Stirring Sagacity

Obviously that schema fell out of favour, but the recent return to challenge game/story game categorisation makes me wonder why a binary slider is a more useful tool of analysis than a trinary spectrum like RBG/HSL for colors.

Since you're the closest thing to my dash's resident RPG philosopher, would you mind weighing in? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

Please & thank you :)

I don't think challenge/story game is necessarily a useful binary either because even most "story" games will end up engaging primarily with the language of challenge (due to the outsized influence of D&D, a game primarily concerned with challenge) even though they don't realize it. This is something I have touched upon multiple times in the past: most PbtA games tend to cast the player characters as a Group of Heroes whose aim is to Overcome Adversity even though that type of framing is nowhere in the text of Apocalypse World and in fact Apocalypse World is not a good game at all for adventure gaming. A lot of people who think they are making "story-focused" games, whatever that means, still end up making various iterations of D&D.

Like, I don't think we should think about games through a binary slider of story vs. challenge and if that's the impression you've gotten then that might be due to lack of clarity on my part. When I speak of challenge games I primarily speak of a mode of play that largely concerns itself with players putting their characters in adversity and seeking to overcome that adversity, often via knowing how to manipulate the rules and developing system mastery. It's not necessarily indicative of design philosophy.

Like, for example: Daggerheart is, at the end of the day, a challenge game. It might also be a "story" game. Whatever, but it's undoubtedly still very much a challenge or adventure game. The point isn't to create a false binary of story vs. challenge, but to illustrate a blind spot most TTRPG designers have: that TTRPGs tend to be largely about overcoming challenge even when designers think they are bucking the trend.

So, in terrible news, Trump's trying to pull some strings to pass this massive internet censorship bill, featuring all the kinds of internet censorship we're terrified of, including mandatory ID for accessing basically any website, specifically to crush state regulation of AI, because apparently this man will always see the moral bottom of the barrel and start digging.

Gilbert Baker added a 9th stripe shortly before his death, with the new stripe representing diversity. He added this stripe in reaction to the 2016 US election. It’s unfortunately not as well known as the 8 and 6 striped versions.

Here’s an image of him sewing together the 9 striped rainbow flag.

I've been having trouble with insomnia, but despite that, I feel more comfortable drawing at night, although I sometimes have existential crises..

Unlike Earth, where sunsets are red and orange due to the scattering of shorter blue wavelengths by our atmosphere, Mars has an extremely fine dust that scatters blue light more efficiently near the Sun.

So during sunset on Mars, the sky turns reddish-brown while the area around the Sun glows a soft blue. It’s the opposite of what we experience on Earth.

NASA’s rovers have captured this eerie sight