Tombs of Annihilation vs. The Pandemic

It started with a tweet:

The traps got them twice tonight in Tombs of Annihilation. And now the ranger has a case of the butterflies.

10:18 PM · Jun 13, 2021·TweetCaster for Android

Bill Barnes

@ataribill

Replying to 

@abraxas3d

Very difficult dungeon..

I thought about it, and here's what I had to say. 

It is. I've been unapologetically intervening (quietly, with a light touch) in the difficulty level because, well, since we've been playing for the past year+ it's the one time of the week we aren't thinking about severely stressful things.

Even as DM and having to do some extra work, it's as if the pandemic wasn't going on - just for a couple of hours. This has turned out to be very valuable. 

We're so very fortunate to have a large enough family to pull off a regular in-person game.

Chult really can slay characters; after their beloved Druid guide was disintegrated by an undead Mind Flayer (horror!); after it was clear that killing characters wasn't going to be handled well at all, I tried hard to make it feel dangerous, but not as punitive as it could be.

We have enough other BS going on as a household. Just a long list of unfair crap and setbacks and hard work and shitty real-life dice rolls. It's still hard and there's been some close calls, but I have extracted things other than character deaths from this party this year.

Watching them deal with encumbrance rules in the field (which I usually ignore) has been entertaining. 

Whatever the top encounter is, they get it. Whenever a trap could be there, it is. NPCs are not as easily captured or defeated. And wow their cleric - how are they still alive? LOL. 

I think I met this character at Burning Man a couple of times and wouldn't trust them with a nail gun or let them in my tent.

There's a Warlock with an insane demon patron, an overeducated Wizard, and a betrayed Knight. With dinosaur steed. Jurassic Don Quixote.

The only thing wrong with this game is that I can't play it. I do get to "play" the NPCs, and there are a lot of them. 

They have a one-armed Dwarven warrior guide, a damaged ranger rescue, Artus, and whoever they don't dispatch does tell them things. 

Not the same as playing.

It does kind of expose my bad habit of being part of the infrastructure or volunteering to do crap rather than "just" enjoying something or "just" being a member or "just" consuming entertainment. 

But, the game wouldn't happen if I didn't force some space for it and set it up.

And sometimes I have to remind/drag/insist them to the game, or reschedule, or listen to lengthy rants about why their character didn't get x or y or why they felt left out or that things are unfair. It's a lot of emotional labor to run a campaign like this.

And some of that isn't fun but it's super important to listen and make it as fun as possible and try and model the sort of collaborative play that creates the totally awesome magic of things like D&D. There is a level where it's not just a game.

Like Warhammer 40k: the 1st rule is that your opponent enjoys the game. You don't pander or roll over to each other. You create a great experience together, even if you are opponents. 

This is the exact same rule in civil discourse. Put your opponent in the best possible light.

So if even a little bit of that sinks in, then all the work (and giving up the chance to run a character in some online campaign because I only have so much time) is totally worth it. 

Plus, we have laughed so damn hard this past year. My household members are hilarious.

They are creative, emotionally invested, daring, craven, sneaky, clever, and unpredictable. What a joy to get this chance to see all of this.

The Radio-Free RFC Podcast

 https://www.openresearch.institute/2021/04/01/radio-free-rfc-podcast-all-episodes/

This podcast was originally published beginning in January 2005. It’s a light-hearted and humorous view of Internet “Request for Comments” or RFCs.

Here's some additional thoughts about this podcast, and the time in which it happened.

Early on in the podcast "movement", this podcast was representative of many of the podcasts published at that time. It was content from individuals that were passionate about what they were doing, and also wanted to take full advantage of the life-changing ability to directly address other people out there that shared their interests (through the internet), and who also had the technical skills and time to 1) produce audio and 2) use the internet distribution mechanisms of the time. 

Many of these early podcasts were exceptional. A lot of them were not great at all. But, there were a lot of choices. A lot of the voices were ordinary people. 

It is true that the voices heard tended to be from a narrow demographic. This has had lasting repercussions on podcasting, media, and the internet. However, at first, the voices were a bit more diverse than what they rapidly coalesced towards (white, male, wealthy).

In the beginning, there were multi-hour hacker podcasts (young, white, male, not wealthy) alongside music shows (mostly young white men) alongside amazing folk music shows (mostly older white men) right next to deep dives on the structure of Psalms sung by rural churches (white highly educated Prostetant men deeply committed to preserving a dying art form).

These church podcasts captured what seems to be the very last working examples of a type of church music that used to be very common. Future archeologists will listen to things like the short-lived "Psalmcast" podcast and I hope they treat it like we now treat Alan Lomax's work.

The voices in the podcasts were, and are now today, almost always white men. But, in the beginning, there was more age diversity, more income diversity, and a wider range of "quirkiness". 

A warning is due here. We cannot and should not assume that all of these podcasts are still available. There is a shockingly large amount of original, creative, innovative early podcast work that has been lost. I thought Radio-Free RFC Podcast would be easy to find on the internet today. After all, it is about the internet. But, I couldn't find any evidence that it ever existed. 

Content like Radio-Free RFC Podcast was produced during a time where assumptions about the media, the message, and the audience were fundamentally different than what we have now. Our current YouTube-dominated and professionalized and advertisement-laden podcast scene was different from what was going on during the Radio-Free RFC Podcast era. At that time, anyone, including myself, could have a podcast. I produced a church podcast for over a decade. I produced it for the local Catholic parish, but the people that it best served were in the military and people that lived in countries where Catholicism was harshly managed. I realized that the mission of this podcast was not what I had originally intended, and I did my best to serve marginalized, endangered, and stressed-out communities. 

What has changed? The professionalization of podcasts, the loss of truly democratic protocols, and the cost and complexity of hosting content. What has stayed the same? The stigma of producing vs. consuming media, because you are supposed to consume and leave the producing to the pros, and racism, sexism, and bigotry in media and performance.

I wish there were more podcasts like this one, now.