending me. Mandy admitted that wasn't true.

• Again, old news for a lot of people but Mandy did admit to punching me and we weren't in an argument when she did it. Her excuse was that she was drunk.

• Vivka admitted that the tattoo of her name that I got on my arm was her idea. Despite all of her claims that somehow me calling her girlfriend or being like "I love you" after we went out for seven months or whatever was somehow too fast or rushed or strange.

• Viv's attack post also made a lot of claims about how I was like an objectifying person and was talking about boobs. And, I mean, I can just show you the extensive video evidence there from the time in question. The people bringing up boobs are definitely not me.

My main focus wasn’t getting a big cash award, it was clearing my name. Because of the time limit, we spent all our time focused on proving what Viv said wasn’t true, not talking about money.

As a result, the judge wasn’t convinced that Viv (who had dogpiled on a few days after Mandy’s original statement) did any damage that Mandy hadn’t already done. (This is just LA, everyone argues that all over again in every other jurisdiction.

The net result was that the cash award wasn’t huge but Viv—as the loser—still has to pay all the court costs, which are pretty substantial.

This also gets weird:

• Viv is now trying to plead poverty and get money from her fans to pay these fees, despite the fact Viv repeatedly testified in court that she made about 30,000$ per month on OnlyFans.
• Now she might’ve been lying: Viv has consistently sold her content online by claiming she was in the top whatever percent of creators on OnlyFans and maybe she lied in court because she wanted to keep up this illusion.
• Or maybe she just spent it all on a house or lost on crypto, I don’t know.
• Maybe she never had that much money and was hoping I’d bribe her to shut up, I don’t know.
• Like I said--weird.

Of course she’s also trying to claim I didn’t win in any real way and that lying about being kidnapped and whatever isn’t a big deal.

P.S.

She tried to spin this in a lot of ways, including following the lead of an anonymous 4chan troll named “Skerples” in claiming that there was some kind of sanction against my lawyer.

So that was this:

Mandy, my ex, was supposed to give a deposition—which is like pre-trial testimony—over video chat.

I asked my lawyer and—according to him, anyone can sit in on a deposition—so I asked some of Mandy’s other victims if they wanted to see this: two women wanted to be present, her closest friends-slash-girlfriends from that time, Charlotte Stokely and Michelle Ford.

If Mandy lied during the deposition, they’d be in a position to spot it and help us ask questions to uncover it. So they were there to help.

There’s no rule saying you can’t do this as far as I know.

According to my lawyer in the deposition 

"I’ve got California Civil Procedure Before Trial volume 2 chapter 8 section 8 colon 698 quote absent a protective order, non-parties may attend a deposition indeed it may be necessary or efficient to have a non-party attend”

At any rate, Mandy claimed this was an attempt to intimidate her (she never explained why this would intimidate anyone or what the threat was supposed to be) and so they should reschedule and redo the deposition.

Fighting to keep Michelle and Stokely on during a second deposition seemed not that important and not worth paying lawyers fees to fight over so we just agreed to set up another deposition without them.

The judge then did what Ive learned judges do a lot, which is make one of the the two lawyers pay a fee for spending the courts time on something that didn’t work. The judge had also made Viv’s lawyers pay a fee for wasting the court’s time during the case as well. This is normal, it’s not some felony—and it had nothing to do with me or Charlotte or Michelle despite Viv and the 4chan trll trying to show it as some kind of smoking gun.

So, Yeah...

...that's the story of the trial. And that's why if you hear Mandy, Viv, or their followers say anything you probably shouldn't believe it.

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Another Theory Tested (Harry Potter And The Sourest Grape)

One Nice Thing

One nice thing is that for a long time I had no idea there was a new Harry Potter game out.

Nobody in my real life talks about it, nobody in my social media feed talks about it, it's--as it should be--a non-thing. Even among people I knew who used to like Harry Potter--even among people who now have hastily-covered-up Harry Potter tattoos--even from trans friends who once were deeply invested in the franchise.

But then--because I have to check on the worst people in games all the time for legal reasons--I found out there was one.

I wouldn't have thought much of it except--they are all talking about it all the time. Hundreds of them.

Congratulating each other for realizing Harry Potter is bad is now their personality in the same way complaining about official D&D's whole Open Game License fuck-up was their whole personality last week and complaining about me was their whole personality in 2019.

And the same way liking Harry Potter was their personality before that.

Lots of media is made by terrible transphobic people--but they're especially mad about Harry Potter because they fucking loved Harry Potter.

The Soft Smack

Anybody might like any thing for any stupid reason, but before JK Rowling revealed herself to be not just boring but also evil, Harry was frequently recruited by harassers in RPG circles to make a point about how bad it was to like cool, metal things like Warhammer or Jack Vance.

