Agreed completely.

I’d rather be too cold than too hot. I can always bundle up, but I can’t always cool off.

The book I’m working on right now is for Shadowdark, with a lot of nautical stuff in it.

(And a few random charts 😂)

But it’s more William Hope Hodgson meets Waterworld & Earthworm Gods than it is Pirates of the Caribbean.

Pirate Borg covers that better than we could.

I love a good random chart- 1 sufficiently evocative sentence can launch a whole campaign. They can do a lot to flesh out a setting.

And I co-wrote Förk Borg, which is full of random charts!

But… man, it feels like a lot of these new books are little more than random charts! I want more than that.

… that said, I have ABSOLUTELY given my players the occasional hard time because they avoided a Thing.

“I painted miniatures and hand-drew a map for a whole encounter and you scoundrels skipped it!!”

It can be funny, but it can be frustrating as hell, too.

Any unused prep for tonight’s game is potential material for next week’s game.

I have written & prepared plenty of stuff that my players never interacted with, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt like any of it was ever wasted.

It all goes into the toolbox, & can be repurposed some other time.

That makes sense to me.

We’re all busy, prep time can be difficult to find. I have certainly run sessions where I was not as prepared as I would have liked to be.

But I’ve never thought of it as homework - for me, game prep is a joy.

If it wasn’t, I’d run something else! Or nothing at all.

7/ unwieldy as any other lore encyclopedia?

And I’ll need a lot more than two cloth bookmarks to mark those pages, especially if I have some inexplicable aversion to turning pages.

6/ A couple of books of random charts are great if my players surprise me and I suddenly need an unexpected random fortune teller or an elven genealogy tree… but surely there’s a limit to how much of that a person needs?

Once I’ve got 2000 pages of instant-generation stuff, isn’t that just as

5/ To me, they are tiny, minor perks, and I do not understand why I see them praised again and again in review after review.

What’s so bad about reading the book ahead of time, marking a couple of pages with bookmarks, and then just… turning the page when you need to?

4/ required on a two page spread. I get it. It’s elegant and convenient.

But… is turning the page really such a burdensome hardship that NOT having to turn a page is actually a selling point?

And sometimes a topic needs more than two pages to explore it! I like depth! Gimme lore!

3/ Why such an aversion to flipping pages?

I just watched a review where the YT’er mentioned “not flipping pages” three times as a selling point for a new game book.

In that same review, he praised the book for having two cloth bookmarks.

It’s great if you can put all the info that a topic

2/ is there some epidemic of people who game so much that they’re constantly running games on no notice?

My experience is the opposite - the hardest thing about the RPG hobby is finding four other adults with overlapping free time! We schedule our sessions weeks (or months!) in advance.

Secondly,

The author, David Peterson, also does a ton of work with childhood literacy groups & libraries.

He is an excellent and generous person. Well worth supporting his projects.

I’m so sorry, man. That’s just awful. There’s no amount of foreknowledge that prepares a person for losing a companion.

… I am currently procrastinating on shoveling the driveway…

You know how Alaskans handle bitter cold?

We stay inside where it’s warm!

I’ve had the boxed set since high school!

The maps are beautiful.

Absolutely. From the general web, I now don’t trust sources unless the posts are pre-2023.

Weirdly, it’s made FB groups MORE useful and reliable for me, as I can ask real people questions & get answers more or less immediately.

If only Zuck made the group search functions a little higher-quality…

Adorable!

Holy shit, that’s a new level of antihumanity.

The floor is infinitely low.