T w e n t y S i d e d
So here we are, at the end of the second movie. This means I spent 46 strips in Fellowship, and 47 in Two Towers. I didn’t plan that, it just sort of worked out that way. Fellowship occupies 58 total pages, while Two Towers is 74 pages long.
So they are finally going to Isengard. There was a rumor that the Hobbits might have been taken there. I guess we’ll find out.
Sure, it can be bad when you realize that one of your players has been zoning out during crucial moments. But, the real horror sets in when the players who have been paying attention try to explain, and their perception of your gameworld is so different from your intention that you almost don’t recognize it as your own.
I like to read through the old comments on the original posts sometimes, just for the fun of looking through a time capsule to the early 2000s. Nothing is funnier than my dads perpetual war against those guys who always wanted to be ‘first’ in the comments. And the other guys who were trying to find every way to get around his rules to quit with the bit without giving up their chance to be first in line in the comments section.
Batman: Arkham Origins
A breakdown of how this game faltered when the franchise was given to a different studio.
Grand Theft Auto Retrospective
This series began as a cheap little 2D overhead game and grew into the most profitable entertainment product ever made. I have a love / hate relationship with the series.
Juvenile and Proud
Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.
Grand Theft Railroad
Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.
The Best of 2015
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2015.
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I apologize, but in my fathers honour I must remove this comment.
100%
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There’s a typo in panel 6. Sill instead of still. First time I was early enough to catch a typo before it was fixed.
Man, “First” comments. What a blast from a past.
Actually we still get them in Youtube videos. Except now it’s a hundred different people making variations on the “Last time I was this early, [private joke related to the channel]”.
…
Wow, nothing ever changes. If anything, those comments got worse.
Anyway, I remember someone who found a solution for the “First” comments: they just gave them a “delay”, which meant the sorting algorithm made them appear later in the comment section. I assume the embarrassment of seeing your “First” comment appear after a dozen others made people stop after a while.
Ah, but now there’s so many “first/last time I was this early” jokes that you don’t even have to do anything for them to appear in the middle. Well, that and the voting/liking/whatever system promoting the more interesting posts to the top, that’s probably more significant. And with the algorithms demanding Engagement, any form of Engagement!, to the point that some channels deliberately ask for comments, any comments even if it’s just the word “Engagement,” those First posts are still performing a function. And socially they’re effectively a roll-call, showing that yup, the community’s still here even if they don’t have anything interesting to say other than bad First jokes or bottom of the barrel Engagement portmanteaus. Scrolling through a clearly active neverending comment section, even if 3/4 of those are 1-word responses, makes it clear that people are watching (and so you should too), while I’ll admit, on say some of LRR’s less popular/comment heavy videos, it’s a little jarring to scroll down and actually pass the end of the comments.
But yeah, on a linear single thread blog with no automatic shuffling, the First post is not helpful.
Its always fascinating to me to see what my players have taken away from the campaign so far. Its convinced me more and more to simplify stuff so that way everything important gets through.
I don’t necessarily blame Legolas’ character here. I was in a long campaign that lasted several years and had 70 sessions and there were certainly times when either due to me missing a session due to work (in which the DM would just have my cleric be a healbot, which typically was fine as since it was a heavy rp group we didn’t always have combat each session) or due to so much time passing between the beginning of the campaign and the end of it there were events or characters I had no remembrance of (I also lost my notes at one point) that I wasn’t sure what was going on and instead of trying to get a 15-20 min recap I’d just role with things. It also happened with our Call of Cthulhu campaign but my character didn’t synergize well with the rest of the group and work was making it more difficult to make that campaign so I gave up caring about what was going on in it (also I don’t feel Call of Cthulhu works very well in a modern 2020’s setting, same with World of Darkness even though I really enjoyed that campaign).
Tbh every now and then the “players who have been paying attention perception of your gameworld is so different from your intention that you almost don’t recognize it as your own” thing is quite usefull in giving me ideas what to do with the campaign.
And in reminding me where the most usefull plot hooks are. Or that the party forgot they’re in charge and their subordinates need to eat, or at least get means to procure their food.