The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
Independent Spaces for RPG Discourse – Lazy RPG Talk Show
Mon, 27 Jan 2025
D&D and RPG news and commentary by Mike Shea of https://slyflourish.com Contents 00:00:00 Show Start 00:01:15 Kickstarter Spotlight: Weapons of Lore by Jeff Stevens 00:03:46 Kickstarter Spotlight: Gate Pass Gazette by EN World Publishing 00:07:32 D&D & RPG News: Mike on Kobold Press Talking Doom Points 00:09:50 D&D & RPG News: Ray Winninger Interview with Stan! on YouTube 00:23:06 D&D & RPG News: No Roll20 Tales of the Valiant Character Builder 00:34:36 Commentary: Thoughts from the Philidelphia Area Gaming Expo 00:48:20 Commentary: RPG Communities on Independent Spaces 01:05:54 Patreon Question: Can I Submit Your Book to Adobe's AI Tool? Links Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter Support Sly Flourish on Patreon Buy Sly Flourish Books: Weapons of Lore Kickstarter Gate Pass Gazette Annual 2024 Terror from the Underdeep Mike on KP talking Doom Points and Monster Vault 2 Ray Winninger EN World Discussion Ray Winninger on Stan!'s Show Stan!'s 50 Years YouTube Playlist Bring On the Discourse – Yochai Gal EN World forums.rpg.net Mastodon — dice.camp Mastodon — chirp.enworld.org Mastodon — mastodon.social Bluesky My Bluesky Starter Pack TTRPG Blogs RPG Blogroll ttrpg.network Top Rated RPG Podcasts
Today on the Lazy RPG Talk Show, we're going to look at the Weapons of Lore Kickstarter by my friend Jeff Stevens. We are going to look at the Gatepass Gazette Annual 2024 by EN World Publishing and Terror from the Underdeep, a new crowdfunding campaign from Goodman Games.
There was a really interesting Ray Wenninger interview that Stan did on YouTube, and we had a really interesting discussion over on EN World. We're going to talk about that later. Roll 20 cancels their Tales of the Valiant character sheet plans. We're going to dig into that just a little bit. I was just at the Philadelphia Area Gaming Expo convention last weekend.
I want to talk about some of my experiences and some of the things that I picked up. I also want to discuss how to follow the RPG community on independent platforms. That's going to be something we're going to dive into today. And we're going to cover more questions from the Sly Flourish Patreon Q&A all today on the Lazy RPG Talk Show.
I'm Mike Shea, your pal from Sly Flourish, here to talk about all things in tabletop role-playing games. The Lazy RPG Talk Show is brought to you by the patrons of Sly Flourish. Patrons get access to all kinds of tips, tricks, tools, source books, a whole separate podcast, a whole bunch of things to help you run your games.
They get access to the awesome Lazy DM community over on Discord, and they help me put on shows like this. To the patrons of Sly Flourish, thank you so much for your outstanding support. Weapons of Lore. My friend Jeff Stevens is running a new crowdfunding campaign for Weapons of Lore, a 5e D&D compatible weapon guide, weapon PDF and book that you can pick up. There is a free PDF download.
Check this out. One click download. Well, two clicks, but you don't have to sign in in order to get the preview of it. So if you want to take a look at it, this is, you know, one of the things I think is important is like, There's a lot of crowdfunding campaigns, right? A lot of things going on. I talk about them all the time on the show.
I do it because I want to shine the light on the independent RPG community that's making so many great things. Many of those great things are being made over on Kickstarter. I think some of the best products that have been made for role-playing games have been crowdfunded. Maybe the best products that have been
made for TTRPGs have been crowdfunded through Kickstarter, through Backerkit and others. I want to shine lights on that, but I think it is also, I also serve you. I serve you, the GM, and I recognize that you do not have unlimited fundings in order to support this. So I don't always say like, you should back it, right? I want to tell you about it. I don't usually say you should absolutely back it.
I will tell you what some of the better deals are in these sorts of things, which is why I talk about bundles of holding all the time and bundles of holding and humble bundles, because those are the best deals you can get for it. But I really like to look at previews.
I don't think there's any reason you shouldn't take a look at the free previews that are available to decide, is this product the kind of thing you want? That's why I harp on like having a one click download so you can one click, get the thing, take a look at it with no commitment, not given your email address. not signing a new thing, not buying it like it's a freaking product.
That's the one that drives me bananas. I really don't like it when I have to go to a site for a Kickstarter and then pretend that I'm buying it. And one case they're asking me for like my PayPal account and it's like, why are you making me, why are you looking like you're going to charge me money? when you're trying to promote a product to me, right? So anyway, Jeff Stevens doesn't do that.
So here we have Weapons of Lore, the preview. It is, how many pages is this? Nine page preview. Jeff Stevens' work is really good. Now I'm biased. I worked with Jeff Stevens before our previous projects. I have certainly backed his Kickstarters for many times in the past. I think they really are great stuff.
and he has a whole product here about how to craft weapons creating weapons building weapons and legendary weapons that all have kind of interesting fun effects like whispers of treason the bow cursed weaponry kind of neat things here so if you want to check it out check out the free preview this is weapons of lore available on kickstarter from jeff stevens looks really fun and jeff is a great guy and he makes awesome products you can find a link to that in the show notes below
Gay Pass Gazette is a book put together by E.N. World Publishing that brings together all of the different kind of small products that they have put out.
I think through, I don't know where they put these out, but it's a compilation, in this case, a compilation of archetypes, feats, spells, heritages, monsters, and more, built for Level Up Advanced 5e, but certainly usable with any version of 5e, whether you're playing 2014 D&D, 2024 D&D, Level Up Advanced 5e, or Tales of the Valiant. You can pick up a book that includes all of this stuff.
sample sad they also don't make you like sign up and buy a sample so that's good too they do have lots of screenshots that show you the kind of things that you can pick up and pick up here the kinds of things that you might want to take a look at so it is a good one i i dig this i dig these i dig the gay pass gazettes it's sort of like a mini xanathars every year right for level up advanced 5e but includes a lot of stuff that you can drop into whatever 5e game you're playing
I usually pick up the PDF of this. I don't know that I usually need the physical version of it because I don't usually run all of the stuff at my table every time. But I do like to have a PDF version of this kind of thing in order to kind of dig through and see what sort of stuff that I find. So it looks pretty cool. That is the Gate Pass Gazette by Level Up Advanced 5e.
One nice thing about the way that Level Up, that EN World Publishing who makes this, they've already got it together. So by the time you are done backing the project and by the time the money hits, they will send you the PDF. So you already know they have it done by the time they've put up a crowdfunding campaign, which, which I think works really well.
So you can, you can take a look at that as the gay past Gazette annual by EN world publishing terror from the under deep is a Goodman games backed project. They are doing, I think like a box set that includes it's built for five E, but has a whole bunch of different sort of like adventures that are in it. You know, they, Hey, look, Oh, Oh, let's see. You're going to make me sign into a thing.
No, look at that. One-click preview. Thank you, Goodman Games, for putting together a one-click preview. This is a 28-page preview. Great big preview of the kind of material that you can get in this Kickstarter. Yeah, is it Kickstarter or is it Backerkit? I think it's Backerkit. It is a Backerkit. More and more people are using Backerkit to do their crowdfunding campaigns, which is totally cool.
So they specialize in like black and white art, black and white design. So it looks kind of old school. They certainly build their things around old school sort of games. I've gotten them. They have been sending me promotion copies of other Goodman Games products, and I've been enjoying reading those. Haven't really ran deep into them yet.
And one of the interesting things about this campaign is this is also where they're going to start playtesting their new version of their house version of 5E. Uh, which is so far, the only real thing we've heard about it is that they are going to look at this art.
It's pretty cool that they are going to, uh, change how advantage and disadvantage works by stepping dice up and down because Goodman games loves their crazy dice, like the D 24 and the D 16 and stuff like that.
So you, instead of rolling two dice and picking the better, you instead increase the dice side, the dice, the number of sides of the dice that you roll, which is certainly one that it gives you. you know, crazy outside numbers. So we'll see what that's like. Anyway, Goodman Games makes really, really outstanding products. The quality is really good. They've been around for a long, long time.
They make really neat stuff. So if you're interested in Goodman Games products, particularly for 5e, take a look at the Terrors from the Underdeep, a giant box of 5e adventures box set with a whole bunch of different things in there. Is there anything else in here? clamshell box, miniatures. Are they really going to look like that? Whoa, those are big. Those are big miniatures.