Harry was not like all the terrible nasty media that Old Schoolers liked a lot where push frequently came to shove and shove came to blood and blood came to axes and fire and people sometimes fuck or think, Harry was accessible, Harry was unproblematic, Harry was diverse, Harry wore sweaters, when people died it was emotional and earned because character development, Harry was Young Adult friendly and Dumbledore was gay and the only time anything was sexy it was in fanfic written by tumblr people, and Harry was, above all, soft.

Harry was a symbol for nightmare nerds of all that was wholesome and undifficult.

One RPGnet mod used to tag "10 points to Gryfindor!" when backslapping friends for outstanding feats of online harassment. Former-Pathfinder-employee-turned-professional-Karen Jessica Price once wrote about how since "spirit animal" was so problematic, we should all just say "Patronus" instead.

Which is so cringey that a joke newspaper that probably never heard of her repeated it years later as satire.

The Drama Club Theory of Harry Potter was simple:

1. Good people liked wholesome media where wholesome things happened and that could be shared with the children they would eventually have or already had

2. And this was somehow not a facemeltingly reactionary concerned-parent take but in fact a bold and progressive stance in These Troubled Times

The Failed Test

Just as the theory about morally improving games has been tested and disproved so has this one. They were proven wrong. Rowling's trash and so are zillions of her most devoted fans.

It's hard admit the club you were hitting people over the head with for 20 years is made of human shit.

So instead of apologizing to the people they attacked and talking up something actually cool like Adventure Time, they are rebranding as people so angry about a video-game no well-informed grown-up cares about that they have to tell everyone it exists.

I lay odds this exact thing will happen again with Steven Universe in the next 10 years and, again, no-one will learn a single lesson from it.

The Price of Painkillers

My ex- used to listen to the audiobooks and movies to go to sleep, so I know the story much better than most things I don't like.

Aside from the issue of just how every generation is going to need some relatively long and relatively literary fantasy novel readable by children written in a version of the english language they'll recognize as of-their-own-time, the only distinguishing thing about Harry Potter is its unusually full-throated embrace of the aesthetics of comfort.

Squashy armchairs, butterbeer, kids living in castles, bumbling idiot villains, shapeless outfits, plots so casual characters forget them because they keep going to class, authority figures who are not only good and wise and all-powerful yet non-threatening because old and gay they also respect you personally and say it a lot, domesticated goblins, wands instead of any more interesting or scary weapon, reading presented as the be-all end-all of fighting evil, and all this even as the stakes rise to death and genocide. All in prose so bloodless it made Peter Rabbit look like Les Chants de Maldoror.

It's as if the whole of Lord of the Rings took place in Hobbiton. The British genius for coziness-uber-alles given full vent over stressful social concerns like how to dress for a date or feed yourself--or anyone else.

If you dreamed you'd leave your shitty family and go to school and there discover you're really good at everything that matters with no work and have everyone decide you are an awesome celebrity because of your trauma and then successfully fight for what's right by pointing your finger at people and saying words while wearing glasses, Harry Potter is the power fantasy for you.

It was meant to be, by its author, a monstrous, thoughtless person who thinks she's being socially progressive by avoiding any invitation to engage her victims.

Again: there's nothing wrong with liking that story or any other--but wielding it should have always been suspicious. It's not a coincidence that all the people who did that as adults to other adults later turned out to be yes, actually, really bad at real-word problems and being adults.

It should be no surprise that, like Rowling, these people thought of "This conversation makes me uncomfortable" as a reason to leave it.

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They Could Never Control The Game

I do and I don't know why the OGL thing made fans turn against corporate D&D in numbers big enough to cost them money.

On the one hand it makes the owners of Dungeons and Dragons look not just greedy, but clumsily so--on the other hand, so does nearly everything else they've ever done.

I mean, this is a company that could have--with the snap of a finger--vastly improved the community for everyone--including themselves and their most important employees--by pointing out all the worst actors online spread a right-wing conspiracy theory about Mike Mearls and didn't lift a finger, presumably because they were scared of Streisanding the situation in the press.

They'll take steps to protect their IP, but not their community, their employees, or their own reputation. Always and forever.

For example:

What have we here?

This gelatinous cube, this dragon? So precise, so assured, so elegant, so finicky, sensual yet controlled, one might even say... continental?

It's 1982.

You know who really wants to play D&D?

The French.

A woman named Mathilde Maraninchi--arguably the author of the first retroclone--says fuck it and makes French D&D:

...the rules are a simplification and mash-up of the various TSR versions of the rules by that time.

I'm told it's a little chaotic--but that was pretty normal back then--and hard to play--also pretty normal for a circa 1982 RPG--and the illustrations by Joël Bordier are kinky as fuck:

It is arguably not just the first French RPG but the first retroclone ever, and one of the earliest works by a female RPG author.

