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Tabletop, video games, sports and maybe someday some other things if I get the ambition to learn.

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Jama
@Jama

I will say, Cohost was the first place I actually felt like talking at length about anything since like, 2010 when I had a blogspot?

Sure, like, 40% of my posts by volume were TTRPG related, but I never spoke about these anywhere besides Discord, and even that was more reserved. I got more into the hobby because of people here and because I was able to just be more curious about it.

Learning about Obsidian is going to make getting back into blogging easier, but I'll still miss being able to rip off campaign reports or just whatever half baked idea that came to my head. It was cool seeing people take a half formed idea I had, and it made them want to expound on it in more detail and give their own thoughts. It felt collaborative in the way that tabletop games are often praised for being.

It's a bummer. Maybe if I feel like blogging and forums aren't filling the gap, I'll try pillowfort or dreamwidth or whatever, but for now, I'm not going to sign up for anything new beyond forums (if even that). We'll see how it goes.

Thanks, everyone.


Jama
@Jama

I found Oathsworn and Calazcon through here. I got to see cool Friends at the Table art and discussion.

I saw so many cool OCs and characters from the games they were running.

I saw impassioned defenses for games many people haven't heard of. I saw people sharing games they've made. I saw all sorts of talk about games outside Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder. I saw Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, so many Forged in the Dark hacks, LANCER, ICON, Fabula Ultima, His Majesty The Worm, Wildsea, Mausritter... the list goes on.

I saw design discussions around mechanics, talks about mechanizing narrative and vice versa. Saw people share their GMing philosophies, advice for being players, and putting voice to repeated patterns we see at the tables.

I saw Dungeon 23, and people making daily dungeon rooms, which was such a cool undertaking to speculate on.

And this is just all the tabletop stuff. This isn't counting all the cool CSS Crimes (The puzzlebox is still an incredible accomplishment), the shitposts, the development of Love Honk, Carbon Ryan Reynolds (Even if I muted those words after a day), Making up a [noun], wizardposting,

This was a site where I actively used the search function to find Topics, not just people I knew. I followed people I never even heard of before because I saw things in the TTRPG tag or their post was shared.

This site had its issues, good lord it has had issues. But it also had some really good parts to it too. Parts that, if the outpouring we've seen the past few days, people are going to be heartbroken to lose.


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in reply to @Jama's post:

I'll do my best to keep in touch. I don't know when or how my post-cohost web life is going take form, but I'll always need TTRPG people to ttrpg about ttrpgs with.

Ideas, inspirations, and just good comrades are hard to find in the increasingly insular and corporatized official channels for these things, and most independent 'communities' are splinters of that, which can never seem to define themselves apart from it. I don't want to be 'influenced' to play, or design, or think about games a certain way, and I don't want the hobby to revolve around the hobby-industrial complex, and the dramas therein. I just liked seeing what you, and @Clouder, and the other #TTRPG folks were working on, the ideas you had.

That made me feel like the hobby was alive again, because it was just a few of us, and the blogs we shared, and the stories we'd tell about our games. It made me want to write about my own game, which makes me want to play! Like a teenager! And somewhere down the line, it makes me think I can have fun running games too. I just need to remove the omnipresent and competing spheres of influence that dominate all discussion of hobby games on the corporate internet. I need to play with abandon, and just have fun doing it. Instead of trying to curate a specific, perfect, game.