There are new 5e rules called Advanced Advantage and lots of other accessories. Neat stuff. Lots of videos you can watch too if you want to learn more about what's going on with terrors from the Underdeep by Goodman Games. I had a awesome time hanging out over on the Kobold Press channel or hanging out with Kobold Press stuff. I talked to Kendo over there who runs their video stuff.
And we talked about doom points in the Monster Vault 2. There was a video, let's see, it's an hour long video talking about Monster Vault 2, which is available on Kickstarter. Disclaimer, they both paid me to write material for the Monster Vault 2, which I did, and they paid me to promote the Monster Vault 2.
recognizing of course that i would have promoted it anyway because i love global press and i promote their stuff anyway but anyway it's an important disclaimer and i did an interview with them with kendo talking about doom points you have heard me talk about doom points and kind of extending doom coin doom points on my talk show they actually heard that too and said hey how would you like to write a section about doom points for the monster vault 2. and i said sure that sounds cool so i did and i had a chance to talk about the the style that i was doing with doom points on the monster vault 2. it was really fun
can find a link to that in the show notes so it's really fun to do the interview and talk about doom points and how to use doom points and all the ways we have doom points there's a lot it's a big chunk i'm hoping everything i wrote makes it into the book but i wrote like 2 000 words on it so there's a fair bit of different options ways to use doom points outside of combat ways to use doom points as a measure for beats for upward and downward beats ways to use doom points as a countdown clock for things there's a lot of stuff that you can do with this currency this idea of doom points in your games
and i talked about it with kendo and i also wrote about it and it will be in the monster vault 2 the monster vault 2 kickstarter is still going on again they did pay me for sponsorship and but i would totally back it because i think it's gonna be great let's get cool cool stuff about doom points they too have a preview downloadable preview i think it's a one-click preview
Click here for preview PDF. I've already talked about it, but you can take a look at it if you want to see more about the Monster Vault. It's got some really neat stuff in there. It's got this idea of like monster groups or monster themes where you can grab a theme and it sort of builds adventures and campaigns around a theme of a set of monsters.
Really neat stuff going on in the Monster Vault, too. But also, I think it's fun. And I think it was fun to do the talk with them about Doom Points. And that's something that... Inside Tales of the Valiant or outside Tales of the Valiant for any 5e game. There are ideas and concepts that you can use for that in any 5e game that you are using. So Doom Points is a really cool feature.
Anyway, it was a really fun interview to do. There has been a fair number of former employees at Wizards of the Coast who have been interviewed on various shows. I talked about the incredible interviews that Peter Ackeson, former head of Wizards of the Coast, did with designers of various versions of D&D going as far back as to the earliest days and how awesome those interviews were.
I listened to every one of them. They were just outstanding. And Stan, who is also a former employee of TSR Wizards of the Coast and longtime contractor that worked at TSR Wizards of the Coast, and cartoonist and creator of his own type, also has a show where he talks to, I think he was doing 50 episodes of 50 years and talking to a creator of D&D throughout 50 years.
It's a really outstanding show, outstanding playlist of stuff. You can find it on YouTube. I will link to it in the show notes. But he did an interview with Ray Wenninger. Ray Wenninger was the lead of the D&D team I think from like 2020 to 2022. Yeah, 2020 to 2022. But he had worked at TSR and had worked on D&D for many decades and was very well known and well respected.
And he gave an interview and there were some really fun things and fun, interesting things that came from the interview. I wrote up a short write up on E.N. World. I'm going to talk about E.N. World a little bit because I really like E.N. World. I did a little short write-up on EN World that Ray then responded to. And Mike Merles, other lead designer of D&D, also responded to.
So that was kind of interesting. In fact, correcting one of the things that came out. So there were a few points that sort of leapt out at me from this interview that I want to talk about. But again, you should watch the interview. It was really interesting. The first one, which I thought was really interesting, turned out to probably not be true.
So what Ray said was there was a reason why there were so few products during the earliest days of 5E, and that it wasn't a strategy, but a simple matter of having a small team who was unable to release more stuff than they did.
was the lead of the design teams that back then it said that is not true it actually absolutely was a strategy to try to make fewer products and make an entire year's worth of like a cornerstone that had a theme to it and had a set of books that all match that theme which we remember you remember like the tomb of annihilation themed year and the the year where they focused on storm king's thunder they had like matt mercer running game set in storm king's thunder so you could see where that strategy was there
But what was interesting is regardless of the motivation, which sounds like it was a strategy, the strategy worked. And typically what had happened previously is that newer products tended to sell better than older products. So you would find that like after products came out, their sales would drop off and then you make a newer product who would then sell and then it would drop off.
And so you were constantly making new products to try to keep that cycle of sales going. But what they found is that when they slowed down and released more products or fewer products, that the older products continued to sell well. And we know that we've heard this before, that like the 2014 core books continued to sell well for a decade.
Like they always sold really well and outsold newer products that were coming out a decade later. And that even older adventures like Horde of the Dragon Queen, they even remade Horde of the Dragon Queen. They remade, you know, Curse of Strahd. They went back and made new printings of Curse of Strahd.
And one of the things he said and came up in the interview and also came up in these conversations that we had on the end world about it was that all those books are still in print.
That even like out of the abyss, the second adventure, which is not a particularly like well-known or well-loved adventure for 5E, continues to be in print because people continue to buy it because there isn't that many products overall. It's not like the fourth edition days where there was a new product, multiple products a month came out for fourth edition.
Like fourth edition, and we talk about like its general popularity, whatever its popularity was, boy, did they hammer out a ton of products. And third edition as well. Tons of products. Second edition, tons of products. So this is the first time they really slowed down and only put out so many products. And we can see it now.
There's complaints about like, oh, man, you know, 2025, we're seeing like three products coming out. We're seeing the Monster Manual come out. We're seeing this Dragon Anthology coming out. And we're seeing the Forgotten Realms stuff coming out. And then we're seeing a starter set coming out later this year. We're seeing like four things, but they're all really big things.
So that I thought was really interesting. Ray brought up the idea of the change in demographics, the increase in women playing games, but said like it wasn't because men quit playing the game. Women came into the game and it increased the overall amount of people that were playing, which is interesting. I mean, it makes sense when you think about it, but like I never really thought of it that way.
The answer is that women came in with the overall popularity of gaming and brought it up to a demographic that's much closer to 50-50 than it was in the past. That's pretty fascinating. As D&D got popular, other parts of the company started to pay more attention to it than people would want. And they started to treat it like other products. This is something that Ray mentioned.
He mentioned this also in some of the comments that we had on this thread, which is, I will link to the thread because there's some interesting topics there. But really like, you know, when this gets to a philosophy, and I think it was DM David, David Hartledge wrote an article about this recently. It was really good. I will link to it in the show notes.
Where he talked about like, does D&D thrive when management's not looking at it, right? Something along the lines, like when the VPs aren't looking at it, does it do better? And I think this kind of falls into that idea that it does tend to do better because your VPs are thinking of it as a product, right? They're thinking of it as a product like every other product.
not as D and D and what D and D means. And they talked about this in that interview when Stan was like, they look at it and think like you're selling a book when people will work on D and D recognize that you're like building a lifestyle around it. The game is this game of people around the table, having fun with their friends. The book is just kind of there to help guide that. Right.
He confirmed, and we've heard this before, that the OGL discussions had happened much earlier than when we saw the event occur at the beginning of 2023. 2023, I think, right? It was late 2022, early 2023 when the whole OGL catastrophe occurred. And that that was really a longtime conversation, but that it just meant that certain powers that be got the angle on it to try it.
And what a mistake it was. And Ray, of course, said like, you know, he was he was definitely not for it at the time. He was not no longer working at Wizards when that happened. And I remember he was pretty vocal about what was going on when it was going on. One thing he said was that when he left, about 50% of the players were using D&D Beyond regularly.
He actually thinks like the digital side of this is really important. It's really important to executives at Wizards, but it's important for the game too. And it's important because people are using it. And to him, and this is 2020, 2022. So this is, you know, three years ago, two to three years ago now. was that 50% of players were using D&D Beyond.
My own polls on YouTube also showed me that about 50% of players were using D&D Beyond. And that's probably the highest used digital tool for D&D. Like even, I think that probably eclipses Roll20. I'm sure it eclipses Roll20 because D&D Beyond is used both in in-person games and in online games.
