L1: Secret of Bone Hill maps redrawn

[DangerousPuhson]

I think the problem is probably that everything that needed to be said has been said by someone else, and likely in a better way. Even the stuff I still find interesting is always a rehash of earlier stuff published decades ago. Telegraphing traps, tracking durations, alternate encumbrance rules, using illusions... they've been discussed to death for over 50 years now. The gold mines are empty, I think - folk are either scraping for residual flecks and dust, or they're taking someone else's gold and melting it down for re-sale.

 

[The1True]

I think there's still room for nuance. You shit on 50-post world building series, and I'm with you; a lot of us are disinterested in your heartbreaker/character/campaign report unless you can reframe it entertainingly, which few people do, BUT I am interested in the nuts and bolts of your world building/character building/game design. If you're trying out something that's been gone over a thousand times to the point of being accepted as dogma, say dungeon loops/Jacquaying the dungeon, and you go through it step by step with illustrations, and then bonus points, try it out in the wild and find out it doesn't always work or could use further refinement or you find and discuss niche cases; THAT's still interesting.

Old stuff like the Quantum Ogre for example need to be kept alive and relevant and should be disected and discussed. Older stuff like the intentions of the game's original creators and the evolution of those rules and the spirit behind them are mechanically interesting. They just need to be maturely discussed and not gate-kept. You can prefer playing the game one way without violently rejecting all the other ways. Say something like a resource game just works better in an older system. Instead of rejecting everything else out of hand and cutting people out of the conversation, why not discuss what made it work? Why not discuss how it could be made to work (maybe not as well) in other editions or systems?

But yeah, I think a lot of the blogs I was following were developing crazy-cool megadungeons and talking about the process and the pain and jamming wild ideas, and all of them went silent. I'm kind of wondering how much of that was people losing interest or getting crushed by the enormity of their projects, and how much of that is creators starting to get cagey about their IP...

 

[DangerousPuhson]

I think there's still room for nuance. You shit on 50-post world building series, and I'm with you; a lot of us are disinterested in your heartbreaker/character/campaign report unless you can reframe it entertainingly, which few people do, BUT I am interested in the nuts and bolts of your world building/character building/game design. If you're trying out something that's been gone over a thousand times to the point of being accepted as dogma, say dungeon loops/Jacquaying the dungeon, and you go through it step by step with illustrations, and then bonus points, try it out in the wild and find out it doesn't always work or could use further refinement or you find and discuss niche cases; THAT's still interesting.

Old stuff like the Quantum Ogre for example need to be kept alive and relevant and should be disected and discussed. Older stuff like the intentions of the game's original creators and the evolution of those rules and the spirit behind them are mechanically interesting. They just need to be maturely discussed and not gate-kept. You can prefer playing the game one way without violently rejecting all the other ways. Say something like a resource game just works better in an older system. Instead of rejecting everything else out of hand and cutting people out of the conversation, why not discuss what made it work? Why not discuss how it could be made to work (maybe not as well) in other editions or systems?

Towards the first point: to clarify, I'm not saying that folk can't post their design diaries and campaign reports and whatever. I'm just saying that if you've got a blog established on the back of general D&D discussion, then specializing it into your own little esoteric spin-off is a detrimental move. If I started a blog reviewing computer components, and spent years become a go-to spot for folks looking to get a better understanding about the differences between, say, DDR4 RAM and DDR5 RAM, it's going to be hella-strange to my readers when my blog pivots into six months of posting nothing but my experiments in coding my own Linux OS. There can be a place for that stuff, but that place is not within your existing established blog that covers another topic.

Imagine if Bryce spent the next 20 posts spit-balling character ideas for his new fantasy novel - it would be weird, and a lot of his audience would stop showing up. Yet oddly it's the direction that a sizeable chunk of OSR blogs seem to take.

To the second point: Pushback is nasty. A lot of people don't want to have discussions/debates; they want to proselytize their own views, reaffirm their existing opinions, and shout down their detractors. Even one person with this mindset poisons an entire discussion, derailing it into bickering (I would know). Unfortunately this is just human nature - few people engage in discussion with the goal of changing their own minds. I think the OSR-sphere has proven time and time again that it is rife with these sorts. "Bad faith" arguments are practically par for the course around these parts. It's like debating with a brick wall... or like two brick walls "debating" with each other. The only place it doesn't play out like that are in the self-affirming echo chambers of like-minds, where little new ground is ever tread and nobody challenges each other on anything.