This is a new format for Retro Ramblings, but, conveniently, Retro Ramblings implies. . .fucking rambling. Buckle up buttercup, we've got some takes hot off the presses.

I think I’ve finally been able to use good words to describe a feeling I’ve had.

For as long as I can remember, people have been saying something along the lines of “Games are getting too easy, they're commoditizing gaming, lowest common denominator, etc.”. And y'all, yes, that's actually happening. But, like, that alone isn't actually. . .a problem? For me anyway. I'm all for accessibility. I mean, a11y ,yes, but also just “People getting to experience games”. These games are often stories and stories are meant to be shared. Someone being “not good enough” to finish a story is elitist. Period. And, also, sometimes that is okay.

But really, the thing that has bothered me about this isn't that things are getting easier. It's that the kind of hard that they are is often contrived. Mundane.

Many (probably most) older games have levels of difficulty that arise from the limitations of the environment they were created in: Technological limitations making it difficult to communicate lots of information that the player needs to Git Gud, digital game design infancy, etc. However and fortunately, game designers and developers knew this. And, since they knew this, they could apply game design to that problem and make that hardness part of the game instead of being an arbitrary slider a user can tweak. And so, difficulty in games had a certain. . .texture to them.

These days. . .well, the texture is mud. Clean, no sticks or anything. . .you know the kind of mud. A it's that mud that isn't. . .dirty, except that it's literally dirt. Ya know? Every “hard mode” in pretty much every (TRIPLE A, but this also applies to indies, sorry folks) is just “We added more health to the enemies and/or made them hit harder, so you just have to do the same thing but faster than you would otherwise.” And no, that's not the entire phenomenon. I'm having trouble describing this part, and it's the point of this post. Well, other than stalling the studying I should be doing for a certification test tomorrow.

I want to give an example. Pokemon

Back In My Day™, if you wanted a great mon, you had to work at it. You had to grind out IVs, find out what the IVs even were, and then once you'd hatched seventeen thousand ghastly eggs you had to then EV train that ghastly. You threw away three whole shinies in your pursuit of the perfect ghastly. It was toil. It sucked. It was not good game design, not by itself. Now, that toil was fine, if all you wanted to do was get a nice team of your favorite pokemon. You only had to do that process six times. But what if you wanted a team of, like, actually good pokemon? Dude you had to spend. . .weeks. Weeks. Just hatching eggs.

Then, lo, HeartGold and SoulSilver dropped. Gen 4 was already very solid in terms of grinding out pokemon. The IV problem was not solved, but at least the EV training part was effable. (If you don't know what those are, they're specific kinds of stats that you get in different ways. It's not important to the point. IVs take much longer to get right because they are. . .were practically impossible to monitor in the base game)

They'd eliminated a big part of the toil without changing the texture of the difficulty. It was still difficult to make a good team, but it wasn't nearly as difficult, and almost all the difficulty was something you applied skill to, not time. It took you time to design and develop your team, but as a whole, not mon-by-mon. However, HGSS fixed the other half of the equation. They made it so that even IVs can easily be locked in during the creation of single mons, and that was such a powerful pattern that people would train their pokemon in HGSS and then transfer over to D/P/Pt in order to play competitively.

It was now. . .EASY to make a competitive team. You had to know what you were doing, or follow a guide (I have feelings about how folks view these kinds of skills. . .that's another post), but the point was you could apply yourself and end up with better results.

. . .But you could also just play the fucking game. And you'd never know that these deep systems are there for more competitive players. You would never stumble upon a perfectly competitive team. You had to work for the extra stuff, but not for the game or the story. This lead to an AMAZING competitive scene (in my opinion, anyway). Put a very crass way, the FNGs were all just playing the game and the battle-hardened veterans were having the time of their lives building the teams they didn't have the time to do just a single game generation earlier. Now, of course, this was also basically the start of “real” competitive pokemon, in the sense that anyone in the world could play with anyone else in the world and thus we actually opened up a “real” competitive scene that wasn't restricted to Rich White Dudes Who Had Time And Money To Travel To Events (My gods, that describes SO MANY COMPETITIVE GAMES it's not even funny. . .).

After that, I kind of lost the thread a little. I bought X and Y but, like, I was a young adult who was fairly new to the workforce at the time. I didn't have time for pokemon, X or Y, and I didn't even have a 3DS, so I could only play it on my then-girlfriend's 3DS.

So I didn't play new pokemon games for many years. It wasn't until I finally got a switch and then Sword and Shield that I got back into pokemon and WOW. I loved Shield. Like, it was great, fun game, it was such a huge difference from the last games I played that it was shocking.

But I played through it. And I beat it. Fast. Easily. Of course I beat it fast and easily, I thought to myself, I used to pretend I was good at pokemon! But like. . .something didn't feel right.

Now I am not going to sit here and review a pokemon game that came out several years ago now. However, I will say: ALL of the toil is gone. All of it.

If you want a kickass team of perfect IV mons to compete with the best of the best, you didn't have to do anything. You could change IVs, EVs, get basically any pokemon you wanted almost anywhere, you were getting mystery gifts and mystery trades and. . .just, all of the toil was gone.

That toil that is now gone is that texture I was talking about from HGSS. The toil in HGSS had a purpose. It was a skill gate, and one which was completely fair. It wasn't a time gate anymore, like in previous generations. There was no monetary gate; you just needed the game, and the DS was never expensive (listen, comparatively. I recognize we're talking about the first-worldiest of first world problems here, you don't need to point that out to me. This parenthetical should go without saying but for some reason it never does!).

This is one example, but it's one that's near and dear to my heart. It seems like the only way game companies can add difficulty these days, what with ever ballooning scope and shorter-than-ever time crunches, is either by making the damned health bar bigger, or giving up, making the game online- and multiplayer-only, and relying on the fact that some people will be better than others to provide said others with a challenge. Looking at you. . .all FPS games published in the last twenty years. (nah, there's been some recent innovation. . .almost all of it changing how multiplayer works)

It's lazy. It's irresponsible; frankly, it is likely a pretty big factor behind predatory practices like loot boxes that artificially inflate play time. And, worst of all, it's just not good game design. I know game designers today are better than game designers from when I was a kid, and that's largely because a lot of the game designers of games I played as a kid are still practicing today. They've defnitely learned a thing or two.