And that's why when I talk about the risk that D and D beyond has for the hobby, that's why I talk about that risk is because it, a lot of people use it. A lot of people use it for a lot of stuff and it's a limiting tool. And it means that we're not seeing as much third party stuff being used outside of it and yada, yada, yada, yada. Ray looked at the stuff at A5E and thought it was really cool.
He sees that as a sort of work as the real value of the OGL because it lets other publishers make stuff Wizards cannot make or will not make. That's one of my arguments for why the OGL is so important is that it allows for so many different, I just, I just spot lit three different ones recently, just, just now, right?
Three different products that are coming out that are, they're not the kind of thing that Wizards of the Coast would put out. They don't have the time, they don't have the attention, they don't have the interest, they're not going to get the sales, right? And yet independent publishers, because of the OGL, can. And they can make them and make profit on them.
They can make enough money to make it worth making that kind of product. So that's really great. I mentioned this before, that Ray said that RPG publishers need to be looking at digital play, how to play online, character builders and the like. I really think so too. I have a, I'm going to give my dream that I would really love to see for this kind of thing.
I would really, and maybe if this thing kind of exists, please let me know. And I'd like to see it. I would really love to see an open source digital tool that focuses on character building for different RPGs. You can start with 5e because it's the biggest one, but allows for customization and flexibility in the back so that you can change different versions of 5e.
You can easily include house versions of 5e, having some kind of open standard to be able to create material in a structured way that this character builder could do and make it so it's self-hostable.
It could still be like an online tool, but if it's an open source tool, it would be really great that you could run it on your own website or you could host it on a different server, a different platform and have that kind of open distributed way of managing character sheets in a tool that is open source. So you know it will be around, different people can fork it.
Whoever creates it, turns out to be a jerk, you can fork it and then somebody else can focus on it. I think the industry could really use a tool like that. It would be really expensive to make, It would take a lot of time and a lot of energy from very skilled people to be able to make a tool like that. But an open source character builder for 5E that is distributed would be fantastic.
EN World Publishing is making Level Up Gateway, which is their character builder. That is a really interesting tool, but it is also not self-hostable. We have to count on them to continue to maintain it. I love the end publishing. I love the end world. Morris is a great guy. I think his heart is in the right place with RPGs, but we cannot trust any single online tool to last forever.
It's one of the reasons I really like Foundry. Foundry is really good because it is self-hostable. You own the software, you own the material that you buy for it and download for it. You can take downloadable snapshots, but it is really a full-fledged VTT. And the kind of thing I want is a character builder specifically, i.e.
a web-based character builder you can give to your players so that they can run it. And that usability is really important too. Anyway, so on. He talks about product dependency. And one of the things he mentioned, which we've heard before, is that he was very against.
And this, I think, has been true with the entire 5E team since the beginning, since 2014 for 5E, is that they did not want to make any product that required that you already owned another product other than the core books. And this is why you didn't see like, oh, character options for Ravenloft.
Or, you know, you have your Spelljammer box set, but then here's a new Spelljammer character option set, and here's a bunch of Spelljammer adventures, but all of them assume that you have the Spelljammer box set.
This is something that occurred back in the second edition days and third edition days, where, you know, basically they would fragment their own audience by creating products that you had to already own a whole other set of products. But it totally makes sense that that's a bad strategy, because imagine... Like, I'm not going to do it, right? Here's an example.
What if I said, oh, I'm going to continue to write stuff for City of Arches, and I'm going to make a City of Arches player's guide and a City of Arches monster book? And what my argument would be, oh, well, in order to use this player's guide and this monster book, you need to own the City of Arches. Well, I'm now already segmented a segmented audience.
There's only so many people that bought or will buy City of Arches. And then there's only a subsection of those that will buy the monster book or the player's guide that's based on that. So it would be far better, and I'm not doing this, so don't get excited.
It would be far better for me to write a general player's guide that is also compatible with City of Arches and a monster book that is also compatible with City of Arches. Monster books in general are pretty good, even if you're writing them around a theme, because those monsters are still good in other themes too. But it makes sense that they don't even want people to think.
that you have to own the first one to get the second one. A very good friend of mine who is a creator and a producer in this industry, he and I have lunch every other week. And when I was talking about Ruins of the Garenda Route, I was going to call it Fantastic Adventures 2. And he said, don't do that. And I was like, why?
And he goes, because they're going to assume you need Fantastic Adventures 1. And only so many people are going to buy that. And it's not going to be that popular. And I think he was right. So I said, ah, I will call it Fantastic Adventures Ruins of the Grendel Route, but it's completely standalone. And it was going to be standalone anyway. I was just giving it the title Fantastic Adventures 2.
But he said, it's going to confuse people. And I think it was absolutely right. And I'm really glad that it didn't go that way, which is why my own products are generally independent from all of the other products that I sell. The same way that Wizards of the Coast is making every product independent of every other product, except for the core books. They assume you have the core books.
So I thought that was really interesting. So it was a really good talk. Very interesting. Both his and I also listened to Mike Merles, who did an interview with Stan as well. That one was really interesting. I highly recommend both.
You will find links to this EN World post and to the series of videos that Stan has done and to the particular links where we're talking with where he was talking with Ray and Mike Merles. And I want to thank Ray and Mike both for talking about all of this stuff on the EN World Post as well. Some really interesting insights into things like the DMs Guild. We talked about that.
You know, some heated discussions back, not between us. At one point, there was a funny exchange where Ray brought up, hey, how far can we push the license agreement on the DMs Guild in order to be able to post some stuff on the DMs Guild? But really, the main product line is outside the DMs Guild. And I'm like... Dude, you worked for Wizards of the Coast. You tell us. Like, we don't know.
And we're always worried that the Ayasaran is going to fall on us and burn us to shred because we had an eye beast on the cover of our book. Like, why are you the one telling us how to do? You know. And he did. He gave some insight. Well, this is how they think about it, right? This is from the inside. I could tell you like this is how they're thinking about it.
And I thought that that was some really useful insight. So very, very good conversation. And I really enjoyed it. And it shows something that I'm going to talk about, which is how valuable these independent spaces are for us to be able to have interesting conversations like this.
A note came out that Roll20, and this is actually taken from the Roll20 Discord server, this gets into my conversation about the importance of electronic tools, is that Roll20 had plans. So it's important to note, this is, you know, we're watching things happen, right? One of the things that happened was Roll20 bought, or Roll20 and DriveThruRPG combined. They still are referred to as Roll20.
Roll20 and DriveThruRPG together then also bought Demiplane. And Demiplane is still operating, according to the people at Demiplane, still operating independently from it. But you know that that can't be the case over the long term. There's no reason to have two different groups building character builders for two different platforms that are both underneath the same company.
Why would you combine? Why would you buy them if your plan wasn't to do some kind of consolidation? So that means Demiplane, Roll20, and DriveThruRPG are now all one company, right? A big company. And Tales of the Valiant is available on Demiplane in a compendium form. So you can go and view all of the rules on Demiplane and read it all, but there is no character builder.
And Demiplane, they were calling it 5e Nexus, I think. was going to be a 5E character builder that you could use to build that stuff. But now Roll20 is building a D&D 2024 character builder that's external from the rest of the VTT. I've tried it out. I think it's not bad. There's clearly bugs and everything like that, but it's a very complicated situation and a complicated system.
So on January 23rd on their Discord server, Roll20 canceled their plans to make a Tales of the Valiant character sheet, which is a big disappointment. And honestly, a lot of people feel like they had bought the Demiplane version of this stuff or the Tales of Valiant material on Roll20 in order to have a character builder and not having a character builder is a big reason why.
So now there's lots of talk about, well, how do you get refunds for it and how is that going to be done and stuff like that? Because it's a really big deal. Not having that character builder is a really big deal and honestly, a big disappointment. And I don't feel like their response to it is they say, you always know. Here's a trick. You ready for a Mike Shea trick?
Whenever somebody says something like, we want to be transparent about where things stand, you know that the stuff they're going to say is not actually transparent. I remember this when Wizards of the Coast said, in order to be fully transparent about the OGL, we wanted to clarify some rumors and stuff. I actually watched my old video about that where I was like, you didn't.
And I'm not saying they're saying that here, but we'll get into it. But over there, it was like, you're going to say, oh, in order to clarify things and get away from rumors and then made up a bunch of rumors, basically made a bunch of lies up about what the OGL actually very much is. So you want to have a little cynical eye.
Whenever somebody says we want to be transparent about what things stand, I would be very careful about what they're going to say next because it's almost certainly not going to be transparent. And they say, when we initially offered to create a TOV character sheet, we did so with great enthusiasm. Yay.
