Premature Character Attachment Disorder

Posted on November 4, 2018 by takeonrules

You can read Premature Character Attachment Disorder over at the new Take on Rules site.

Reviewing Top Content from My Old WordPress Site

Posted on November 1, 2018 by takeonrules

This post has been copied over from TakeOnRules.com. If you are subscribing to this blog through WordPress Reader, I recommend updating your settings. In your Followed Site settings add “takeonrules.com”; That will add the new site. If you are following by email, I recommend hopping over to Inoreader.com and subscribing to the takeonrules.com RSS feed.

With the deprecation of my old WordPress site, I decided to gather up some information.

Welcome to My New Take on Rules

Posted on November 1, 2018 by takeonrules

As I’ve written about before, I finally switched over my site. I plan to continue maintaining my takeonrules.wordpress.com blog, as there are several of you that subscribe to my blog posts via email or WordPress Reader—Please consider switching to my RSS feed, as I don’t yet know how long I will maintain the wordpress site..

During this migration, I removed a tremendous amount of what I came to see as clutter. I refocused the blog for reading longer form articles.

I compressed the navigation to more narrow concerns. The about page links to previous top-level navigation items.

Comparison

Gone is much of the cruft injected by WordPress.

Let’s examine my Burning Wheel Lifepaths Inspired by Warhammer Fantasy post (see previous site).

You’ll first notice, the styling. I have extreme control over the new table rendering—In fact, I now use Jekyll to read through a YAML data file to populate those tables; Each lifepath table will now have a consistent look and feel. Important as I work at creating other lifepaths.. The control extends everywhere on the site.

Second, the old WordPress site’s page requires 112 HTTP requests and transfers 1.3 MB of data. The new static site page requires 9 requests, transferred 146 KB of data. What this means for you? Far faster load times; For those of you with metered data or slow connections, you’re welcome.

Third, compare the print preview of each site. I love the new printed look.

The Little Things

I’ve ensured you need not use Javascript. To get a sense of traffic to the site, I did setup Google Analytics; But feel free to turn on your ad-blocking and disable Javascript. The site will continue working just fine. Though there is one caveat; When javascript is disabled, the Search feature shifts away from the Javascript requiring Google’s Custom Search Engine. Instead, I provide a search button to directing the user to Google’s basic search with the prepopulated “site:takeonrules.com”.

I’ve tried to build towards an accessible experience, leveraging accessibility guidelines from Penn State—Go to the top of the page, click the top left corner, then hit the tab key. I love that feature. I learned that from a Skip Links accessibility tutorial. And for the extra-tech people, fire up a lynx browser.

Whither Goes the Comments?

I removed comments—A todo item, albeit low on the priority list, is to attach the historical comments to their respective commentss.. Instead, feel free to contact Me; From there we can have a conversation—I will only post comments or excerpts that you give after getting your express consent.

Also, consider writing your reply on your own blog; And drop me a line to draw attention to your post. There are many free and easy-to-use platforms for blogging.

Multi-colored dice and pieces from various boardgames (Chess, Puerto Rico, Shadows over Camelot, Ticket to Ride, Chicken Cha Cha Cha, Carcassonne, Yinsh, Monopoly, Dominion, and Settlers of Catan) are arranged in a seemingly scattered manner across a chess board. — Ye ol’ banner for takeonrules.wordpress.com

I love that old banner. My partner surprised me with a series of photos she took in celebration of launching my old site. I’m trying to track down the source images for that banner. The largest image I have found so far is 1000px by 288px. I need at least 1280px by X; even then, I don’t know where I might find a place for that. Perhaps converting the Take on Rules in the header to a badge?

Onward

The plan is to keep on blogging. I’m eager to get back to writing more game related posts, and wrap up these meta posts about blogging and frameworks.

My Blogging Engine

Posted on October 31, 2018 by takeonrules

Jekyll, written in italics. To its right a tilted test-tube partially full of red liquid.

Jekyll – “Transform your plain text into static websites and blogs.”

This blog post builds on my Keeping the RSS Fires Burning post and Howto Markdown Blog.

I wanted to build a bit more on my game blogging. What fuels this blog and the framework I use to build it out.

Fuel

My face to face gaming feeds this blog. The actual play as well conversations around the game session itself. I reflect on the highlights (and lowlights), looking for the magic.

I prioritize reading. I typically get about 40 books in per year; Ranging across genres, fiction and non-fiction alike. I also read a lot of game sourcebooks.

I follow numerous blogs—Do yourself a favor, and go checkout Save vs. Total Party Kill’s OSR OPML. There you will find instructions for subscribing to a plethora of blogs. And also visit Campaign Wiki’s Old School RPG Planet and Indie RPG Planet). From these blogs, I read the more deliberate conversations. The majority of my feed is gaming blogs, but I also subscribe to a plethora of other blogs.

Over the past month, I switched from using Feedly.com to using Inoreader.com. I use Inoreader to star, save posts to Google Drive, categorize, and subscribe to blogs&mdashThe migration was simple. I exported my OPML file from Feedly and imported it into Inoreader. Once the OSR OPML file showed up, I subscribed to that. I noticed some blogs showing up twice. I wrote a script to de-duplicate what was in my original OPML and what was in the OSR OPML; Every so often I re-run that script..