Anyway. ..so that's the Ted Talk. I don't think this is news to anyone. It's just a framing I don't think I've heard anyone talk about. IANAGD (Game Developer), so take all that with a grain of salt.

And don't worry, I'll get back to the game-specific ramblings soon.

As always, if you wanna yell at me for my opinions, you're welcome to do so on Mastodon.

💡This series is not spoiler free. Like at all. This is not “b4ux1t3 reviews games”. I'll be talking about things that strike me as interesting, going all the way through the game. While I'm not going to lay the story out as I go, it's inevitable that story points will bleed through. I will endeavor to leave spoilers “below the fold”, so to speak, but you have been warned. ;)

I had a PlayStation as a kid. I don't remember when we got it, but it was after the N64. We only had it a few years before the PS2 came out, and we only had a couple games for it. That's a long way to say I never played this game growing up, and in fact hadn't even heard of it until I saw the gameplay on one retro YouTube channel or another.

The PlayStation is known for one thing above all else: Chunky, flickering 3D geometry. Sure, there were a few big names in the 2D space (Chrono Trigger, e.g.), but I think a lot of people, myself thoroughly included, remember it for the advancements in 3D. Silent Hill, Metal Gear Solid, Twisted Metal. . .those are the games I think back to. I don't think we owned a single 2D PS1 game.

That's okay, though. I'm making up for my lack of culture now, thirty years later.

---

In my last post, I said that I won't be doing a review, but I will say right now: If you like action RPG games with intentional, thought-provoking combat, you'll like this game. There are some modern conveniences that would be “nice to have”, but the combat loop here is great. They tried to hide the fact that this is “just” an action RPG with a bunch of randomization and a little bit of player-lead, literal world building, but at the end of t he day you're playing through the same few stories, with the world map laid out a bit differently every time. This is not a bad thing. It just is what it is.

Anyway, time to talk about the thing that made me want to start this blog post:

Just Look At It

Look at this art.

I went in here to stop an elf from doing bad things to this poor barmaid. Or, you know, so I assumed. Turns out it was all misunderstanding, and the dude is just a massive jerk, not a creep. But it's okay because he was upset about missing his. . .sister? I dunno. Whatever. Not the point. This place is throwaway for me so far. There's no one in here, and as such I have no reason to walk around. But, walk around I did.

You can go upstairs. And upstairs is so “on-limits” that the singular NPC in here will also go up the stairs. I'm not in some throw-away room where some story plays out before I move on to the next nondescript room to have yet more exposition layered on me. I'm in a quaint, homey tavern that's just experiencing a midday lull in customers.

Admitting It To Myself

I suffered for many years under a single delusional way of thinking: better graphics means better game. In the PS1 era, I was a kid. To me, I barely understood the difference between 3D and 2D other than the 2D games looked like cartoons (for KIDS, yuck) and the 3D games looked like they were grown-ups, and I badly wanted to be a grown-up.

This way of thinking followed me for far too many years. And it's not even like I didn't get exposed to the beauty that is 2D art and video games. Many of my friends tried to get me to play Chrono Trigger, and I just kept saying “It's not my thing, man”. Sure, I did play the original Final Fantasy games on the GBA, and I had a decent enough time of it. But that was mostly a curiosity, relegated, again, to the “lesser” handheld console.

Editor's note: One of these days I should probably pick those games up again and see what I missed in my naive “get to the end of the game” playthroughs.

Put another way, I was an idiot. Even after I grew up a little, and started getting really into indie games with the Xbox 360, I didn't think to start looking back at games I might have dismissed as a kid. I'd happily play new old games, ones I hadn't heard of as a kid. But the ones that I'd already dismissed as a kid felt like I wouldn't like them. “Yeah it's just not my thing.”

With Fresh Eyes

The sheer amount of care that is put into this game is staggering. Look at this little area, zoomed in a little:

Unlike the copy-pasted bottles and forks and whatnot that pervade 3D games of all generations, every one of these objects has to be hand-drawn into the background here. The little hallway going into the back of the establishment, with the door that, to my modern eye, says “Bathroom's that way”.

This level of detail is everywhere in this game.

Don't Hear the Words I'm Not Saying

There is a certain subset of folks who are passionate about games, in particular retro and/or indie games, who decry 3D as some kind of anti-pattern. I've heard people who I generally respect say things like “Well look how well Mario 64 has aged compared to Super Mario World”. 3D is not a bad thing, and it's just as possible to make 3D games that stand up to the scrutiny that time brings. I haven't switched from “3D is for adults and 2D is for babies” to “2D is for adults and 3D is for babies”.

Games are art. Not all art needs to be for all people; this is a thing that the indie community understands implicitly. It is also a thing that the large publishers and studios seem to have largely forgotten.

But, y'all, all of my favorite games, as of today, are 2D. ;)

What's Next?

I don't even know what format this blog post was in. I basically just blabbered about how pretty the pixel art is. Next post, I think I want to talk about the combat, but I'm still terrible at it, so I want to let the game teach me as I go.

---

I'm thinking that the actual format for this blog will basically be “Here's a bunch of stream of consciousness ramblings about specific aspects of the game that occur to me while I'm playing” with a mega post at the end of a game where I summarize and rehash what I've found, hopefully coming to some kind of meaningful conclusion.

I've decided to start another new blog. Because you know, I've done so great at maintaining the old ones. Ahem.

I've been a gamer my whole life. Starting with the Commodore 64 at my grandparents' house, to when we got our Nintendo ^[1], to the years of PC Master Race BS ^[2], to today, where I spend most of my gaming hours curating lists of old games and updating things on the Xbox.

Wait, what?

You're familiar with this. I know you. You bought every Humble Bundle that ever looked somewhat interesting, dumped every game you ever owned ^[3] into Retroarch. You pay for the Xbox Game Passes, the Playstation Onlines, the Nintendo Onlines. You have all the games you can possibly want. All the games you ever wanted. Late stage Capitalism has been a mixed bag ^[4], but easily the best part is that you, as a gamer, have access to pretty much anything you've ever wanted to play, and it's dirt cheap. Look, you can play the PlayStation's Tony Hawk's Pro Skater for free on The Internet Archive straight from your browser.