However, once our teams were actually able to assess the work involved, we found that Roll20's priorities on other projects simply do not allow enough time. This is a failure and we have to own and we deeply regret the confusion. What do you mean by own? Like, so own how, right?
We deeply regret the confusion or frustration or actions caused for Kobo Press because Kobo Press, and this is the one thing I would highly recommend to you, is recognizing where this fault lies. And it's not with Kobo Press. Maybe Kobo Press oversold the intentions of something that didn't end up happening.
But you absolutely know Kobo Press would absolutely want this character builder to move forward. They absolutely want a character builder to move forward. And that is a real shame that they couldn't. But this is where the BS lies, right?
So while we have since explored other options and offered alternative solutions to our friends at Kobo, we regret that we cannot deliver the sheet due to many competing priorities. Not many. One, D&D 2024. They have one priority, D&D 2024. That is the only reason why they're not doing a Tales of the Valley character builder.
It's because they're busy focusing their time and attention on a character builder for D&D 2024. They don't mention it in here, but don't say many priorities. You have one, one competing priority, and that is the other big 5E that's bigger than you, which is what they're saying to Coldplay. We deeply value our partnership, but not enough to actually do the thing we said we'd do.
We empathize with our many disappointed fans, and we appreciate your understanding. I don't know what else you're going to say, right? But there's a lot of like, hey, oh, it's okay. Everything. We love you. Our friends, right? You're like our friends, but you're not doing the thing you said you were going to do.
Honestly, I really haven't been paying attention to Roll20 making a character builder for Tales of the Valiant anyway. But this feels... you know, like the issue is let's be, you want to be transparent. The transparency is D&D 2024 is bigger than global press. That's where we're going to focus our time and attention.
Also, we bought another company and we're trying to figure out how to consolidate because that's what you do when you buy another company. They are definitely sliding into the larger corporate speak that's going on here. And what that means is they said they were going to do a thing. Kobo Press marketed the fact that they were going to do a thing.
A lot of people bought products expecting that thing to be there. So now money was spent by people expecting this thing to happen. And now it's not going to happen. And that sucks. The other thing, though, is like, you know who didn't have this problem? Shard. So Shard is another tabletop, another virtual tabletop run by a much smaller group of people. And guess what?
They have freaking Tales of the Valiant on there, right? You could go buy Tales of the Valiant over on Shard. You could build characters over on Shard. I have players who do it and integrate it with your VTT and it is a web-based character builder. So if you are looking for that, check out Shard. And hopefully if you got it here, there's a way for you to get a refund.
And if you want to have it on another platform that you can use where you can actually build characters and run into VTT, Shard VTT is where you could do that. The other one that I'd recommend is over on Foundry. Again, there is not an external character builder for it, but Foundry does have full Tales of the Valiant support. And when you buy it on Foundry, you can download it and keep it forever.
That's one thing that centralized server-based architectures like Roll20 and like Shard do not have. If either of them decide to switch or pivot or move or they go out of business or anything happens, your stuff is gone. With Foundry, that is not the case. You own your own installation of Foundry. You own the data that you downloaded to it. That is yours. You can host it on multiple hosts.
I mentioned one host called The Forge where a lot of people host it and other people said, actually, that's not a good place to host because of this, that, and the other. And you should go host in this other place too. I don't remember what it was. But it's very cool that you can host on other places, right? You can run a Docker. I'm running it. I got a little Raspberry Pi, right?
right over there. So I have, I only have Black Flag. I didn't pick up the rest of it yet, but I have all of the material. This is my version of Foundry with all the kind of stuff. I can look it up. I can look up monsters in it. Where's some of the monsters? Monsters. Let's look at monsters and NPCs. Let's look at, we could do a search, Balor. Look at my Balor.
right balor stats guess what this is running off my raspberry pi sitting right over there i've got a raspberry pi i've got like external ssds hooked up to two external ssds that are backing each other up with our sync every night so that way one of those drives goes bad i have the other and i have my version of foundry and all of my installation all my stuff on a little thing that's like this big it's like sitting right over there on my network
and I can access it right here and I get it. So that self-hosting, I think, is a valuable thing. Foundry has it. Foundry is one of the few. So Fantasy Grounds is another one that has that as well. Fantasy Grounds, you can download and keep forever. So it is really good. And it's the kind of thing to think about because these server-based architectures, they change.
The server-based solutions change. They decide things. We all remember when they were like, oh, we're going to just upgrade all the spells to 2024. And you're like, no, we don't want that. Like, okay, fine, we won't do that. Sometimes they're going to do it anyway. So I think that that is something to consider.
Anyway, this, I think, is an important lesson in understanding the risk of digital platforms for tabletop role-playing games. I've talked about it before. I'm going to talk about it again. The really nice thing about tabletop role-playing games is we have physical books right here. I'm going to grab the old one. I have the new one too. I have this forever, right?
I have, I actually have like multiple copies of this and there's millions of copies out there and we can get it and you can buy it and you can make a character sheet and you can play. And that is really resilient, right? But stuff like this is not resilient. because another thing could have happened. And that's, oh, we made one, but it's kind of kludgy and weird. And our priorities change.
And now it just kind of sucks, right? That could have happened too. And you don't have any power over that, right? You don't have any way to deal with that. So I think it's interesting news. I think the lesson that we GMs can take from this, and I've talked about this in lots of other platforms too. I talked about it over on the Cobalt Crest Discord server while this was going on.
If you are dependent upon a platform to run a game, you're at risk. If you're dependent on any platform to run a game, you're at risk. Some platforms are more risky than others. Roll20 is more risky than Fantasy Grounds or the Fantasy Grounds or Foundry are because at least with Fantasy Grounds and Foundry, you own the stuff.
The only real way to have less risk with digital platforms for RPGs is if you can download them and if you can host them yourself or host them on other servers. That's really the only way. Other than that, you are dependent upon whoever's running the server to continue to run it the way that they're running it. And I think that's a risk for Roll20. I think it's a risk for Shard.
I like Shard a lot, but I think that's a risk for Shard. I think it's a risk for Alchemy. It's a risk for obviously D&D Beyond. Like these are all risks. And as you know, that Ray Wenninger talk that we were just talking about, Ray Wenninger talked about it. Mike Merles talked about it. And then one of the things they kept talking about is, oh, D&D Beyond will become the Steam.
They want it to be the Steam for RPGs. And I'm like, that sounds like a really bad idea. We already have that kind of, and that's D&D Beyond, or that's DriveThruRPG. But boy, having a centralized group that runs RPGs, one of the great things about RPGs is they don't have to run that way. That's one of the reasons I love it so much.
So anyway, I'm continuing to talk about the same thing that I've talked about many times before. More evidence. This is what I'm talking about. This is more evidence of the risks of centralized services being required for running your D&D game. And there's a solution to that. And that solution is be less resilient on any one platform. Use physical books.
This is what I was recommending and what I have done. I did it my game last night. Last night? I don't know. A couple nights ago. Friday night. So Friday night I ran a D&D game.
dnd 2024 they could use whatever they wanted paper character sheets dnd beyond whatever they wanted to use on the player side they could use on the player side what i used was an easel a freaking wood easel with my copy of the monstrous menagerie on it my copy of advanced 5e trials and treasure sitting nearby i had notepad open or i use bb edit but i had bb edit open to use for tracking monster damage tracking initiative tracking other little notes like marching order
all that stuff separate. And we use discord for our chat. And we would use discord to sit, to, to move stuff back and forth. We could have used a bunch of different possible platforms for the voice communication, but I had totally separate tools. And that meant all of them. And some of those are very reliable. Like physical books are very reliable, right?
My, if I lose one, if I have a flood, I can go buy another copy and I still have it. But if a server goes down and last week, I think D and D beyond went down for some significant amounts of time. If you're like, Oh my God, what do I do? Be less reliant than any single tool in order to help you with your RPG.
And I think that this is an example of that case where we're watching companies making priority decisions, giving us corporate speak about how they have different priorities. The reality is we want to focus on this one over here because it's a great big hit. We don't want to focus on that one because we don't know how well it's going to sell. That's the answer. That's the result.
This past weekend, I had a really awesome time over at the Philadelphia Area Gaming Expo. I wanted to share some of my experiences there, kind of talk about some of the things that had happened, some of the things that I sort of picked up while I was there and just share, talk about Paige. Paige did invite me as a special guest.
They helped, they got a hotel room for me and they helped get badges and everything for me. So keep that in mind. I got to put disclaimers all over the show. Thank you to all the nice people. Thank you in particular to Ron who ran the convention and Phil who brought us in for running a fantastic show. It was really, really fun. I had not been, I think it's only been around one time before.
