Jay Dragon

And we're all agreeing to just be hardcore versus people who are like, you know, it's important for us to remove things that will be traumatic.

Later on, we're going to get Jay Dragon talking about you know, pallets and other kinds of ways of thinking about risk and negotiating safety so that especially like marginalized people can think more intensely about, you know, um, things that are of concern to them, um, in, in ways that are allow for curiosity and also safety.

So in the middle of all of these kinds of debates very early on when, um, Meg A. Baker, the designer of Apocalypse World, so AKA mother of the apocalypse, um, and Emily Careboss, which is the greatest name ever, um, are kind of co-blogging, um, in different kinds of ways, Megé comes up with this, you know, intervenes in the conversation about playing to the pain, you know, playing to lift, all these sorts of things, and says, what if we have this idea of I will not abandon you? And the important part of that which is applicable beyond games, is the idea that you can't say it ahead of time.

It's not a thing you can promise.

And yet... uh, from a, from a player perspective, like I certainly believe that different rule sets provoke different experiences and that those, those you experiences you could say are almost existentially unique.

Um, like, um, I was talking to Jay Dragon, who did Wander Home, which is a very, very soft, low-stress, you're traveling furries, essentially, role-playing game.

And he said that he sees... all of these people rushing to do dnd-esque games and he thinks that you know there's there's thousands and thousands of people out there really interested in making the best fork possible you know and there's all these different amazing styles of fork and a great variety of forks but it is still just a fork at the end of the day and maybe we should make other kinds of cutlery um so you know i can i can certainly see where you're coming from on that end but i look at it and i'm like I mean, I want to kill Oda Nobunaga.

That sounds amazing.

Right.

There was a whole episode that Marilee Buffkin and Jay Dragon did on this back in the feed that people can go check out.

But like, yeah, the point is so much more like the the text and the engaging with the game as a text than it is actually going and playing it.

Whether or not it's a dungeon

It calls itself, like, a map game or a map-drawing game.

Um, and, like, as another knock-on from this, uh, Wanderhome, Jay Dragon's, uh, game mostly doesn't call itself a role-playing game.

I once looked through it for this, and it actually, the only place it calls itself a role-playing game is on the back of the book, like on the back cover.

And I messaged Jay about this, and she was like, "Yeah, they really wanted us to put that on there because otherwise it wouldn't get sorted nicely at game shops." Um, and I think also just on the Barnes & Noble point, I might argue that if, if The Quiet Year went on the board game shelf instead of the RPG shelf, it might actually sell more copies.

It just was like w-what is choosing what circle to subdivide at and then cutting out both collaborative storytelling and mechanics, uh, felt a little bit weird.

And honestly, I think just if there was a w-- Again, if, if you just called this character-driven, uh, narrative interaction, uh, something like, mm-

The term that I once used in an argument with, I think, like, Jay Dragon.

Character playing.

I was part of, um, I've been part of three, seven part packed play tests.

That game, Jay Dragon's game has just as of today started.

Yeah, it has already 40 minutes reached its first not at all fake funding goal and is doing quite well at this moment.

And we had a media embargo um to this day we still do no video can be circulated from any of those play tests i took it because sometimes you just want to watch your friends do a wizard stool and you want to remember that for never but and we've we've shared a few photos and those kinds of things um there's a photo of me on the crowdfund um uh that brian flaherty took But those are all these kinds of, we're capturing the moment, not for flex or anything like that, but just because this, like any other experience that you have with people that you may like and enjoy and want to spend time with, right? You want to remember that