And yet, when you find those little, thirty-minute chunks, one of a couple things happens:

1. Your emulator doesn't work, because you haven't touched it for longer than a week and we all know that Retroarch gets jealous.
2. The cool new game you've been meaning to play ^[5] needs a required update which weighs in at an astonishing 27GB before you can play it. Download time: 4 hours.
3. You boot up a game. Play it for a few minutes. Realize it's just not what you were yearning for. You scroll through an interminable list of games. You select nothing, and then sigh and put your controller away when you realize you're going to be late for that thing.
4. You pull out your pocket super computer, which has more power than every game console you ever owned as a kid, and start doomscrolling.

I'm not going to sit here and judge you because all I did was describe my weekend. Every weekend. Every evening. It was never this difficult as a kid, yadda yadda, we've all had this thought.

The Backlog

There's a lot of discourse around “the backlog”. And while some view the backlog as an existential failure of us as gamers, there are very real psychological phenomena around these behaviors. Everything from analysis paralysis to commitment avoidance to false progress.

But we're not going to talk about any of that. We know that the problem is that we just have too many games, and back when we were kid we had, like, one game. No, instead we're going to talk about what I intend to do for myself about it.

---

I have a lot of hobbies that I actually spend quite a bit of time on ^[6], where I don't have this issue. Crochet is a good one; generally, I will sit down and crochet something if I want to crochet something. Ham radio is another one. If I want to do something with a radio, it's usually a specific thing I do, like packet radio or chatting on the repeater or whatever.

But when it comes to the simple act of playing a game? Why is it that, even though I definitely want to play something, I never want to play anything?

Because I'm not invested.

Becoming Invested.

No, Brandon, go away, not that one

In crochet, I have to work on whatever project I'm working on; I only have one project bag, and it can only hold so many projects ^[7]. Similarly, while ham radio is a varied hobby, it really requires you to use specific pieces of kit that you can only have a few of.

With games, the only thing I've ever invested time into is. . .well, curating my games collection. I have lists of games I want to play ^[8], I have multiple systems with games installed on them ^[9].

There is so much around gaming, in particular retro gaming, that it is trivial to waste literally hours doing things that suspiciously feel like work without ever picking up a game. And hey look, if I pick up a game, and waste time on it because I didn't like it, well, that's just a waste of time. But obviously if I'm spending my time figuring out which games are the good ones to play, that'll lead to more “playing good games” in the nebulous future, right?!

Wrong.

So here's how I'm going to solve this problem, for me:

I'm going to blog about it.

b4ux1t3, b4ux1t3, you sneakily linked a paper about how sharing that you're doing things leads to a decreased likelihood that you will actually do them.

Aha! Caught that, did you? Well, I'll put it this way: Telling you about the thing is the thing.

I'm going to write up. . .reviews? Thoughts? Walkthroughs? for retro video games, right here on this blog. This won't actually have a prescribed format, at first anyway. I was just struck while ^[10] sitting down to play Legend of Mana on the PS1 just how great the pixel work was. Like, the Playstation is known for chunky 3D characters and FMV cutscenes, but I think a lot of folks would be surprised by the sheer non-playstation-one-ness of the 2D titles for that console. I was running around through a bar in the game and was struck by just how hand-drawn it felt.

I do this for all of my hobbies. I keep extensive notes on TTRPG campaigns and crochet projects I'm working on. And I even used to do it for games back when that was a thing you needed to do ^[11].

So I want to talk about things like that. Not reviews, necessarily, not “game design showcases” or whatever. Just. . .the stuff that occurs to me while playing these games. The only way to do that is to. . .oh, right, play games.

There will be typoes, there will be run-on sentences. There will be a dearth of em-dashes. But there will be real, genuine reactions to games that you've probably played of, or at least, like, wanted to play. Or have heard of.

What this is not

This will not be a hidden gems playlist. I am not going to schlep through three thousand GameBoy Advance games to find ones you might have missed. I have a job, and kids, and stuff.

This is not a New Years Resolution. It's just a thing I think I wanna do.

This is not a big deal. Lots of people do this, in their head, as they just play video games, and don't even suffer from the issues I've described. I'm just a little bit special and my aged, ADHD brain needs a little accessibility aid to keep the focus.

I'm just going to pick a game, play it through to completion ^[12], and write about it along the way.

Sound good?

Good.

In case you couldn't tell, the first game will be Legend of Mana for the PlayStation. :)

---

Footnotes

[1] That was all you called the NES, because there wasn't anything else at the time; it was just “A Nintendo” ↩

[2] so very much World of Warcraft ↩

[3] which is somehow all of them? ↩

[4] to put it. . .mildly ↩

[5] which made the game awards this year and you now realize has been in your library, untouched, for a year ↩

[6] I mean, accounting for “being a parent” and “having a full time job” ↩

[7] it's a large bag ↩

[8] hey look, making a list about games makes me feel like I did something, neat, now I an do something not game-related ↩

[9] ah, yes, Xbox Game Pass, what an excellent abstract investment that will allow me to view and download every game I've ever wanted to play from the last few years ↩

[10] finally ↩

[11] Gosh, Morrowind feels a lot smaller now that I can just look up where that quest giver is on the wiki ↩

[12] let's say we'll use the “any% glitchless-ish” rules of completion ↩

I was holding my son just now. Putting him to bed. He’s two and a half and he still can’t fall asleep without being held by mom. So I usually come in and help put him down now that he’s getting kind of big.

I picked him up off of my wife.

He rolled over into my chest and snuggled in. Let out a contented sigh, and just slept. Comfortable and happy and safe.

And I just stood there for a few minutes. Because I realized that one day, I’m not going to be able to hold him like this anymore. My older one is four and I can pick him up just fine…. But I can’t really cradle him anymore. Parents, you know the difference. Or, if you don’t yet, you will soon.

Because today that just hit me. It just hit me that my son will probably never be…cradled by me again. Certainly not by his mom. But I still put him to sleep every night. I’m still there every night when he drifts off, sitting next to his bed. And there will be a last time that I do that. I get annoyed some nights because “I have stuff to do”. And there will be a last time that was annoying. Because there will be a last time that it happens at all.

We finally got the two year old weaned off of breast milk fairly recently. Maybe a few months. And like…there was a last breastfeeding. I don’t remember when it was. We celebrated the next day when he went to sleep without breastfeeding. I remember celebrating. And now I’m mourning.

No wonder he doesn’t want to go to sleep without mom; there will be a last time. And he probably doesn’t know why it upsets him, but that time will come and pass and he won’t remember. Only my wife and I will even know that something ended, that something was lost.