They call it page two. So I presume that it was missed. Oh, hey, look, who's that? Is that Ron or Phil? That's Philly Gaming Expo is here. It says, good morning, Mike. Love having you. Great. What did you, who are you? Phil. Hey, Phil. Great. So Phil was here. So thank you, Phil, directly for inviting me to the show. It was absolutely fantastic.
And I want to talk about some of my experiences and hopefully share some useful tidbits with you that are also going to lead into my next little segment of the show. I get to play a bunch of different games and a bunch of games that I wanted to play. I got to play Crown and Skull, which is really fun. I played Castles and Crusades, which I'd never played before.
I ran a Shadow Dark game and I played in a Shadow Dark game and that was really good. And I played in my first 20th level D&D 2024 game. We're going to talk about that one in a minute. Phil, I have a funny story. So I also got a really cool Philadelphia area gaming expo t-shirt. And I was like, oh, that's cool. It's like a t-shirt with a mimic on it.
And it wasn't until my wife was wearing it after we got home. I go, oh, look, it's a cheesesteak mimic. I didn't realize that the mascot was a cheesesteak mimic. I mean, I must have seen that shirt 50 times. Clearly, I have some kind of issue looking at imagery because I didn't realize it was a cheesesteak mimic on the shirt. But I thought that was really cute.
So one of the things that I picked up from having been to other conventions where I played a lot of independent games is just how similar these games really are. And we get so bent out of shape about mechanics and talking about compatibility and talking about all this stuff. And there are definite differences.
Like if you play Shadow Dark and you play D&D 5e and you play Pathfinder 2, they definitely are different games, right? And maybe you throw in like a Powered by the Apocalypse game in there. You play Monsters of the Week. I think if you play like those games, there's definitely like a difference in them.
But if you brought somebody who doesn't really understand role playing games to look at those games, they look very similar. And I think that's something we should kind of remember is that it's easy to get Ben out of shape about the various mechanics of the game. But the reality is like the way the game plays and operates is really not that different.
And that's just something that was apparent to me. It was apparent to me when I went to 1D4Con last year. I like to play a lot of independent RPGs that I don't normally play when I go to conventions. And I had them where I've played like Pirate Borg and Blade Runner and Dragonbane and D&D 5e and Pathfinder.
And you're like, you know, I mean, we're sitting around rolling dice, having a good time with our friends. And they like, if you think about that way, you know, I think we need to worry a little less about the mechanics of things and just kind of enjoy this game that we like, the style of game that we like. So that was something that kind of picked me up. There were outliers.
The 20th level 5e game was definitely an outlier. One problem we had is that I didn't know it was a 20th level 5e game and no slight to the game master. I would not have played in a 5e game if I had known it was a 20th level game because I know how hard it is to run a 20th level game in a slot at a convention.
It's a reason why I do not sign up for tier three and four games when I'm playing like adventures league games. I like tier one and two. And I've just seen how tier three and four games can go. And many, many times, certainly more often than lower tier games, they go too long. Battles take forever. There's, you know, players will hang on to like every mechanic that they've got.
You know, there's a lot of issues that go on there. But I think that one of the things is that we like we spend a lot of time in the minutia of games when really we should just remember what the big the big thing from the games are. So one of them is, and I was talking to Michelle, we were getting kind of frustrated.
She was frustrated with me because I was like, my recommendation is don't run 20th level 5E games. Now I will say this, the best D&D game I ever played in, the best RPG I ever played in was a 20th level game. that my friend James Intercaso ran for his adventure called Invasion of the Planet of Tarrasques. But we spent a lot of time building our characters together before we ever sat down to play.
It was James Intercaso, who is not what I would consider a DM in the media, and he is a very, very experienced DM. He had run it a whole bunch, and he knew how to fit it in. I also think we had like a six-hour slot. Like none of us had anything to do, so we knew it could go long. That was a very, and we all knew each other. We're all friends and we all knew each other.
That was a very different case. When you're running like a convention game and you're running a 20th level game, you don't know who's going to come there. And if you get somebody who's like a true min-maxer, a min-maxer with a 20th level character is going to take forever. Now I will say this, there were two of, there were four of us there, two couples, none of us were min-maxers.
We didn't get a notification that it was a 20th level game until the night before, which means we had to whip up D&D 2024 characters. And we did. And I was nice. They were like, oh, you can have any like uncommon, two uncommon, one rare, one very rare magic item. And I'm like, I will not pick the, you know, armor that lets me cast shield six times. And he's like, you can if you want.
I'm like, I'm not doing that. Like, that's just no, not for a one shot game. So I did take an item that let me cast Misty Step because I was a fighter. I didn't, I can't really say I learned a lot about D&D 2024 from playing that game, other than I tried to topple the hell out of stuff.
I forced a creature to make eight saving throws in one turn with topple by hitting it with my maul times using action surge. And it burned two of its legendary resistances and made the saving through the other six times before. And it would have really mattered because it was flying. So if I managed to topple what was flying, it would have fallen and taken a bunch of falling damage.
But my general recommendation is don't run 20th level one-shot games because it's going to be too hard. You don't know what you're going to get. Michelle was like, well, what if it said you did it? I'm like, you know, then my answer is you made a mistake because you said you were going to run a 20th level game. I'm like, just don't do it. Like the easiest way is just don't do it.
We had four people. Instead of six, two more were supposed to show up and didn't. And we all got along, right? It was really two couples and both of us were having a really good time and enjoying it. There was one really kind of frustrating puzzle in the middle that we didn't like. And it still went long because it's too hard to run 20 level game.
So yeah, that's one thing I would, that's one thing I would do. So I was on two panels. One panel I affectionately referred to as the, if you want to start a YouTube show, start a blog 15 years ago. And then the second one was on how to market your RPG. They were fun and interesting panels with lots of different viewpoints of how to do things, how to accomplish these things.
In the first panel, we had three of us that all had run blogs for a long time, ran newsletters, and now have YouTube shows. And we talked about what that experience is like. And I gave some of my
Some of my bigger opinions, I had a lot of opinions on it, and I was able to tell the one thing that neither my fellow panelists nor anybody in the audience knew about, which is heating and how heating works. So I'm going to tell you right now what heating is. Heating is when a platform artificially inflates your content in order to see if you would be a hit if you had more people viewing it.
So the way this works is let's say you're on TikTok. We're going to talk about TikTok in a little bit here. But let's say you're on TikTok and you're making videos. And you're like, I'm going to do a DD tip TikTok show. What you'll do, and you say, I'm going to record a bunch of videos. So you record a bunch of videos and you start posting those videos. And the first one does okay, right?
You're like, oh yeah, so people watch it. That's interesting. The second one does, wow, I got more. And then like your third one is like 10 times more. And your fourth one is like eight times more. And you're like, wow, I made it. I went viral. I'm the best. Hey boss, I quit. F you, I quit. Right? Right.
Hey, honey, we're going to cash out the kids tuition fund and I'm going to put it on the video equipment to do the tick tocks. Right. And you're like, this is great. I made it. And then your fourth video is like back to the original numbers and your fifth video is even lower and your sixth video. And you're like, oh, my God, what did I do wrong? Right. Nothing. You didn't do anything. They did it.
They have algorithms that automatically inflate videos early on in a new creator's space because they want to get data. And the data that they get is if they put a video out in front of a lot of people, they get better data on how well it retains, how interested people are. Do they follow you further? They're going to learn a lot more about that if more people see it.
So they don't want to have just like a couple of hundred people see it. They want a few thousand. They want tens of thousands. I've seen this on my own views. In fact, I saw heating occur. I did some short form video work a couple of years ago. I did it on TikTok. I did an Instagram and I did it on YouTube shorts and all three of them. He did my videos. You could see it very clearly.
Huge spike in the beginning and then it tailed off.
and i knew about heating at the time but nobody else that i talked to there knew about heating so i was able to share that and now i'm sharing it with you that's what heating is so do not be surprised if you start a show and you're like oh i want to get a lot of you oh i got a lot of views don't quit your job and don't cash out your kids tuition fund because that's artificial that's called heating
So lots of different interesting viewpoints about what went on the show. And like one of the interesting things is TikTok was going went down during the show. And I thought that was really apt. And I saw like on Blue Sky and other places where people are talking about how important it was for their career, for their, you know, to make money that that TikTok was important to them.
