#blorb — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #blorb, aggregated by home.social.
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if i fly in your window
if i fly in your door
i always bring luck
have a tad more...#WindowFriday #Fensterfreitag #Bird #Birding #Floof #Blorb #Photography #BirdPhotography #SometimesTheyFlyRightInAndDemandToBePhoto'd
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Ok, here's the blorb tree. It's hard to capture the true sphericality of this critter! Now if it can just last the first night without kitten slayage, then we can probably pack it with ornaments! 🤞 🤞
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@LuluHelle He's like a white Kirby! 😂 #birb #blorb
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So this little guy was just going *peep peep peep peep peep* for like a solid hour. I don't know if he was calling to mom, or to other fledglings, or was just hanging out. When I left for work, I could see his bright red breast which still has plenty of fluffy down sticking out of it. Such a cute little #blorb.
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D&D got pretty intense and confusing! Into it!
I tried two things differently.
Number one is that I can’t have the video app open at the same time as the PDF app. So they can’t see me nor can I see them. But today I tried really hard to switch back to the video app as often as I could! Since my memory is
/dev/null, that meant making notes of some of the baboons’ stats. (They were fighting large baboons.)Number two is something that the DMG tells you to do (p247) but which is usually too much of a chore to do. It’s to give each monster a trait, like “the one with a helmet”, “the one with a scar” and so on. That’s difficulter than it sounds for pretty small rewards (we’ve been getting by just fine for ten years with just “the one that’s fighting Nanna”, “the one over by Nechta” and so on) but those rewards, though small, are non-zero and since I wanted to give 110% today, I tried it. It’s difficult but the difficulty is up front and then the payoff of doing that lasts throughout the entire fight.
Fun fun fun.♥︎
Also the session today was #blorb at its finest and most distilled:
I’ve got the rooms, I’ve got the features, I’ve got the monsters, I’ve got the traps, what do you do? And what ensues are totally fair shenigans like “OK we’re stuck down here and we don’t have a rope but if we polymorph the elf rogue into a giant hornet (other “giant fliers” are too big to fit the passage) she can carry the gnome and they can go to the Horus Head barbershop and buy ropes.” Two explorations turns later: “Whoops we can’t unpolymorph ourselves and the bard is 200 feet under the ground and don’t know whether we’ve landed and we didn’t come up with a plan. So we’re hiding on the ground until the polymorph runs out.” One hour later: “Whoops we have no money and there are only three ropes for sale here. Let’s head down to Gosterwick, maybe we can sell this figurine down there.” Two hours later: “Whoops we wore out our shoes and we are getting attacked by boars!” And so on. Love it.
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This is great:
https://knightattheopera.blogspot.com/2024/03/no-foolproof-illusions.html
“Designer (?)”, I love that.
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Talking to a guy at a party and the topic of roleplaying games came up and the guy mentioned #blorb 💁🏻♀️ but it wasn't a Solnit / Muybridge situation because when I said that's what I've been doing, the vibe he was giving off was more along the lines of "That tracks, I thought it might be". At least that's how I read him 🤷🏻♀️
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@NanoBookReview #birb or perhaps more accurately #blorb
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Supergood post on #blorb by Bastionland guy! I didn't see this until now, more than a year later. Really great to see blorb explained by someone who gets it and who writes better & clearer than me 🫡
https://www.bastionland.com/2022/04/patching.html?m=1 -
CW: Spoiler for Knights of the Dinner Table #117
B.A. cheated 😭
After the party stole the questgiver's map case he, as DM, swapped the contents with explosive runes. That's not the way I run my games up in old #blorb town. I play to find out.
Weird how he "sticks with the prep" and let it "introduce the unwanted" when it punishes the party but not when they find shortcuts.
His vindictiveness also shot him in the foot since that map was the surest route into a well-prepped region. He pretty much cheated to punish them. 💔 -
KotD such #blorb
Off-screen canon game state. Full myth. And we've had similar things happen in our game a few times. -
Me: "Skill challenges should die in a fire"
Me, three seconds later: "Hold on, Starforged is amazing!"