One day my baby boy is going to be a kid. And one day my kid is going to be an adult. And that adult will be…someone else.

My kid. My baby boy. But not.

Eventually the time without me will make up the bulk of my child’s life. He’ll have been an adult for longer than he’d ever been a baby or a kid or both.

Oh, shit, yeah, I dunno, something something computers, or whatever it is I usually post about.

This is the first in a series of Ironsworn: Starforged actual solo play journals. I figured, since I'm writing them anyway, I may as well share them.

This is originally stored in my dokuwiki instance that I use to keep track of the world I'm building through this solo experience. Anywhere you see mention of a specific place or technology, I try to make a separate page to give a couple details about that, which is why it may seem sort of. . .wordy in some places.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy!

___

Common Year 203, 5th cycle

Location: Summit, Everest, New Sol, Silent Song

I looked back up toward the sky as I rappelled down. The cliff face was smooth as cliff faces go, so I could enjoy the view of the nearby nebula in Everest's skies. I was fast approaching the new and thus unmapped crag that would cloak me in rock as I moved down to toward my target. I took a last wistful look at the sky before I embedded a new piton and swung into the crevice.

The rest of my descent was in eerie false color, with the major handholds and obstacles outlined in stark, crisp lines. Finally I reached the point where the newly-formed fault opened out behind the laser fence guarding the opening of the cave system. After placing a final piton and securing my extra cordage, I peeked my head out of the crack.

The airfield which made up the bulk of the wide mouth of the cavern was abuzz with automated activity. Security drones flitted about in their chaotic, non-deterministic patterns. Loading mechs prepared various classes of ships, from surface hoppers to a single interstellar pinnace, for departure. It was easy to pick out the parts of the field which had been damaged by the recent tectonic activity, as the dark stone of the surrounding caverns marred the pristine silvery alloy of the field's floor.

I needed to find a way into the greater facility. The most obvious path forward was a set of massive, vault-like cargo doors set into the far wall. Fortunately, toward the western end of the field I spotted a more human-sized entrance, an airlock which, most likely, would lead to administrative offices. Just the sort of offices which may have a clue about where I could find my target.

I kicked off from the ceiling, hard. Plummeting toward the ground, I pivoted with practiced ease, and engaged my coat's fall arresting shell a meter or so above the ground. The coat's flapping tail stiffened as a pulse of electricity rippled through it, causing it to spread out to its full four-meter radius, revealing and temporarily charging its ascension pads and catching the air, depositing me silently on the field below. It retracted itself as soon as my boots touched the ground.

The expert system was very focused on external threats; it was obvious from the RF chatter that there was no active scanning within the confines of the laser grid. I slinked off to the building I had identified earlier, careful to stay out of the cone of visual sensors on the drones. They were a standard model, equipped with non-lethal stun cannons and HumanLike™️ sensor packages.

As long as I tracked where the sensors were looking, I'd be able to stay unseen fairly easily. Again, fortune smiled upon me, as I found a lone figure out for a lunch-time stroll. Upon interrogation, he revealed to me the location of the data core. It's in the primary facility, air-gapped from the systems in this compound. He was unable to provide me with access to the primary facility, and thus provided no further utility. While I managed to execute him, he caused just enough of a stir to raise the attention of a nearby drone.

The drone approached, obviously unsure what specifically was happening. I let loose my daggers, though the sensors managed to pick up on them and dodge out of the ay. With their signature trill as they whirled through the air, my daggers returned to my hands.

The drone charged its stun cannon, and I managed to duck into an alley way between outbuildings just in time to miss being stunned. But now I was cornered, no way out of this alleyway except through the drone. I feinted toward it, causing it to discharge its stun cannon early, and spun toward the wall, kicking off of it and pinwheeling through the air, throwing my daggers while just outside of the drone's visual sensor cone. The daggers, absorbing non-visible electromagnetic radiation, were completely invisible to the active sensors the drone would have engaged during the conflict. Both daggers struck home, embedding themselves up to the hilts, one cutting off the drone's primary power supply and the other disabling one of its ascension pads, causing it to drift to the ground. Before the drone could engage its secondary power supply, I quickly dispatched it with a twist of one of the daggers.

While I was doing this, another drone joined the fray. It charged, this one obviously being directly controlled by the expert system in charge of the security for the compound. It left no openings for me to take advantage of, but it was also too cautious for it to be able to gain any ground. We went back and forth for many precious minutes before, finally, I identified an opening. I danced backwards, baiting a partially-charged stun cannon shot which I was able to shunt into my coat's systems, quickly pushing me off the ground and giving me the angle to throw both daggers as hard as I could, shearing through a specific weak point that is almost never patched correctly in this model of defense drone.

Over the base's public address system, the expert system informed all personnel to take shelter and prepare for a directed military action. There were more drones on the way. I needed to get out, and I needed to do it fast.

My only real hope was to get back to the crag I entered from. It was about 60 meters above the field, and the only way to get to it required sacrificing my ascension pads. I purposefully took a half dozen nearly-fully-charged stun cannon blasts, managing to again shunt the energy into my ascension pads capacitors, and then releasing the energy through the pads all at once, burning them out in the process, but shooting me straight up at breakneck speed to my waiting cordage. I managed to grab on to the rope and pull myself into the crevice. I knew that I wouldn't be able to get back in this way, and reinfiltrating this compound would be extremely difficult.

It wasn't failure of the mission, and I did now know exactly where I needed to go to find the data I needed. But it was going to take a lot more planning and effort than I originally envisioned. As I climbed, I made sure to leave behind some primed grenades with proximity triggers, just in case. I didn't think the drones would follow me, as I hadn't actually been able to reach any critical areas, and therefore wouldn't be worth the potential expenditure of resources.

I was wrong, at least partially. I distinctly heard one of my grenades go off below, though no more after that.

I needed to find a place to hole up until the heat died down.

One of the things that I do on the weekends is take the kiddos in the car to drive around. The ulterior motive here is to get them to nap, and they still haven't caught on to that.

Now, sure, you can make the argument that I'm killing the environment by putting a few miles on my car every weekend, but that's not what this is about.

The kids are usually out after about 10 minutes of driving, so what I do is I loop around and then come back home where we have a lake^[1]. I park at the primary boat ramp, because it's a nice, shady, quiet area. I drop the windows, turn off the car, and I get out, sit by the water and either read a book or do some writing^[2] while I wait for nap time to end.

