iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Also I'm keenly aware of the adjacency to Vampire the Masquerade of all of this (and White-Wolf games in general) and the ick includes them but I also feel like there it can be used as a way to illustrate the problems with tribalism (even if not everyone approaches it that way)

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 11h

Even the way they "connected" people to something, it was to then segregate. I distinctly remember a "Which Mass Effect character are you based on your MBTI?" and superficially it was like "oh you're like me!" but, once applied, oop, we're back in tribes again.

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 15h

Cast that light farther back and like, I don't remember A Wizard of Earthsea doing any sorta factional shenanigans. Lord of the Rings had cultural groups, but not in the way GoT Houses were.

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 15h

Is it weird that I feel like 2000s media exposed (and was indeed successful due to) our tribalism? Like, take bad lady wizard books. The whole thing of feeling like "there's a place for you" (and everyone else is stinky). Game of Thrones "What House are you?" tacitly said "You belong".

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Ben // foresight studio @foresightstudio.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Abolish prisons except for the person who came up with the "spooky" discord notification sound

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Imagine writing an antagonist so elemental that it becomes your template for the next 20 years. Not just your template, but like, *the* stock character for a whole genre of games. Even Project Wingman was like, "But what if we did Pixy again?"

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

There's a small part of me that's like "That was written by AI, right?" but no self-respecting LLM would just dangle a mid-sentence lower-case "I", right? ...Right? Is that what they do if you say "yes" to "Would you like me to make this sound more human and relatable?"

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Matt Risby @thebadspot.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

My stock response to the folks now saying they include “just a little AI” in their shitty games.

Buddy, if you used AI for some of it, I can only assume you used AI to do all of it. Hell, I assume you used AI to write this email.

Hardest of passes.

Matt Risby
(he/him)
@thebadspotcast

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Rise Up (From the Grave) Comus @riseupcomus.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Rereading old blog posts, and Grognardia reminded me of this essential truth: "don't design rules with bad players in mind. Any rule, no matter how well written, can and will be abused by players looking to find a way to take advantage of a situation."

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Fancy that, The Reefer is one of the upcoming Struggles from TLR.

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

It's what you get from marijuana.

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Leave the Zoom call up for the ghosts to use, ala the ghost light, in theatre.

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Isabelle Ruebsaat -> paxu @anxiousmimicrpgs.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

If you are too scared to play girlframe or PtHK or any of those other games like that you should just do it anyways

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Shane Hensley had to have his Confederate apologaeia pulled, and he posted sympathy for Charlie Kirk. I don't think you're being oversensitive, as I'd not be surprised to find other ick in his writing that isn't so blatantly offensive to demand its removal, even if it's just in tone/vibes.

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Jesus I hate how relatable this mood is.

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

"How did you get into ttrpgs" 60% "Star Wars is neat but I wanna explore the B-plot, the stuff outside the Skywalker story. I wanna tell stories about the Guys Who Made Stuff Happen". 40% I picked up a Battletech book at a garage sale because it read like an in-fiction technical manual; mechs neat

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Every now and then I think about how I watched an AP of The Between to support a friend on the show, had it on the second monitor while I played video games on main, and the first time they got to Theorize and I understood what was happening, I fully stopped and leaned in like I never have before.

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I was typing the exact same thing. Is it that DnD works, or that GMs make DnD work for their captive audience, even despite itself at times? I will continue to assert that most people who leave DnD don't leave because of elements on the player side of the screen.

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Sometimes I read a minigame in a Firebrands-offshoot, or like, Fight With Spirit, and I go, "I don't care how we get there, I want to do this." Then you make the fiction work. That's kind of the beautiful part. Done well, it opens doors to fiction maybe you hadn't considered.

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I feel like I see this keenly in the design of MF0:Firebrands. The "game" is "a series of questions asked, playfully, and their responses". I also come at this from a theater tradition, where "play" has a very similar if uncommon connotation. "If I say this, what changes? What do you do?"

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

That arguably goes against "fiction first", and why I grumble a bit at people who slavishly devote themselves to this ideal. Sometimes you see an option presented in a game and you go "Yes. I want that plz. How do we make it happen?"

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I want eyes to glitter when a player looks at the potential ramifications of a mechanic (move, skill, bespoke dice schema). I remember after playing Hearts of Wulin for a while, saying I wanna fight someone above my Scale because there's a whole training chunk of this game I haven't seen yet.