TSR killed it of course.

Thanks to French gamers Peggy and Arnaud for bringing this to my attention, here are some more details...

click to enlarge

click to enlarge

And some more here courtesy of Google Translate and French gameblogger Dvergguden.

Thanks to all of them for their help with this article!

Vive la resistance.

"Apparence d'un Rubik's cube"

This Is A Cursed Text

Years ago, they hired me to write the 5th edition of Vampire.

Then a bunch of people harassed the company and I got thrown off the game.

Due to these same peoples' continuing harassment, Vampire 5e died.

I took all the ideas I had when working on Vampire and said fuck it I'm making my own game. I hired a diverse crew of the cream of the OSR crop to help write it. People of different backgrounds from different countries straight queer cis trans but all people I knew had ideas that I'd liked over the years.

We wrote and drew our hearts out.

But it turned out that the woman I love--a victim of mentall illness--progressed to the point where she lost contact with reality, my actual life became a horror game, and my wife, the people who harassed me off Vampire, and most of the cream of the OSR crop I'd hired to make that new game got together and destroyed my life.

Throughout this, me and all the people on the game who actually had been around for the last ten years and seen what had gone down kept working on the game. We had to. 

I had said we were going to produce the greatest horror game in the history of RPGs.

The contributors who remained went through a lot during this time:

One got shot in the eye by the police. One tried to help form a health care worker's union and it didn't work but they wrote about it for the New York Times. One got nominated for a National Book Award. Others got divorced, engaged, got covid, lost pets, medically transitioned, dealt with addiction and dozens of other things people deal with. 

And throughout this the comments section for the Kickstarter was a nightmare: the harassment campaign had spread there, of course, the harassers got really mad when told that if they thought I'd done anything wrong they should say that under oath and help the "victims" they were alleging were out there somewhere, and they complained and complained that the game was late. The graphic designer just did what he was supposed to: he took the time he needed to make the game as good as he could.

They aren't complaining any more.

The Demon City backer PDF was released and now it's just:

"Beautiful book, can't wait for the physical copy."

"This game is incredible. Lots of good ideas and a game design masterclass. Wow! If anyone wants to sell a print pledge, I would like to buy it"

"Slayed it guys. Absolutely slayed it. This books is as much art as it is a game. FKING amazing."

"It's magnificent."

"Here is one for the haters: I backed and bought a lot of RPG stuff over the last couple of years. Today a lot of products are just given you some fancy looking bare bones or rushed and untested game material. Demon City took ages to complete but with over 400 pages a lot more stuff then hoped for. For me it was totally worth the time."

"This book looks absolutely... fabulous. That's what it is. Fabulous. Congrats, Demon City team!"

"Wow, this book looks incredible. It's been a long wait, but I've never seen a better-looking TTRPG book, period. Can't wait to get my hands on a physical copy and keep it out as a coffee table book. Just starting to dig in and I love the idea to use examples of play to demonstrate what each section of the rules is going to talk about. The quick guide for character creation will also be super useful to reference."

"You all utterly, utterly nailed it :-D I've been poring over it for a day or so now and there's so much good stuff. I like how initiative is done, it feels really novel. Killer art and design too."

"This looks amazing. Just taking in the artwork and the page design, it's incredible. Well worth the wait. Looking forward to diving in and getting a game going. Thank you all for what was unquestionably an enormous amount of work."

"omg its F****ing glorious"

I hated a lot about this process. 

What I maybe hate most of all is that this game is really, really, good and I hate that we had no choice but to make it really really good.

Fuck this.

Fuck this cursed book.

Fuck this community.

Dear Fiona Geist,

This is the fourth time I've tried to contact you about getting paid for your work on Demon City.

Our original deal was the standard one I did with contributors: you help write a section or edit some stuff and in exchange you get whatever you want, within reason--I could write, edit or draw something for you or just throw you some cash.

Before telling me what you wanted in return for the work you did, around Februrary 2019, you stopped answering messages or emails and wrote a public blog entry saying what you wanted as compensation was for me to publicly lie about a felony.

Since that's not just morally wrong and illegal but would also make it harder to bring my abusers to justice in order to prevent them from hurting more people, I can't pay you that way. 

I've tried contacting you privately, but no answer (last attempt was 3/3/2021). I think people should get paid for their work so I am making one last effort by posting this in public--since I know you read this blog.

So, email me at zakzsmith AT hawtmayle dawt calm.