And now it's gone and they're really angry about it. And I'm going to make the unpopular opinion that if you're really angry that TikTok went down and it hurt your career, you need to think about your career differently because you're never going to win that. Right. And I'm telling you this and I told them this at the convention.
As someone who gets 40% of the new people who find my work, find it through YouTube. Right. I have pretty good data on this. And 40% of the people who find my stuff find it through YouTube. You're probably watching me on YouTube right now talking about this. And that's how a lot of new people find me is through YouTube. And I'm kind of screwed, right?
Because I don't have any insight into how the algorithm works. Very little. Obviously, make a good thumbnail, try to make something sticky, make a good title, get people curious and get people to come in and then make content that people want to see. Yes, I know. I've heard it all before.
We have recently seen, I'm now kind of moving from the convention and the talks that we had there into some stuff that we talked about there, but I'm going to talk to you about as well. So as you recall, in the last few weeks, there have been a number of YouTube creators for the RPG space who have lamented the fact that their channels have died or been dying and dying, have died.
People with hundreds of thousands of followers who are getting hundreds of views. So they're literally getting a thousand times fewer views than they have subscribers on the videos that they're putting out. Maybe not a thousand times, but at least a hundred times more. Yeah, a hundred times more, thereabouts, somewhere about that. Very few followers, very few views compared to followers.
And other people, so a few people have said, I'm leaving YouTube, right? Makes sense. Like, why are you spending a whole lot of time doing a thing that's not really that valuable? And then other people have said, well, you're just not doing it right.
You need, here are the things that you need to do in order to keep your YouTube channel healthy, or here's what you need to do on and so on and so forth. And all the advice comes down to YouTube harder, right? Do better at YouTube. Do the YouTube better. And my answer is like, that is a battle you are not going to win. I am not going to win this. One day I'm going to be hosed.
It could be this day because somebody's going to read it and the guy at YouTube's like, ooh, turns the dial down. And that's the end of that, right? That YouTube harder is not a good answer because that makes the assumption that YouTube will still be on your side and they're not. TikTok is not on your side. Instagram is not on your side. These platforms are not there to help you.
YouTube is the last life raft in a giant black sea of in shitified platforms that are hosing creators. And the only reason why YouTube hasn't quite gotten there yet is because it is an actually a really good way to get people to find you that didn't know you before and get into your other worlds like Patreon or a newsletter or a bookstore.
By the way, if you haven't subscribed to my newsletter, please subscribe to the newsletter. It's in the show notes. That's the best way to stay in touch with me. You want to help me avoid getting totally hosed, join the newsletter. It's my best way to talk to you. And you and I could talk together without anybody between us. There's nobody between us when we're talking to the newsletter.
And so YouTube is one of the last platforms where that's still the case. TikTok is, from my experience and from talking to other creators, and Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts are terrible ways to get people to pay attention to your other work. They're not bad ways to get attention for the single video that you're creating. but they're terrible ways to get you to get into anything else.
If my goal is to help show you all of the other stuff I have by following my newsletter and reading my weekly newsletter or seeing the cool stuff that I'm putting out on Patreon or checking out the books that I've worked very, very hard to create, I can't do that on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube Shorts. They do not work for that. So they do work. But right now, YouTube does do well at that.
And it's one of the last platforms that does, which is why we spend so much attention on it. And it's also why I think that YouTube has become a more desperate platform to try to get people to follow videos. And that is a whole further topic. So we talked about all of this stuff at these panels and conventions. And I thought it was really, really useful.
So as it comes to Paige, Paige was outstanding. I love it. I am very excited to go there again next year. I had a very good time. My wife had a very good time. We got stuck in the snow and then you get stuck in the snow. We ended up spending the extra day because of the snow, but it was great. And we still had a really good time.
If I saw you at Page, thank you so much for coming up and saying hello. I saw a lot of people. I suck with names. I suck with faces. I'm kind of embarrassed about all of that, but I definitely met some people. If I did meet you at Page, you could throw me something on Discord to say hello and remind me of our little interchange and we can stay in touch. That'd be awesome.
But it was a very, very fun convention. I really liked it and I'm looking forward to it next year. So following up with this thought about YouTube and these giant platforms where people are creating their work got me thinking more about where the RPG community can communicate with each other on independent platforms.
I've talked about this before, too, since leaving X, which I think I left now two years ago or so, and moving over to federated platforms. I started with Mastodon. I'm now over on Blue Sky as well. I have thoughts about Blue Sky, which I'll share in a minute. Got me thinking a lot about where are the independent platforms where we can all congregate and talk about our hobby.
It's actually very apt. Yoshi Gall wrote a blog article about it literally this morning. I already had this topic on my list. And then I'm going through my RSS feeds, which we're going to talk about. Hey, look, this is a really good article. And he talks about the importance of forums and bringing back forums again as an independent platform. I agree completely.
And I thought it was a really great, I thought it was a really great article. You will find a link to this article in the show notes. But right now, the discourse for tabletop role-playing games is spread a lot of different places.
And what I want to talk about is where we can go to have really good conversations and listen to creators in the industry and learn from them that aren't tied to these massive communication platforms like Facebook, like Instagram, like TikTok. like YouTube, like X, you know, all of these other places where they're just not out for us. They don't care about good discourse.
They don't care about connecting people. All they care about is keeping you on their platform as long as you can be on there and they will feed you whatever they have to feed you in order for you to stay on that platform and eat up advertisements. That is their goal. That is their drive. That is what they do.
So I think it's really important to look at the independent, the independent places where we can have conversations about RPGs. And I wanted to talk about some of these and kind of highlight some of these and, you know, bring them up. So forums. So Yoshi Gall talked about forums. And there are two forums in particular that I really like.
That one where I've been spending a lot of time, one where I would like to spend more time. That's EN World. You've heard me talk about EN World on here before. Ian World run by Ian Publishing. Russ Morrissey has been running it. It's very, very old, like been around a long time, old school forum with lots of stuff going on and pretty popular, pretty popular place.
Lots of conversations that are happening. One thing is I definitely notice there's a lot of people who are pretty loud on there. So you're going to see a lot of posts from people who spend a lot of time talking about things there. So it's not this massive community where it's like millions of people talking.
You're going to see, you know, like a few dozen people that talk often, but lots of really good conversations that go on there. Lots of like industry insiders who talk there. You know, I really, I really like it. So EN World is great. Completely run by EN World Publishing, funded by EN World Publishing. It's their own, their own site. I really dig it.
RPGNet, I haven't spent as much time over in RPGNet. I hadn't been there in a while, and I asked some people like, hey, is this still a good place? Like, oh yeah, it's definitely a good forum. They reached out to me. They're doing something about including an RSS link for Sly Flourish in there somewhere, I think. And it also looks like a really good forum.
I want to spend more time hanging out over on that forum as well. Great place to have conversations about tabletop role-playing games over there. So forums, those are two forums I recommend. I'm sure there are other forums. If you know other forums that are really great places to talk about tabletop role-playing games, please go there.
One thing I like about both of these forums is they're very well moderated. They have moderated. I got moderated. I'm embarrassed to say I was moderated during a conversation that I had while I was at Page. I got very angry and got well moderated for good reasons. I even sent a note to the guy who moderated me and said, you're absolutely right. You were right to moderate me. I was very angry.
Yeah, yeah. I don't need to talk about why it wasn't worthwhile. Those are some places. So what about the sort of small form, what they call microblogging platforms? And these are things like what used to be cool over on X and isn't cool, obviously not cool there anymore. And those two, two of the big ones are Mastodon and Blue Sky. I really love Mastodon, but it is not a super popular place.
And Blue Sky is, I think somebody said it's 20 times bigger overall, that 20 times more people are talking over on Blue Sky than are talking on Mastodon. But one major difference is Blue Sky is not yet federated. They say they are. The software is all open source. So theoretically, somebody could start one up.
But the cost to start up an alternative Blue Sky server is really big, not just in server, physical server costs, but also in moderation, in content control, legal stuff that you have to do. It's a big deal to fire up another Blue Sky server. It's really hard. It is not nearly as hard
as running a mastodon server as a little model as a test i actually went to a service called masta host where you can host your own mastodon server with your own domain name and stuff like that and i fired one up just to see what it was like it was six dollars a month So it's pretty cheap. Now that's on their hosting provider. So I have to trust that that hosting provider is going to stay up.
But it was my own URL. It was slyflourish at mastodon.slyflourish.com. So it was literally my own domain. But even that I was like, well, with the number of followers I have and the number of people that I follow, that $6 is likely to increase. And I am also happy with the other one that it was on. So I shut it down. Because I'm over at chirp.enworld.com because I like EN World a lot.