I find less fuel on Social Media that sparks a response—Aside from clicking on a blog post and adding it to Inoreader—More on that in In Response to “I’m Bowing Out” – Hack & Slash.

A Tangent that Loops Back

I started blogging in 2010 as part of my day job; I used a campus provided WordPress instance. In 2011 I started my game blog leveraging WordPress.com. I had thought about Blogger, spending a bit of time in an aborted migration, but opted to remain on WordPress—I believe I was looking at tighter integration with the fledgling Google+.

I switched roles on campus, and moved my professional blogging to ndlib.github.io: A site powered by Jekyll. We sought to build-up a team blog. During this time, I actively engaged in Github code contributions. Github leverages Markdown for its rich text comments. I find Markdown more legible than HTML. I will often write Markdown in Atom.io&mdash:my text editor of choice. I use the markdown-preview-plus plugin to preview the Markdown as HTML.

I prefer Markdown over HTML or WYSYWIG editors. I spend time thinking about the content and not poking around formatting the content—Focus on one task. While writing avoid editing and formatting. Focus on getting the words out. Then go back and revisit.

Framework

On September 9th, I started once again migrating from WordPress—In 2013, I had another failed attempt at migrating off of WordPress. If memory served, I wanted the simplicity of Github Pages, but needed redirects, which were not available in Github pages at the time. Also in the back of my head I wanted HTTPS for my custom domain hosted by Github Pages. This was not available until May 1, 2018. I had stumbled upon the Tufte Jekyll theme. One that purported to be a “Minimal Jekyll blog styled to resemble the look and layout of Edward Tufte’s books.” I became enamored with the layout of the demo page —I like side notes and margin notes. Foot notes are nice as well. I wanted something that would ease the management of including these asides. My semantic preference would be to use the aside HTML5 element, but that has challenges and issues further detailed in tufte-css.

I dove into the migration, starting first with Jekyll Import. I performed a full clean-up; I wanted to embrace the new theme. I also wanted to preserve links from other pages. This involved a mix of scripts, manual changes, and patience—I dusted off my Imagemagick, Nokogiri, Psych/Yaml, and Rake skills. I do hope to publish the bones of how this site gets built, but for now, you’ll have to put on your imagination hat..

I have scripts that:

Create proper aspect ratio derivative images for side, main, and full images.
Create an AMP compliant version all pages, while maintaining a the foundational fast non-JS dependent site.
Extract image metadata to have proper aspect ratio for the AMP version of the site.
Beautifies the HTML generated from Jekyll by normalizing indents and spacing.
Takes a tag and adds new tags to posts that already have the tag.

In other words, once I cutover from WordPress to my new site, I’ll have full control over my blog’s data. And I love it.

Until I switch over, I write my post first for takeonrules.github.io, then do some HTML antics and copy it into my WordPress site.

Kibitzing Burning Beards, Or Thinking Up Consequences for Failure

Posted on October 31, 2018 by takeonrules

Four Fate dice and a scope target highlights Sunday on a calendar. Several bullet holes pierce the calendar

Sunday Skypers logo

I’ve occupied my commute by listening to the Sunday Skyper’s Burning Beards podcast—I wrote about this in my Rethinking the Failed Climb Check. I have fast become attached to the trials and tribulations of Fandril, Flint, Ulfkell, and Slate.

In episode 38, after a battle to a stalemate, the spiders pinned the dwarves. One spider begins parlaying with Flint. Having earlier spoken about ghosts, weird dreams, unseen spirits haunting Flint enters the parlay; Flint requests that the spiders let them pass if they promise to come back and talk with the mother spider tomorrow—The group has side-stepped many Dual of Wits in favor of expediency; After all they have but a few hours for the whole session; And scripted conflict will take more time than a quick Vs. test. An unfortunate side-effect is that poor Flint, every engaging in social conflict, has rarely had a chance for a Routine persuasion test, something far easier to come by in a Dual of Wits than in a Vs. Will persuasion..

The GM presents a great complication for Flint’s failure. But I was wondering what other consequences could someone inflict?

First complication, Flint was invoking his Oddly Likeable character trait—In the rules as written Burning Wheel, character traits are not something that add advantages. This is something from Mouseguard and Torchbearer. However, it is a reasonable hack.. This would be something I’d put in the crosshairs. If you fail, you’ll shift Oddly Likeable to just Odd—Definitely bring this up in a trait vote..

Second complication, Flint has been blathering about spirits and such. On failure, you’ll gain an infamous reputation “Speaker of Nonsense.”

Third complication, they’ll let you leave, but you’ll need to leave reassurances. Their first request is Fandril’s dwarven mail.

Fourth complication, they’ll give you what you want, but as you’re leaving they’ll spring a trap, picking off one or two of you.

Burning Wheel offers minimal guidance, but frames how to approach test failures; Namely look to their intent and push against that. I know when I’ve run Burning Wheel, I sometimes forget to press for intent before rolling the dice; I find it more difficult to establish intent after a failure.