This gives my wife a much needed break^[3], and, frankly, it gives me a chance to sit by a body of water and just exist for a little while. I don't get to be on or in the water as much as I'd like, but at least being near it feels energizing.

There are a few folks who frequent the boat ramp, and most of them recognize me and smile and wave. Most of them have seen the kids in the car, or just struck up a conversation while loading or unloading. Not a single one of them knows my name, or where I live (other than in the neighborhood, of course). I don't know their names. But it is community. It feels like community.

There is one guy, though, who I've never. . .liked. He does not smile. he does not wave. He barely acknowledges my presence. He scowls in my direction if he does anything at all. Sometimes he's accompanied by a friend, or a brother, I'm unsure which. The brother isn't so bad, he at least gives me a nod.

Today, though, he had someone else with him: A little boy. Probably about 4 years old. Definitely no older than 5. This little boy is his son, so far as I can tell. And this man has nothing but contempt for this little boy. They were loading his boat[4] today as I pulled up. Every word out of the man's mouth toward the kid had a curse in it.

Apparently his hands were dirty, because the guy told the kid to “Wash his fucking hands off” in the lake water before getting in the car.” He told the kid he was bad and was going to time out when they got home. Maybe I'm biased because the guy's not warm like the rest of the folks I see there, but this really didn't sit well with me. But whatever, I don't generally judge other parents too hard. I know what it's like.

But then the brother piped up. “Come on man, he was just playing around. We can wash the boat off.”

Yep, you read that right. This man is sitting there cursing and spitting at his kid because he got the boat muddy. The boat that he takes into the water and loads and unloads in the muddy area next to the boat ramp. Well, okay, maybe dude's having a bad day and this was just the icing and—

He started spanking the kid when the kid wasn't appropriately sorry for having put a muddy handprint on the waxed hull of the boat.

This kid is maybe as old as my oldest kid. The one who is sitting in my car, sleeping peacefully, as this other little boy gets his ass whipped for the crime of being a kid.

No, no, I didn't say anything. I didn't confront the redneck, I didn't save the day. I did consider it, but it really and truly isn't my place to do that. There was no heroic act, and nobody cheered. The brother, at least, had the decency to looked embarrassed when he saw that I'd noticed what was going on. I get the feeling he's a good uncle.

I don't know what the point of this story was. I don't know why this, of all things, caused me to finally start writing “journal-style” blog entries. I guess the thing I learned from this is that. . .I'm doing a pretty good job.

I've never hit my kids. Oh, sure, I've lost my temper and yelled, definitely more often than I should. I've even cursed[5]. I'm a human being, after all. But I have never and will never hit them. Call it gentle parenting. Call it being a pussy.

I call it being a man, in all the noble and worthy ways that something can be “manly”, and none of the toxic ones. I call it being good.

I can only hope that that poor kid will be able to break the cycle of anger that his father couldn't. I hope my kids meet him, one day. I hope they share what a good dad can be. Not a perfect dad. But a good one.

Dads (and moms, too), I know you're struggling. I know that there's a loneliness epidemic amongst us. I know this because I feel it. I know that you probably feel like you're not a good dad sometimes. But, take it from me: You're doing great.

---

Footnotes

[1]: We do not have a lake house. Our house is downstream of the dam that makes the lake.

[2]: I tell myself it'll be a novel, or a blog post, but it usually ends up being code. 😕

[3]: She has to deal with nap time all week while I work.

[4]: This boat is very well taken care of. He recently got a new paint job on it, and it wasn't a cheap one. This is sort of important for the story, but I didn't feel like breaking the flow to include it.

[5]: I don't actually have that much of a bias against cursing around kids, to be honest. I generally try not to, even my own, but. . .meh.

The Internet is a big place. It's also not nearly as nice as it used to be writ large. I would not recommend opening up port 80 on your home router and letting the world in. However there are ways to go about hosting things from home that don't involve doing that. I'm going to go through one such way of doing that in this blog post. There are many services like the one that I will share with you, this is the one that I'm most familiar with.

We're going to set up a service called WriteFreely, and we will tunnel traffic from the Internet directly to the computer that is hosting WriteFreely. Note that, technically, you could use any web server for this. WriteFreely is a nice little blogging platform that is still simple to set up, and isn't just a static site generator.

It should be noted that each of the sections here is its own entire world of rabbit holes. I could easily write an entire blog post on just setting up WriteFreely, or just securely configuring Cloudflare.

If that sounds daunting, don't worry. All of these things are designed to be used by people with minimal expertise in networking and web hosting. Plus, you have me, what could possibly go wrong?

Now, if you want to simply pay someone to host your instance for you and give you a URL to log in at, you can do that. Just check out the page directly on WriteFreel's website about it. If you want to do it yourself, read on.

How can you be sure all of this works? Well, you're reading this post on a system that is set up using the process listed here. :)

Staking Your Claim

The first thing you need to have is a domain. If you already have one, great. If not, there are plenty of ways to to get one. I recommend Namecheap. Once you've purchased a domain, you can begin with the rest of the post. Note that it can take a little while for the domain registration process to finish. You may want to purchase the domain the day before you have time to set things up.

Picking a Computer

I'm going to assume you're comfortable with the idea of running a Linux server for this. If you've never done that before, there are many, many resources out there for spinning things up. I highly recommend you use something like Ubuntu. I use Debian, which Ubuntu is built on top of. If you're using a Raspberry Pi, use Raspberry Pi OS. It's designed to be easy to use, and it's based on Debian. Follow the instructions to install the operating system either on a physical computer or on a virtual machine.

Using virtualization software is well beyond the scope of this tutorial. I, personally, host all of my web presence from KVM guests running Debian on my Linux Mint desktop computer.

Once you've installed your operating system, you can follow the rest of the guide!

Running WriteFreely

WriteFreely is a very small little program written in a language called Go. You can and should follow the instructions on their install page to set it up. I recommend hosting the service on a port like 8080 or 9000 or something else similarly high (but less than 10000 because of stupid silly reasons that aren't important). Really, anything over 5000 and less than 10000 will work just fine. Just make sure you know which number you used!

You can skip anything related to MySQL. I am using MySQL myself (well, MariaDB, but it's the same thing), but you do not need to for a single-user instance of WriteFreely. I'm just a masochist.