I know the people that run it. I talk to them. They're great folks. And it runs and scales just fine. So I've been over at chirp.enworld.com, which is my Mastodon server. One of the tricky bits about Mastodon is you have to know which Mastodon server to join. A lot of people join Dice.Camp. Dice Camp is run by Sage LaTorra, who's one of the creators of Dungeon World.
If you don't know what to do, just sign up over at Dice Camp and you'll be fine. I would recommend that. Chirp.enworld.com has actually been around for a long time, but there's not a lot of people over there. There's like a handful. I stayed over there because I've been over there for a while. And again, I know the people over there and I like them.
If you want the big dog, if you wanted to join the big Mastodon one, it would be mastodon.social, which is sort of like the reference installation of Mastodon. The key is it doesn't matter which one of those you join. You can still talk to people on the other ones.
That's the whole point of the federation is that if people are over on Dice Camp could talk to people over on chirp.enworld.org, it doesn't even look like there's a difference between the two. So it doesn't really matter which Mastodon server you join. And that's why I know people are like, I get confused because I don't know which one to join.
So my recommendation would be joining dice.camp, joining Sherp.enworld.com or joining Mastodon.social. And you can find links to those. I really like Mastodon. Then Blue Sky I brought up. Blue Sky is where lots of TTRPG people came over from X. Finally, people got over X. I was over it two years ago. I could be the grognard that was like, I left it a long time ago.
I could tell where this was going. And then I was like, oh, we're all moving over. So everybody moved over from from X over to blue sky. And a lot of people did. And it's much more active over there than it had been before. And I still think it's at risk. And as Corey Doctorow says, it's a system that has no fire exits yet. It's a big theater with no fire exits.
If you decided today you didn't want to be there anymore, you can't really leave. So Blue Sky is still at risk because it costs so much money and so much effort in order to fire up an alternative Blue Sky server that nobody, as far as I know, nobody has done it yet. I think there was one in Japan. Somebody fired one up in Japan.
And there's a bunch of technical reasons why, but basically it's essentially you're making a full copy of all of blue sky that in under like mastodon where you're really only making your, you know, you're setting up a server that can communicate to the people that are on your server that communicate to others in theirs. It's the whole thing.
You're downloading the whole thing and it's scaling exponentially, which means like you need massive amounts of storage. It's like petabyte. I don't know if it's petabytes. It was a lot. It was a ton of storage that you were gonna need in order to keep, to have your own version of Blue Sky so that you could be independent from it.
It has a really interesting architecture and maybe they could get there, but right now they don't. I'm not saying don't go to Blue Sky. I am on Blue Sky, but I don't trust it, right? I don't trust that it'll always be there. I am using Blue Sky as what I've heard to referred to as POSSE, Post Owned Site Syndicate Everywhere, P-O-S-S-E. And what that means is I trust slyflourish.com.
And I trust my RSS feeds that I generated on slideflourish.com. And I have bots that post those RSS feeds to Mastodon and Blue Sky. And that's fine. And if they stopped, that's fine too, right? Like it wouldn't make that. I'm not burning a lot of my own intellectual capital on these other platforms. I would rather focus that on us here and on the Discord server. Discord is a whole other thing.
God, I could get on Discord. Stuff like that. Anyway, if you're interested in like actual sort of that, you know, I would definitely recommend Mastodon and Blue Sky over Threads or X. Absolutely. Absolutely. I recommend that. Then we get to blogs. I love blogs. Sly Flourish has been a blog. I've run Sly Flourish for 20 years now. I ran a blog for 10 years before that.
I've been running blogs since before there were blogs. I've been absolutely obsessed with RSS feeds for almost 30 years. Some of my earliest coding work was scraping sites to generate RSS feeds that then got so popular I was taking servers down. So I've been doing a lot with blogs and RSS feeds for a lot. And there's tons of good RPG blogs.
They actually tend to lean more in the OSR space than I see in other ones, but not all of them. And what I did is I created a, if you're interested in, I created a site. I actually had this site going for a while. The URL is dndblogs.com, but now I'm calling it ttrpgblogs. I don't have the URL for ttrpgblogs.
And there is a blog roll and the blog roll has more than 100 different RPG blogs on it, including all of their RSS feeds. And there is this thing called an OPML file. Oh, look at that. We're going to look at code, everybody. An OPML file is a file that you can import into your own RSS reader to automatically subscribe to all of these blogs at once.
So and you get to decide if you want to stay subscribed to whichever ones you want to subscribe to. But you can absolutely use that. It's called an OPML file. And what this does is something that you don't get with all of those giant and shitified platforms. Guess what I can't do?
I can't download all of the YouTube channels that I subscribe to, take that and give it to somebody else and they can import it and follow all the same ones. You can't do that. Also, like it's all side YouTube. So I can't say like, oh, I actually want to include other subscriptions from other services. You can't do that too. Blogs, RSS feeds, OPML files, you can't.
This is all crazy technology stuff, right? And people are like, ah, I can't be bothered. I don't know what that is. If you're gonna fight against giant and shitified corporations, you're gonna have to learn some of this stuff. And it doesn't mean it's easy, right? It means, God forbid, you go to Wikipedia and look up what an OPML file is. It doesn't mean you have to learn how to code.
It means you need to know, ah, this is how I import this. This is a file that I can export from one service and import into another service in order to move all of the blogs that I follow. I'll give a fantastic example. So I used Feedly for a long time. Feedly is a RSS, online RSS tool where you can subscribe to different feeds.
For example, you can see here, I have my RPGs lists over here and it shows all of the different RPGs. I hate this one. I want to change my layout to just title, right? So that's, I don't like that either, but I like that. Magazine view, article view. Let's try article view. Oh, I don't like that. Cards view. No, I don't like that. We've got a title interview, right?
These are all of the different new articles that have shown up on the RSS feeds. I wasn't crazy about Feedly because they're doing all this new AI stuff in there. And I'm not really into like, it's not even that I'm like directly against any kind of AI stuff, like summarizing articles or telling me like, hey, today, these are some of the top topics.
Although it's wrong as often as it's right on a lot of that stuff. But it also feels like they're trying to court tech bros. And I worry about what it's like for a company to support tech bros and stuff like that, going to that realm. So I was like, well, you know what? I want to move to a different platform.
Well, it was one click for me to take all of the feeds that I subscribed to in Feedly, download it into an OPML file, and then use a new tool, which is called NetNewsWire, which is what is an app that I use on my iPhone. And I imported all my feeds into NetNewsWire, and I was suddenly following all the same people again. Super easy to do.
Imagine trying to take all of the people you follow out of threads and move them into Twitter or X. You can't do it, right? You can't export all your stuff that it doesn't work. So that's why, like some of the stuff, it takes a little time to figure out what it is, but it's totally worthwhile. So TTRPG Blogs is just a website. You can go to dndblogs.com. I'll link to it in the show notes.
And that's just all the latest articles from that feed list that I've got, which is right here. You wanna see which blogs it's reading? These are the blogs that it's reading. The other fun thing is TTRPG Blogs, it has its own RSS feed, which means you can subscribe to D&D Blogs They have a name for this. It's like a RSS pool or something, a blog pool.
But basically, it's like when one site is aggregating RSS feeds from a bunch of other sites into a new RSS feed, so you're getting all of it at once. There's a name for that. But I'm doing it here. So you can subscribe to this, and that way you don't even have to subscribe to the other 100 blogs. You're getting it all here. But you have to trust that I'm keeping my RSS feed up.
I think it's better for you to go follow the exact ones you want to see rather than following it. But I offer it here. So blogs are cool, right? I dig blogs. And that blog role is really good. You know, if you want a good list of very popular, not very popular. I mean, some of them are popular, some of them aren't. But you want to follow it, then you can do that.
If you don't know what the hell I'm talking about, if you're like, I don't know what RSS is. I've talked to creators who have hundreds of thousands of views. And I said, do you know what RSS feed is? Like, I have no idea. I'm like, it's worth doing five minutes on Wikipedia to learn about RSS, learn about OPML.
learn about blogs and how they interoperate and interrelate because you're going to have a far better handle on the community than by going to these incentivized platforms that just want to feed you whatever they want to feed you. So Reddit, we saw Reddit was a big, a couple of years ago when they decided we're not going to let you use third-party clients anymore.
