Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

David J Prokopetz

@prokopetz.bsky.social

6.4K followers 260 following 2.4K posts

Main site at https://prokopetz.net

prokopetz.net

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 13d

"Eat God" is live on Kickstarter:

www.kickstarter.com/projects/pen...

Be a blue-furred social justice advocate with detachable limbs, a many-eyed horror with strong opinions about metaphysics, or a jet-powered telepathic crab and stick it to the Man though the power of gratuitous cartoon violence.

Eat God

a tabletop roleplaying game about causing problems on purpose

www.kickstarter.com

1 100 170

David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 7m

Popeye punches Cthulhu and Cthulhu explodes into ludicrous Mortal Kombat style gibs like when they ran him over with a boat in the original novella.

(Also as in the novella, this isn't actually a career-ending injury for the big C, so things kind of escalate from there.)

1 13

David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 24m

I was a teenager in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which means my favourite childhood video games are a bunch of localised RPGs with fascinating game-mechanical ideas that don't actually work.

2 19

David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 1h

I think the basic problem with all these low-effort horror movie adaptations of recently-public-domain cartoon characters is they always make the titular character the monster. Like, nobody gives a shit about a film where Mickey Mouse is a zombie; they want to see Mickey Mouse FIGHT the zombies!

8 24 120

David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 1h

Straw poll: if you've backed or plan to back "Eat God" (www.kickstarter.com/projects/pen...), would you be interested in a printed compilation of the stretch goal playsets as an add-on?

2 6

David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 1h

A supporting character later headlining their own spin-off series is a completely different thing.

David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 1h

$2793 CAD / $5000 CAD; a bit of a slowdown due to several pledge cancellations in the past 24 hours, but still well past the halfway mark!

David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 2h

I think modern cartoons should start doing the 1980s anime thing where successful directors would just recycle exactly the same character designs in multiple unrelated projects. I want to watch a retrofuturist cyberpunk thriller where the characters are clearly the cast of Steven Universe.

4 13 100

David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 19h

Never a bad idea, though one should know going in that if you're drilling down to that level of weirdness, you're necessarily committing to producing a very large table. Florida Man level weirdness + small table = a lot of work on the GM's part to avoid or deal with incongruous duplicate results.

David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 19h

[5/5] (And it's always a particular kind of weird shit; remember, game rules are inherently opinionated about what kinds of stories they want to produce, the protestations of certain multinational-publishers-who-shall-remain-nameless notwithstanding!)

2 36

David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 19h

[4/5] In this sense, the BST is the rules-as-weird-shit-generator in its purest form. A game cannot live on this alone, or else all you've got is a prompt list, but I find starting with a BST can be immensely clarifying about what particular kind of weird shit you want your game's rules to generate.

2 2 27

David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 19h

[3/5] Most storytelling we do in our daily lives is of this second kind, and I'd argue that most TTRPGs – certainly nearly all "trad" RPGs – are likewise oriented toward this kind of story. The rules are *weird shit generators*, and interpreting the outputs of the rules is what *produces the story*.

1 5 27

David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 19h

[2/5] Basically, we use "story" in two distinct ways, often without realising we're flipping between them. There's "story" as in protagonists and arcs and acts and such; and there's "story" as in a bunch of weird shit happens, and we invent an explanatory narrative post hoc to make sense of it.

1 5 31

David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 19h

[1/5] I'll freely admit that a big part of my preoccupation with Big Stupid Tables (BSTs) in tabletop RPG design is for the bit, but it's not JUST a bit. There's a very specific thesis about what "story" in the context of tabletop RPGs means lurking in there.

1 17 49

David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 1d

$2306 CAD / $5000 CAD as of this morning – we're nearing the halfway mark on this one after just a day and a half.

1 3

David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 1d

Today is already the fourth-best day of Eat God's Kickstarter campaign, and it would only take like five more backers to move it into third place, which is kind of bizarre for day twelve. This is usually where the mid-campaign slump hits – did somebody post about us on Reddit, or what?

2 26

David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 1d

I think it's important to bear in mind that the only reason it's "stepsister" and not just "sister" is because Pornhub doesn't want to piss off Visa and Mastercard. They'd 100% drop the "step" if they thought they could get away with it.

2 14

David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 1d

Reading up on why various YouTubers stopped performing can be kind of a rollercoaster because it's like "said a slur", "said a slur", "lost contact while searching for a cave near Area 51 whose entrance allegedly emitted 'mysterious vibrations'; present whereabouts unknown", "said a slur".

11 140 570

David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 1d

The really troubling part of getting older and confronting one's own mortality is the realisation that you've only got so many decade-long indie metroidvania development cycles in you. Imagine getting super hyped for a forthcoming game, then dying of old age before it comes out.

12 24 260

David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 1d

Like, I promise you a demographic that makes up less than 1% of the population is not driving those numbers.

6 110

David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 1d

It's a pretty stark illustration that our idea of sexual deviance is identity-based that we're seeing thinkpieces about why incest kink is allegedly uniquely appealing to trans women, as if POV roleplay scenarios about fucking your stepsister aren't one of the top ten most requested tags on Pornhub.

3 25 180

David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 1d

Less than 24 hours after the stretch goal for "A Confabulation of Wastrels" opened and it's already at $1546 CAD / $5000 CAD. Keen to see this one funded, are we?

1 1 9

David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 1d

[2/2] I understand WHY – the mundane and the impossible are broadly adaptable, while the merely unusual can encode pretty specific assumptions about the personalities involved – but if I ever cook up my own list it's going to be 100% shit like eyeball-licking and getting turned on by thunderstorms.

1 1 60

David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 1d

A thing I've noticed about Kinktober prompt lists lately is that they tend to jump from the pedestrian to the fantastical without stopping for the merely esoteric. The same list will go from foot fetish to alien tentacles, and I feel like there's a pretty significant excluded middle there. [1/2]

1 4 61

David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 1d

A lot of They Would Not Fucking Say That moments for me are really more about the REGISTER than they are about the sentiment. Like, yeah, maybe they would say something *to that effect*, but they wouldn't say it with that particular level of formality under these particular circumstances.

7 70

David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 1d

Many publishing services still do shit mainly by fax, so I have one of those printer-fax combos. Surprisingly, there are still a few fax spammers, so it's like having a haunted printer that randomly turns itself on in the middle of the night and starts printing the weirdest ads you've ever seen.

1 5 56