This game is so great. It's basically the never-ending version of something like those old choose-your-own-adventure books like Citadel of Chaos.
The strength of skill challenges are the low-prep / pickup nature of them; create a textured description purely generatively. They're the ultimate extension of the "wallpaper salience" #blorb principle.
The problem is that it's at the expense of agency. It reduces the joy of exploring to a drab one-dimensional bingo. And the math is broken, too (that goes for 5e's group checks also). It's one of the reasons why Diaspora wasn't that fun after a while.
Starforged mitigates the drawbacks (by weaving together several different "vows" (its name for skill challenges) at the same time, pulling in different directions across that starlit canvas), and leverages its strength (with a mythic / location crafter style generative world).
I love blorb so of course I miss all the tier one truths of a blorbier game (like Arden Vul which is the blorbiest and best game experience of all time). But I'm also loving Starforged. It reminds me of… well, the aforementioned Citadel of Chaos, sure, but also Caves of Qod with its mix of generative / oracular gameplay. Or something like Untold: Adventures Await (which I'd say is maybe a good intro game to try before jumping in to Starforged?). It also reminds me a li'l bit of Disco Elysium but with the safety valves I wish that game had. Although my Starforged game has already become snafubar. My imagination is problematic 🤦🏻♀️ -
@lumpley
1. That's a mystery!
2. Kult! Very derivative of Gaiman, Barker etc but it's a great mix that gets a lot of stuff right. Demonstrating the value of having some core philosophical values/ideas/themes as a throughline when making a kitchen sink. Makes Planescape look like a damp potato.
3. Booshk and friends from CthulhuPunk. Among the first 🏳️🌈 characters I ever saw in any medium, let alone TRPGS.
4. There's been many and I'm not sure which was the first. Solar System probably. Kind of a not good game. Maybe it's an easier read after reading TSoY first.
5. D&D. I came to D&D after a bunch of other games. I regret skipping it because I actually love it.
6. Lucy Slow-Dance from our Anomalous Subsurface Environment game. But, she was also a lesson in character concepts pushed so far it's disruptive. It taught me to try to focus more on rels than on my own traits.
7. GURPS is the TRPG I've spent the most money on (if counting book spines, not dollars, since 5e books are more expensive) and I've pretty much never played it.
8 & 9. Everway. I get that it's a problematic fave after stuff that has happened later. 🫱🏼🫲🏿♥
10–13. Yes, of course!
14. Probably a sacred bowl I used as divine focus in a Svärd & Svartkonst game 🤷🏻♀️
15. As Lene, with Jesper in Baekgaard's "Midsummer" semi. Close second is a relationship from Cthulhu by Gaslight. Also had a jam and a half wih Aviatrix in a 2p GM-less, dice-less run of @johnharper Breakers
16. I'm not a completionist. I've got a bunch of Sine Nomine stuff.
17. I'm working on a rules light modern horror thing but right now I've only got D&D on my mind for the foreseeable. 🤷🏻♀️
18. As a player? Nothing comes to mind except other PCs in games like Apocalypse World or Monsterhearts or semis. As a DM/GM, I feel that the, uh, thing in room 2-8 in the original Moldvay version of B4 The Lost City is pretty legendary. I won't spoil it. Our group nicknamed it Minty Fresh. 💁🏻♀️ As a runner up, The Lodger when I ran the Viewscreen Dreams scenarion in Creatures of the Night (for GURPS 3e) in a 1-on-1 session with a friend. What a trip.
19. Almost every time I play 🤷🏻♀️
20. We had to hack it alone from the books, out in the boonies. That was rough and we made a lot of mistakes but that's to the benefit for y'all since that made me eager to codify the missing pieces and call it #blorb. -
The key to creating "story-like" tension and pacing in an undirected, non-linear, wide-open sandbox game is an awareness of how time is tied to answering questions at the table. Do I live or die? Do I find what I need? Can I climb the ravine without plunging down? What happens now?