Once WriteFreely is running locally (run sudo systemctl status writefreely to check), you can move on to setting up the tunnel.

Signing up for Cloudflare

We're going to be configuring what is called a tunnel. It is, fundamentally, a private connection from a service called Cloudflare to a computer that you own. Cloudflare will, for free, route web traffic going to a domain name that they manage for you to your computer via this tunnel.

You need to pull up Cloudflare, make an account, and register your DNS with Cloudflare. Here is Namecheap's own tutorial on doing this.

Setting Up the Tunnel

Once Cloudflare is in charge of your DNS, you need to set up your tunnel! In the left-hand sidebar, click Zero Trust. On this new page, click the Networks dropdown, also in the left-hand navigation sidebar. From the list that falls out u nderneath, select Tunnels.

Click the Create Tunnel button. Under Select your tunnel type, click the button Select Cloudflared. Give your tunnel a meaningful name. I recommend “WriteFreely”. ;)

You should now be on the Configure page. Make sure you select Debian from the list of options, and (probably) 64-bit. Then, and this part is really important, copy the big block of text under the words “If you don’t have cloudflared installed on your machine” and paste it into your command line.

Wait for that to finish running, and then copy the other text block on the right, and paste that into your terminal. DO NOT SHARE THAT COMMAND WITH ANYONE. This second command has a secret key which allows anyone who holds it to act as though they are your tunnel.

Plugging it All In

This is the last step!

Now you have a couple parts: 1. You have your server which is running WriteFreely on a port like 8080. 2. You have a Cloudflare tunnel which is set up to begin accepting traffic from Cloudflare to this server.

The thing that is missing is the connection from Cloudflare to your server.

In Cloudflare, after you configured your tunnel, you should have the option to click on Public Hostname at the top of the page. Click it. Then click the button labeled Add a public hostname.

In this new page, you can add a Subdomain if you like. For example, the blog you're reading is hosted on write.bauxite.tech. That first part, write, is a subdomain. If your domain will only be used for your blog, you can leave this blank.

From the Domain drop down, select the primary domain name that you signed up with. If you've never done any of this before, it should be the only option.

Leave the Path blank. Let me repeat that: Leave the path blank.

Under Type, select the HTTP option. Then, in URL, type localhost:8080. Note that whatever comes after t he colon is the port number which you configured for WriteFreely. It is very important that those match up!

Then. . .just click Save hostname.

Conclusion

Et voila! You should now be able to point to your new domain and see WriteFreely running. Follow WriteFreely's instructions for setting up your account, and START WRITING!

What a mouthful. Anyway, this is part two in a series of posts I'm doing, which started with Asynchronous Text-Based Tabletop Role Playing Games.

What follows is the “welcome, here's what we're doing” document I intend to publish for my prospective players.

I'm mostly posting it here to start looking for commentary on it, so if you have anything to say, please do!

You can hit me up on Mastodon, or on PhD20's awesome TTRPG forum, where I have a thread going about this concept.

___

Welcome!

I'm sure you're wondering what all is going on here. Someone or another sent you a link to a Matrix server and said “Don't worry, you'll figure it out, have fun!” Trust me when I tell you that I get it. Let's demystify things a bit.

b4ux1t3 Enters the Dungeon (BEtD) is an asynchronous, text-first interactive roleplaying experience. If you got the link, you're probably involved in TTRPGs to one extent or another. You can think of BEtD as a persistent, ongoing virtual tabletop that relies on text-based descriptions (and maybe a few images here and there) to play.

In BEtD, you can do whatever you want to do. You can join up with parties who are pillaging a lost tomb, you can join a gang of mercenaries and seek your fortune, or you can find the nearest empty plot of land, chop down some trees, and build a house. But how does it work?

Asynchronous

We are not all sitting down at a table to play a TTRPG. We're people who have lives; kids, jobs, significant others, other hobbies, we've got stuff going on. So, the first and most important part of this community is the word “Asynchronous”. The way you play this game is simple. You say what you want to do, and then you walk away. You put down the phone, or the computer, and you go do something else.

Eventually, a GM (right now that's just me, b4ux1t3) will see your message and will respond with the result of your action. If you need to make a skill check, they'll ask for it. For now, this is an honor system. I'll add a dice roller to the chat one of these days!

That's it. That's the game loop. You have all the time in the world to check your skills, come up with a plan with any team mates, and try to execute on them.

Text-First

No voice chats, no video calls. Aside from the occasional illustration and emojis, everything is done like you're writing a novel. This is a blessing and a curse. It means you can't rely on body language or fun voices; you need to write. You need to be descriptive. If the best way for you to get your point across is to draw it out, then do that! But the default will always be fingers on the keyboard.

This also means you have a lot of leeway to really drive home your point. You won't be interrupted by Grog deciding he wants to charge in (Unless Grog logs on while you're typing your novel, that is).

Interactive

The world is yours. It isn't mine. I just set up the sandbox. I am no god, I am no dictator. I am the system. I'm the ghost in the machine. You are the world. You decide where you go. You decide what you do. Through your actions, and the whims of the fates, you decide who lives and who dies.

Role-Playing

There is a long history of in-character role-playing, both at the tabletop and online. From entire servers full of people dedicated to pretending that they are actually noble paladins fighting off the Scourge in World of Warcraft, to the dedicated forums for in-universe shared storytelling on sites like GaiaOnline and NeoPets. (Did I date myself there?)

You do not have to be in character all of the time, not even in “places” that are designated as “in-universe”. (We'll go over what that means shortly!) That said, it is very much encouraged that you try. It's difficult to keep up a fake accent for a three-hour game session, but it's pretty easy to transform what you want to do into prose given a functionally-indefinite time period.

Just keep any long-form commentary relegated to the dedicated Out Of Universe Room.

Experience

This is not a game. I mean, yes, strictly speaking, we are playing a game. We're playing Dungeon Crawl Classics, specifically. However, the point here isn't stats and loot. Those things are fun and you're encouraged to pursue them. But what we're doing here is best described by the word in that section title: Experience. This is meant to be an enjoyable place to spend a bit of time. A little escape from a busy life. Let's keep it comfortable for all involved. I'll have a specific document that lays out the hard rules, but, for now: Don't be a jerk. Disagree gently. Discuss, don't argue.