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Call this my "design thesis" if you want, but I think there is a small subset of the storygamer crowd who feel like mechanics should be involved as little as possible, and should only exist so much as is needed to facilitate storytelling. I believe that some mechanics can be fun, actually.

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Hey! I know that die! Glad you checked them out! Some of my other faves of theirs are the Aliens motion tracker d6 and the wound d6 (useful as a Ruin tracker in Trophy).

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

So rather than make mundane things into rolls (which I still do sometimes because this feels like A Place Dice Should Be Rolled), my more common error is to have a thousand bears come crashing through the door because just cooking a fancy meal isn't interesting. Doing it while attacked by bears is.

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I think one of my critical failures in running games is that, sure, I understand that not everything needs to be a roll. But, follow that maxim and at least my brain starts to go, "So where is the roll?" And I'll start to bend the fiction to move towards roll conditions.

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Reddit-spawned PbtA takes are a whole literary genre.

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

It's usually more interesting to investigate a secondary crux of the roll. Usually people want to get through locked doors quietly. So now that's your fail condition. It's not whether or not they get through, it's a question of, do guards get alerted? Or maybe they break their lockpicks!

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

It's a question of pacing, or what I call the Locked Door Problem of ttrpgs. There is a locked door. A player wants to get past it. They roll poorly. Is it interesting to say, "Okay so you don't"? All that results in is players trying again, or changing their approach. But your momentum is gone.

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Does Black Oak Workshop count? I feel like their dice are sometimes more art pieces in dice format.

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I will admit I only know about the Cornell stuff because someone shared Florence Pugh's post. I'm not even one of her followers. That's the kind of reach celebrities can have, and we are seeing what people with such platforms can do (and often choose not to). So, Ed Sheeran can get fucked.

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Oh no, your Night Witches was my Band of Blades (and vice versa).

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Freyja Valentine, Girl IRL Cat URL @freyjavalentine.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Tabletop game systems have systems rhetoric and procedural rhetoric. When you write even something as simple and basic as a d20 as making an attack roll you've made an inherently ideological statement about the world. That means your design is open to being analyzed as literature.

en.wikipedia.org

Procedural rhetoric - Wikipedia

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

There is a tiny dark corner of my brain that was like "Rules-lite vs Rules Light?" Don't worry, I took that thought, boxed it up, and sent it to the Rancor Pit of my mind palace, never to be seen again.

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I kinda hate when ttrpgs are thinly-veiled Calvinball. I gather it was a big design ethos in the 20teens, this idea of "rules are suggestions, GMs know best for their tables." A statement I read with the same inflection as "parents, not doctors, know what's best for their kids"

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

There's a variant of "rules lite" that's like, sure, there's very few mechanics but the ones that are there *matter*. "Load-bearing rules-lite". I consider Brindlewood Bay rules lite but in a very different way than, say, Lasers & Feelings.

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I can't share ttrpg stories without addressing the mechanics that led to them. It's never just "oh and then this happened." It's "oh and they rolled a miss on Inner Conflict [and so this happened]." "We were in a Crisis in Eyes on the Prize..." "Drew a red card in Once More Into the Void..."

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

👉 ~*POINTING HANDS*~ 👈

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I was such a slut for this aesthetic back in college. (I probably still am)

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

There is the Gauntlet Discord server. The game is WIP so what documents are out in the public is spotty.

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Tin foil hat is just, they're reaching in the hat for "bad things" and saying AI must never do them, hoping their audience infers that they *can*. "Oh no, AI is going to get so powerful it'll make chemical weapons! It'll colonize the moon! It'll fuck your wife!"

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The latest I heard is "we must not let AI build chemical weapons." Like, how would it? AI cannot do anything in meatspace.

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

J Kenji's recipes are so good.

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

"It's only a few hundred words" is a lie I have told myself repeatedly. Those "few hundred words" almost always involve several nights, into even weeks of research. Even stuff I feel like I know about, you wanna confirm, verify. Good writing is often borne out of curiosity.

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Sure. Here's my 9 animes. Though this doesn't include the manga that never got adapted, nor the video games with anime aesthetic.

A collage of 9 animes, captioned "My 9 animes". In reading order, they are: Macross, 08th MS Team, Samurai Champloo, Berserk, Steamboy, Millennium Actress, Porco Rosso, Howl's Moving Castle, and Escaflowne.

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Mackyuu @kmacku.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

We're one presser away from calling our planet Super Earth.

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