-Z

The Jeff to Patrick OSR Continuum

Basics

• OSR stands for "Old School Renaissance"--a resurgence in interest in pre-90s RPGs that began around the time blogging became a thing online and influences products to this day by people who want to do something new and creative with RPGs but don't think D&D makes people into Nazis or want to hang out with people who do. A small community, perhaps, but one still capable of running a Kickstarter
• While some products or creators or commenters that might be considered "OSR" existed before this, the most important person in the early OSR was Jeff Rients of the venerable Jeff's Gameblog. It goes all the way back to 2004. If you read it, you can see OSR ideas clarify themselves one by one in real time.
• I--much influenced by Jeff--showed up gameblogging years later, in 2009.
• Patrick Stuart--of the False Machine blog and Veins of the Earth etc.--showed up after me, saying explicitly that he was--in turn--much influenced by me, especially by Vornheim.
• Since they were both really influential OSR creators with lots of ideas (and ones I liked and got along with), it always seemed odd to me that the two of them didn't talk much.

I have two points to make here:

1. I think of all OSR game products as existing on a continuum from Jeff-ish to Patrick-y.

2. By what is honestly coincidence, it could be fairly claimed that Jeff Rients created the OSR community and Patrick Stuart destroyed it.

The Continuum

The Jeff Rients' End

Jeff is an incredibly experienced DM (example) whose style reflects having run games for strangers and friends at home, in game stores, and at conventions for longer than many of us have been alive.

His blog, GM style, and game products reflect that experience: how to make sure people have fun.

On the other hand, his game products are few in number and relatively modest. His major thing out is Broodmother Sky Fortress, which is half awesome-adventure-with-tips-for-first-time-GMs and half best-of-Jeff's-Gameblog. The adventure's great but it's pretty short and compact.

Though both I and other people have spent lots of time asking Jeff to put out more product he hasn't--and he once told me his very Jeff reason for this: most of the dungeons he runs are composed a lot of old dungeons mashed together. It's the way he runs them that makes them work.

Jeff has lots of really good ideas for weird things to put in a game, but that's not the center of his aesthetic. The center is: make sure it's playable and fun.

I think a good example of the Jeff Rients aesthetic is the random hireling table in Broodmother Skyfortress: it's a d6 table.

Obviously, if this was a Zak table it would have 100 entries and if it only had 20 then I'd make some excuse like I was trying to fit it on the page with 9 other tables. And every entry would tell you like 4 things minimum about the hireling.

...but I also know what Jeff would say when you ask why it only has 6 entries (including pack-apes, which is cool): Jeff has run dungeons over and over and over and over and over and has found that 6 is enough--after that you get diminishing returns.

So that's Jeff's thing: doing a lot with a little to make sure you have fun.

The Patrick Stuart End

Patrick was not only capable of writing magnificent sentences, he really liked to show you that he was. When I created Maze of the Blue Medusa and wanted to save some time by not writing it all myself, I asked him to collaborate. He's good and has lots of esoteric ideas and the things he writes are brimming with exciting concepts.

On the other hand: 

He never rolls.

Last I knew: he lived alone in the middle of nowhere, UK, he's painfully isolated, his best friend is someone he's never met in real life, he's never had--as an adult--a regular RPG group he met with and doesn't even run his own stuff.

He once told me his favorite-ever session of D&D was one he played online. That's fucked up--and it shows in his work.

Patrick Stuart has not a clue how to make a functional game without help from a collaborator.

So that's Patrick's thing: Doing a whole lot with a lot but without a lot of clear ideas about how to make it fun.

Creating on the Continuum

Unsurprisingly, considering the timeline, I've generally tried to make things that are in the middle, or which have the strengths of both:

Esoteric and well-written enough to be interesting and new, but concise and considered enough to be playable. Whether I've succeeded isn't really the point--that's not up to me--it's just often a real thought I have in my head: "This needs more out-the-box playability--this needs a little more inspiring verbiage". 

That idea's in my head.

And It's Weird Because...

...the OSR kinda did begin and then end with these two guys.

Jeff showed up, wrote about playable things, handled shit right, and--to the degree he took responsibility for people or talked about other peoples' business--had a moral compass.

Patrick started out that way, but was fucking terrible at it because he had no real-life experience with real people. Around 2017 or 18 he started lashing out at basic 101-level rules of healthy human interaction like "Talk to people before assuming crazy shit about them" and "Don't lie".

Unfortunately a lot of creators followed his lead--the people he influenced took Patricks repudiation of things like facts and evidence as a cue that standards for how to treat each other were now lower--and they ran with it.

And now the OSR is not really a thing--creators and moneymaking entities are still here but the community is gone, because in a world run by Patrick rules, nobody is ever accountable for their actions and interacting with other creators is fucking dangerous.

The OSR reddit would, for example, rather just take down a critical post than figure out how to constructively criticize a game...

...

...considering one of the only things the OSR was ever good for was constructively criticizing games, this is pretty fucked up.

I hate it all and I want to die very badly.

Bye.

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