What's Next?

Now that you have an idea what this is all about, you can move on to the Getting Started page to start your journey with us!

This is going to be a long post, so I took the liberty of adding a Table of Contents.

Table of Contents

1. Overview of the idea
2. Technical details
   • If you don't care about the technical bits, skip this section and click the next one!
3. Setting up your Space
4. How to play
5. How to pick a system

Overview

Back in the day, I was introduced to ttrpgs by a friend of a friend. He invited me to an IRC Channel, sent me a PDF character sheet for a D&D 3.5e character. He said “Don’t worry, you’ll have fun and figure it out”.

I didn’t have fun and I didn’t figure it out. It was a bad intro to TTRPGs. It turned me off of D&D and the whole world of TTRPGs for years.

However. . .

Thinking back on it, it seemed great. It was basically a VTT, but entirely theater of the mind. The DM described where each player was and asked the player what they wanted to do. The version that they played was live, like people sitting around a table and playing. However, while digging at the time, I found groups that play full on TTRPGs completely asynchronously. The players just said what they wanted to do, and then waited for a response. It was akin to play by mail. The conversation around it was usually ongoing in other channels, but the main thread of play was “stopped” while every one waited for the next action.

This sounds ideal for a modern game group, especially with some of the lighter-weight systems that have gotten popular. So I set out to make one.

Technical Section

Look, I know not everyone is as technical as I am. I write emulators for 50-year-old CPUs on Twitch. However, when I tell you that it is dead easy to run your own Matrix server, I mean it. I think anyone with a reasonable amount of knowledge about computers could do it. Whether you should is another story.

Now, it is trivial to get a hosted Matrix server, and most people, even the technical ones, should just do that. You don't even need your own instance, really, you could set up a Space on an existing instance. You do you! If you choose to do that, you can skip forward to this section

For the rest of you nutjobs, here's a very brief crash course. To be very clear here, this is more meant to be a reminder to me about how I set it up. It should work for you, too, but know that you're probably not the primary audience for this bit. Unless you're me. Hi me!

Getting the Server Running

The only requirement for this section is that you have to know how to open a terminal. On Windows, you need PowerShell, not Command Prompt.

The easiest way to run a Matrix server is to have Python installed already. If you don't have Python installed (I dunno, maybe you're on Windows. Don't run servers on Windows), go install Python. The best way to do that in 2025 is with a program called uv. Fortunately, installing uv is simple on every platform. Once uv is installed, it shouldn't matter what OS you're on, every command will be the same. I think.

Next you need to install your python version using uv. You shouldn't need to use a specific version.

Once you have your Python installed, you're gonna follow the instructions straight from the horse's mouth. We'll be using a Matrix server implementation called Synapse. This was originally created by the creators of the Matrix protocol itself, but is now maintained by another company.

We're going to use the “Pip Install” instructions, because they're better for our purposes, but we're going to do it slightly differently. We need to use uv instead of using the commands they use.

So, type:

mkdir -p ~/synapse
uv add setuptools matrix-synapse
source ~/synapse/env/bin/activate

After that, you'll need to run the bootstrapping script inside Synapse.

cd ~/synapse 
uv python -m synapse.app.homeserver \
    --server-name YOUR.DOMAIN.NAME\
    --config-path homeserver.yaml \
    --generate-config \
    --report-stats=no

That last command will create a configuration file called homeserver.yaml. You're going to have to edit that in a text editor. Don't use Microsoft Word, and don't use Macos' Pages. Use Notepad if you're on Windows, Text Wrangler if on Macos.

Once you've installed the server, it's time to CONFIGURE IT! This part is the tricky part, so pay attention.

They have a section on configuring Synapse further down the same page. Note that they say some very hurtful words about SQLite, but the fact of the matter is that, unless you plan to run this for hundreds of people, you don't need Postgres. Also, I don't want to write a section on installing and configuring Postgres. If you wanna use Postgres, you're on your own. (I actually use Postgres, because I am a monster and I maintain my own production Postgres instance. Don't be me, your spouse will despise you.)

I'm going to give you a shortcut, and we're going to walk through it. So, fire up that text editor and open the file homeserver.yaml.

Most of this should be good to go already. Take a second to verify that the server_name you want to use is correct. Fixing an incorrect server name later is hard enough that it's better to just start over with a new server name than to try to fix it! Trust me. For example, the server_name for my instance is chat.bauxite.tech.

One thing you need to add is a single line which sets up the .well-known file for allowing you to sign into your instance with a client. This line needs to be at the “root level” of the configuration file. All that means is that it should have no spaces before the key (the thing before the colon). A good place to put it is directly below your server_name line.

public_baseurl: https://YOUR.SERVER.NAME

Note that this must match the server_name configuration, and it needs to include the https://, which is the URL scheme.

That's all you need to do to configure your Synapse server. In theory, you could just get started. However, there are lots of ways to customize the server, including adding third-party authentication (So you can log in with Google or Facebook or any of the other companies that give you a free service at the expense of your personal data). If you are going to allow other people to sign up directly on your instance for Matrix accounts, then you should do that. The nice thing about Matrix is that you don't need to have an account on the server in order to use rooms hosted on the server.

Cool, huh?

In a follow up post “eventually”, I'll give some tips on making this more “production-like”. Like I said earlier, if you're hosting this for a few friends, you do not need to do any of that. Just start the server with the synctl start command and follow the directions to make yourself an account.

Congratulations, if all went well, you have a server! Go find yourself a client (I like Element, it's “Good enough”), log in and read the next section.

Setting Up a Space

Fundamentally, what we're trying to accomplish here is akin to play-by-mail (PbM) (or play-by-post, PbP). Startplaying.games has a great little explainer on what that entails. The only difference between PbM and our little chat-based solution is that the gameplay loop is a little tighter. We have the capacity to have multiple little side stories going on that can't happen in PbM, since it is a more “ordered” experience.

So, let's look at how I set up my Space. The rest of this article is going to be more descriptive than prescriptive.

What is a Space?

If you are familiar with Discord, you know what a server is. A server, in Discord-land, is a specific community. The equivalent in Matrix is not a Matrix server. Don't mix those up! The equivalent is a Matrix Space. I have a Space called b4ux1t3 Has Entered the Dungeon which represents my game world. It's divided up into (for now) four Rooms:

We'll get to those in a second.