And we're, you know, all the moderators started to leave and they're like, we're going to fire all the moderators and we're going to do all this stuff. And everyone left Reddit. So there is actually another system called Lemmy. Lemmy is a federated Q and a federated sort of link sharing site. That's like Reddit, not nearly as big.
It's even smaller than Mastodon is really, but it is a fun place to go see about tabletop role-playing game stuff. And there is a site. If you go to TTRPG.network, you are going to a Lemmy site and you can subscribe over there. You can even use your Mastodon handle to subscribe to it because it's, it's built on the same protocol behind the scenes and you can see what's going on.
So talks about visualizations for mega dungeons and other things for, for RPGs, small, not a lot of people, not a lot of votes. It's not Reddit. It's not huge, but it's a kind of a fun way to have conversations. I still like it. I still go there and hang out. It's neat. A much bigger one. Arguably, it's not YouTube big, but it's definitely big, are podcasts. Podcasts are huge.
And there's lots of podcasts, lots of podcasts going on there. There is an article here that we talked about some of the top 10 best podcasts for D&D, for tabletop role-playing games that weren't...
and and aren't live play there's tons of live play and i was very happy they they they said that i was number one that's very nice the top four are all ones that i listen to obviously my own right right but the other three are three of my favorite podcasts morris's unofficial tabletop pg talk is great elder galore class is great and mastering dungeons are great i love all three of those podcasts i don't know if you need tons of podcasts you might want more than that
I find that listening to these, this is my way of listening to what's going on in the community, hearing from people that I know and respect. Friends of mine, you know, Teos and Sean Merwin are two very good friends of mine. And I love to hear them talk about tabletop role-playing games. These are great podcasts.
so i will link to that as well but podcasts are another way and podcasts are not on any one platform you can use different tools in order to to listen to them you can they are hosted on different hosts i moved my podcast from one host to another and nobody even knew i kind of knew there's some bugs but like you can move that stuff around you can decide what platform you want to be on you can decide who you're going to subscribe to and there's no algorithm telling you oh this is the article you should listen to
So it's very good. Those to me are the best ways to stay connected to the RPG community on independent platforms. That's really what I think is valuable about this is, I don't know how else to say it. I think that we cannot trust these giant mega corporations and these giant media corporations like Facebook and Google and X and TikTok and everybody else. to manage our community for us.
And that's exactly what they're doing. They're deciding who you see, they're deciding what you see, they're deciding who you follow, who you don't follow. They're making all these choices and they certainly aren't doing it for your interests or the interests of the bigger tabletop role-playing community. Instead, find the platforms that are.
Find the platforms that serve you with software that serves you, software that is designed to give you what you want and not get in the way. And all of the ones that I'm recommending here are all services and software that are distributed. You can leave them. You can export your stuff from them. You can move from one to the other. They are independent of the tools that you use to connect with them.
There's a lot of advantage for that. So take a look at them and maybe I'll see you there. Every quarter now on the Sly Flourish Patreon, we have the Patreon Q&A. Every Friday, any patron of Sly Flourish can ask a question on the Q&A thread. I answer all the questions on Friday. I even did it while I was at Page. I kept up with the questions while I was at Page.
And I bring interesting questions here to talk about on the show. So today, our question is from David B., who says, "'Adobe Acrobat's AI Assistant seems like a useful feature in theory, but it also seems like an easy way for Adobe to ingest any PDF straight into their training datasets.
Given the AI's ability to keep the entirety of the source PDF in context as it answers questions or brainstorms with you, it seems like an interesting way to bounce ideas around. But I wanted to hear your take as a creator before diving in." How do you feel about the AI models being able to ingest your PDFs when they're opened up in Adobe Acrobat?
First of all, so I believe strongly that my products are for you. If you feel like you're getting a value out of it, then that product is yours and you can do what you want with it other than like putting the product on the open internet so people can steal the product directly.
I would not be surprised if my stuff is already inside some of these models anyway, or certainly material that is relevant to those models through my blog and everywhere else, that it's probably in there too.
So I don't think you, I am not upset with you if you decide that you wanted your AI whatever to read the books or the PDFs or whatever that I offer to help you answer your questions and stuff like that. I'm mad at the creators of the AI algorithms in general for something similar to this, which is they also harvested my entire website, which I release under Creative Commons license.
And the only thing they need to do in order to work with that Creative Commons license is cite me. And they won't do that, right? They cannot cite the sources. The models, as far as I can tell, cannot actually cite sources. When they say they're citing sources, I'm pretty sure they're lying. They're running like a Google search behind it and coming up with the sites.
They're not actually getting it from the same data. I'm pretty convinced of that. So all of the problems that I have with generative AI, I've talked about on the show before, I'm not, this is probably not the one I'm really worried about, right? Like I didn't even block the AI bots from scraping my site. I don't think I did, but I do think that what they're doing is pretty immoral.
And I think that like the big one for me, it's one thing for one of these big providers to generate a model that they then release under an open license for other people to use. That I think I have a much better time recognizing.
It's when companies like ChatGPT are valued at billions of dollars and then claim like, well, we don't really owe anything to the people that generated all of the training material that we were able to get that billions of dollars from. That pisses me off.
right because it's like well if it's if we're not valuable to us then don't use us oh well if we did that then we don't have any money at all because imagine how good chat gpt is without any training data so obviously that training data is worth it to them but then they're like yeah but we're not going to pay for it so that that kind of pisses me off i will say one other thing though which is i bet you you're not getting the value out of it that you think you're getting because i think there is a very poor recall on the data that it returns i've seen it myself and
And an example is if you feed a product in that has 20 gods described in the product and then say, give me a list of the gods in this product, it's not going to come up with 20 and it's not going to be accurate. So in the world of search and retrieval and natural language processing and AI, there's a thing called precision and recall.
Precision is how many of the results that you got returned to you were accurate to the query that you gave it. And recall is of the total amount of data that was out there, how much of that data did you get that you should have gotten? Recall is really hard to measure. It's sort of the dog that didn't bark problem. You don't know what you didn't get. Right. It's really hard.
And what I have seen with a lot of the AI bots that supposedly they call it RAG, like retrieval augmented generation, that they retrieve a bunch of information. You read a bunch of information and then you use the rest of the model to help you query that information. It's not bad if you're like, hey, give me three adventure prompts and you really don't care if it's accurate.
The problem is it didn't really read and process and understand everything you gave it, and it might only have read half of it. How do you know which half? And how do you know what stuff it's not building off of for it? So I don't think it's that accurate. So what I would recommend you do instead is read the book. Highlight the book. Use little tabs. Highlight stuff.
Copy and paste text and put it in your own text documents. That's what I've been doing when I've been doing my Dragon Empire campaign. I didn't run anything through AI, right? I read the book. So my feeling is I get, and I have friends who love it. I have friends who love to shoot ideas on this thing. But I don't think it's actually giving you the kind of value you think you're getting from it.
I just don't. I think that, you know, some of the answers are there, but it's like, you know, it's like asking a fourth grader to give you good information about Tale of Two Cities, right? And you're making the assumption that you're asking like PhD level questions about Tales of Two Cities to a fourth grader who barely could read the cliff notes on it. So that's how I feel about it.
I'm not mad at you. Dave B., you're my pal. Thank you for buying the book. That book serves you. So if you feel like it's useful, you can do what you want with it. I'm not giving blanket permission to Audible to ingest my book. So Audible or not Audible, Adobe. So Adobe, if you're listening, no, the answer is no, you can't do that.
Dave, I leave it to you to decide what you want to do, but I'm not mad at you. I'm mad at the world. Friends, I want to thank you all for hanging out with me today while we talked about all things in tabletop role-playing games. If you enjoyed the show, please consider subscribing to the Sly Flourish newsletter. It is just a conversation between you and me. Nobody's in the way.
I try to give you very valuable information to help you run your games. I give you links to all of the other work that I do. It's a great way for you and I to stay in touch. Even if you reply to the email, you're emailing me and I can talk to you. So isn't that great? Nobody in between. You can also support me on Patreon.
Patreon is a great way to support the work that I do to get lots of awesome tips, tricks, and tools. You can see the kind of work that I'm working on in the future. You get a whole other podcast, lots of things you can get from joining me on Patreon. And you help, and you join the Lazy RPG community over on Discord. And you can pick up any of my actual books.
In PDF, I'm going to start releasing, City of Arches is going to be in Markdown, so that's going to be interesting. But you can pick up my books, read them and enjoy them and use them for your tabletop games at the Sly Flourish bookstore. Links for that are on the show notes. Thank you so much. Have a great day and get out there and play an RPG.