At any given moment as DM, become aware of what is the question right now, and what is needed to answer it. Are they waiting for information from you about rules or what they find or what to roll? Are you waiting for information from them about their character's decisions or actions?
The reason why #blorb play at its best is so tense and action filled is that there's no reason to dwell on times when nothing happens. Quickly move along. For example, yesterday they camped out fifteen hours in the jungles of Valachan. They were terrified as they made camp but instead of rolling fifteen separate checks — which would've eroded all the tension with roll after roll of nothing happening — we used a multiroll https://idiomdrottning.org/multiroll . Miraculously, they survived the night (only a 9% chance). Then as the new day dawned and they headed toward their goal, the dice absolutely clobbered them with hydras and panther-gods.
The flipside is that the logistics game can eat up a lot of the mood. -
@jmettraux
Wow, a lot of anonymous generous booklenders sent it!
Thank you all. I'll buy this if I run it.
From a blorbiness perspective, 10/10.
Encounter tables, clear rules for how often and when to roll on them, pointcrawl, no prepped plot or outcomes, super interesting situations. This is great for #blorb.
I have a minor complaint. Not a blorb problem, it's something else.
The following is bad UX for DMs.There are three questions and it says: "Read the adventure and answer these questions for yourself"
Instead, give the DM clear and explicit answers to mysteries upfront.
They'll need to know them in order to answer questions, and not create contradictions. If your adventure is about a stolen cake, put on page one who stole the cake. The DM's reading experience is very different from the player's experience trying to figure out who stole that cake. -
@frotz
Great post.
I feel like "90s games" had too much complexity on the player end but "lol just fudge handwave and lie" on the DM side, a combo which is a complete waste of everybody's time. With our current homebrew game it's not just the character classes that are complex, it's stuff like encounter checks etc, things that make the game world itself be a system and not just my DM-ly whim. #blorb -
One thing I've noticed running tabletop RPGs over the years is how design, all kinds of design, needs to be focused on answering questions that arise at the table. I've had this idea of a moody "raise dead" scene over the last week, but the #boatmode dorks were kinda fastforwardy, and in hindsight it's clear why. "Are we alive yet? y/n" is the number one question in their minds, and if yes then can we move on.
This is also why exploration (a.k.a. discovery) is such a huge pillar. It's all about answering questions. "What's in the room?", "What's in this chest?", "What's weird about this axe?" that's where details can live.
Death House (probably better known as the intro adventure to Curse of Strahd) is an OK adventure but it's weird how some of its clues is buried into like descriptions of the wallpaper and stuff like that that noone would normally even look at. Whereas the wonderful B4 The Lost City puts it detail in stuff that the players actually do need to care about, and will naturally discover through play, like how to disarm traps or what's the history of this cloak, or who the heck is Usamigaras and why should I care?
Another example of a failure to do "question based design" is the trading system in The Minrothad Guilds for Mystara, where I'm like "OK they wanna sell silk what's the price" and the system is like "Here's how you roll up trade modifiers for a huge region I hope you've done that", it takes forever to get to an actual result.
#Blorb play is based on pull, not on push; the players explore a region (or a set of relationships) and they want the DM to answer questions and the DM turns to the gloracle (the glorious oracle of dice and prep) and that gloracle better have answers fast ♥
We're pretty much wrapping up Date of Expiration and it's so clear when it does this right (there's an NPC that has like two lines of text but it's awesome that one of those two lines is "He's talking about the machine in room A-11") and when it's been sloppy and the dorks are looking at a machine and go like "hmm, were do you turn this off" and well, the control panel that turns it off is on another page, and the reference is only one direction. -
I just found out that my D&D group, and our #blorb playstyle were mentioned in the april issue of the Glatisant https://questingbeast.substack.com/p/the-glatisant-issue-26 and in there, I found this fantastic summary by someone I'm not familiar with but they absolutely nail everything perfectly: https://technoskald.me/2022/03/11/blorb-the-technoskald-interpretation/
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