The Space is representative of a single “Game Session”. This is one group of players playing in the same canonical world. That doesn't mean that this is a “specific plane of existence” in the sense of D&D's planescape. It's more akin to a play group. The Multiverse is even vaster than players realize, since each game group technically exists in its own separate multiverse. A multiverse of multiverses. How's your brain? Mine hurts.

The Rooms

Adding a new Room to a Space is trivial, but it will be different for each client. Check out the manual for your chosen client for how to do it. Element's User Guide (in PDF form) is here.

Each room is a logical division that has semantic meaning.

Roughly:

• The Tavern is basically the hub. New players join there, get their characters, and get access to the other rooms by joining existing quests (or starting new ones).

• Out of Universe is your basic OOC chat. Technically I don’t have any rules against talking out of character in the other rooms, but it’s probably a good idea to keep chatter to a minimum so other players don’t lose track of what’s going on.

• The Wilderness is, roughly, adventures that take place out doors.

• The Dungeon is the same, but roughly things that take place “at places”.

Note that these are not discrete locations unto themselves (except maybe The Tavern). They are merely “themed discussions”, which roughly group players by the kinds of locations they're going to.

As an aside, I'm toying with the idea of adding a fifth room that acts as the actual staging area before players are shoved into The Tavern. It would act as an orientation room, where new players can learn and ask question about the mechanics of the game, get their characters made, things like that. It'd be a somewhat more focused version of the Out of Universe room.

Rooms are easy to add to spaces, so if you find yourself needing to add more rooms to be “specific places”, that's fine! It may also be worthwhile taking the old RP forum route and just actually map out your world with rooms. One room is the capital city of a continent, another is a player's home town.

I have the suspicion that that may get kind of overwhelming, though. For now, I'm going to stick with just these rooms.

Once you've set up your room structure, you're ready to play!

Okay, But How in the Hells Do I Play?

This is the part that I'm going to probably come back and edit as I find more gotchas and more “rules” to follow.

Generally, though, my plan is to find a few adventure modules that make sense for my given setting (We'll talk about settings and systems in a future section). These have the benefit of already being laid out, so I don't need to do any specific prep work. As a GM, you're probably already great at railroading your players, so just do that. 😉

The actual play is pretty straightforward. Players can explore the world, typing what their characters do in the section they are in. If they are setting off on a quest, for example, they'll put a thread or just a few messages describing the beginning of their journey in The Wilderness. Then they walk away from the computer, phone, device, whatever.

Yep, you read that right. This method of play is not meant to be instant or fast-paced. It's meant for busy people who have stuff to do. I think this specific bit is going to be the hardest thing for some players to come to terms with.

You, as the GM, make your rounds every few hours (or just once a day, whatever, you have stuff going on, no biggie), checking the active threads and rooms, giving rulings, and describing new scenes. Then you walk away. You don't sit there and babysit it. Let people talk about things, let them make their actions, then realize that their action was a stupid one and retract it and do something else.

Note that I don't think it's bad if you and some players get into a little live session. The point is that that's not the default.

I'm considering building a bot for Matrix that allows someone to catch up on all of the new messages since they were last active with the Room specifically to support this style of play. That said, if the group is small enough, it shouldn't be that hard to catch up. That's also why I'm keeping the number of rooms fairly low. It's only a few places to check.

Format-Specific Rules

This format is going to require a few soft rules to keep it working. For example, you may or may not want to outright “ban” OOC discussion in the adventure rooms. There's the case to be made that it's more immersion breaking to be told you can't talk in-situ about what's going on, but there's also the case to be made that someone accidentally talking about the wart they had removed in the middle of combat could be worse.

As far as I know, most Matrix clients support Markdown syntax for styling text, so it may be worthwhile to encourage players to make in-situ OOC talk demonstrably different with italics or even some character string indicator (Like double parentheses: ((LOL, ridiculous!))), or some combination of those.

This is also why I think it's important to have a specific, dedicated space for OOC discussion. That space should be focused on the game, but it doesn't need to be in character and it doesn't need to be beholden to the “physical layout” of the world like the other rooms are.

In some situations, it may make sense to add time-boxes to the situation at hand. Maybe certain locations have time-based traps (a rising sea of lava, e.g.) that really requires the players there to work together to survive. Don't respond in two hours, half a day, whatever? Your character get's lava'd! Alternatively you may just have to take over a PC sometimes to move the action along. Do not do this unless everyone is aware that it can happen, and only do it if you absolutely have to. Probably.

On that note, though, it may also be worthwhile to adjust how you use your system's death mechanics. Again, I haven't done this yet, so we'll see how this plays out!

Wait, That's It?!

That's it. That's all I have for you, at least so far. Watch this space (or at least this blog) for more about what I discover as I explore this concept myself!

One last final thought is that this concept might work well with multiple GMs running it. As long as everyone agrees on some ground rules, this can help speed up the gameplay loop pretty significantly. Maybe.

How to Pick a System

I think most modern systems would work well in this format. For very mechanic-heavy and statistic-oriented games, it has the benefit of allowing players to really think through their actions, and play min-max meta games to their hearts' content. (Not to mention that the GM has all the time in the world to “Hold on, let me look that up”.)

For more rules-lite games, it has the benefit that players can be drivers of the story. There are game systems out there where the GM is basically a referee for the players. Blades in the Dark comes to mind. It's conceivable that you could have a server running Blades in the Dark with no GMs, just a bot or something that utilizes an oracle system. I want to try this.

In the end, the point of this kind of gameplay is to explore a story, to build a world together. It's up to you as the GM to provide the sandbox, to flesh it out, but it is your players who will be making the story. This is not something where railroading actually works, despite my joke earlier.

Conclusion

I think this has the opportunity to enable some very fun play for a lot of people that may not have the time (or energy) to play TTRPGs, whether in person or online. The time investments required by players are minimal, and even the GM can lean heavily on the asynchronous nature to get things ready for their players while the players are doing other things.

I have said more than once that this is a new thing to me. I haven't done any of this, and I have specifically avoided looking up how this has been done before. So, if you've read all this, I really, really appreciate it. I'd also really appreciate feedback! You can hit me up on Mastodon, or on PhD20's awesome TTRPG forum, where I have a thread going about this concept.

When I go live, a link to the Space will appear here. 😁

In my next post, I'll share how I plan to inboard new players.