Look to Apocalypse World for a bit more nuanced guidance—In 2012, I wrote about Apocalypse World moves in the Fellowship of the Ring. Below is a quick summary:

Separate them.
Capture someone.
Put someone in a spot.
Trade harm for harm (as established).
Announce off-screen badness.
Announce future badness.
Inflict harm (as established).
Take away their stuff.
Make them buy.
Activate their stuff’s downside.
Tell them the possible consequences and ask.
Offer an opportunity, with or without a cost.
Turn their move back on them.
Make a threat move.

And remember, after every move ask: “what do you do?”

A failed move/test should push the fiction in a direction that demands a response and further risk.

In Response to “I’m Bowing Out” – Hack & Slash

Posted on October 30, 2018 by takeonrules

Image of a Griffon, overlaid with the words "Hack & Slash"

Hack & Slash Header Image

Hack & Slash’s post I’m Bowing Out sparked this blog post.

“I engage in social media less. I read it, but now the only time I actually engage is to talk to artists or other creators. I’m tired of being sick to my stomach over stupid discussions online about shit people don’t have the first clue over anyway. I’m tired of the never ending rant of just a few people who desperately want someone else to take their side or back their cause. Have you noticed I’m more quiet on social media? It’s because I’m bowing out of the arguments online. That’s not the fight. That’s people trying to profit from the fight. I win the fight when I vote, volunteer, and fulfill my role to my community, family, and planet. Not when I’m pushing an agenda.” — I’m Bowing Out from Hack & Slash

A fantastic conclusion to a tender and genuine blog post; I echo these sentiments. I also recommend reading 3 Toadstools Publishin follow-up.

I have relatives across a wide-political spectrum. Facebook has made it easy to stay in-touch and raise your ire. When you log onto social media, their application dictates your experience; How they will shock and awe you into interacting with their “services”—A social media company is in the business of selling your engagement and interaction to others.

Snap responses fuel the engine.

Things happen quickly on social media. When I login, my lizard brain demands that I connect posts I saw in my last “session” to the top-most current posts of this “session”. Time spent just catching up on a mixed bag of content, curated and selected by the social media’s algorithm. A waste of time—I am reminded of the following by Henry David Thoreau “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”. Much of my experiences with social media is about “catching up” in idle moments. Facebook curate’s my experience, the very order of each post I see as well as what posts just don’t show up. In other words, I’m letting Facebook decide my experiences and I’m killing time engaging with their decisions.

The Pivot

I’m focusing my energy on the physical world: Conversations around a dinner table, face to face role-playing games, conversations at our local farmer’s market, supporting my partner’s small business, and supporting my family as my children gear up for college.

In the twilight of Google+—My go to social media site for the gaming hobby, I find myself more and more focusing on blogs. As I wrote earlier, I want to find those committed to publishing in a standards-based system; A format available beyond the gatekeeping of a social media platform.

For now, I’ll focus my online effort in writing blog posts and responding via my own blog posts to others. I’ll link to my blog posts on various social media platforms, with a goal of drawing people into conversations happening outside of those walled gardens.

Postscript

I continue to work on migrating my website from takeonrules.wordpress.com to a static site version at takeonrules.github.io.

I am planning to omit a public comment system for my blog. I’ll provide a Contact Me form, and if that proves untenable, I’ll provide an email address. Two considerations factor into this decision; First a comment system requires another dependency; Second a comment system has analogues to the worst aspects of social media. Yes, a comment system provides a mechanism for conversations, but I’m looking to have those conversations in a more deliberate manner.

In addition, I spent Sunday implementing a minimum-viable AMP version of my site (see takeonrules.github.io/amp). The non-AMP static site remains wicked fast, but being part of the AMP ecosystem provides another vector for people to stumble upon my blog and the larger wilderness of online blogging.

Witchburner in Burning Wheel

Posted on October 28, 2018 by takeonrules

Two adventurers and their dog descending the road into a village in the mountains.

“Witchburner: Burner Edition” by Luka Rejec

Upon first reading Luka Rejec’s Witchburner, I thought “I want to run this now. And I want to use Burning Wheel—I am getting ahead of myself, as I have time for one campaign, which is presently a 5E run through of Tomb of Annihilation. What follows is more of a if-I-were-to-run-this-in-Burning-Wheel,-these-are-the-player-facing-changes-that-I-would-make conversion.”

Focus on the Situation

Witchburner has analogues to Trouble in Hochen, a Burning Wheel adventure included in Twilight in the Duchy Verdorben—On the surface the initial situations look similar, but I find “Witchburner” to have more fertile ground for exploring a village and its inhabitants; The situation in “Witchburner” unfolds slower.

Below is Trouble in Hochen’s situation:

You have been sent or called to Hochen. How exactly depends on the nature of your relationship. Hochen is in dire straits—famine in the dead of a hard winter and rumors of infernal influence.

Let’s frame the situation for Witchburner:

Calamities beset Saint Cleareyes; Its mayor issued calls for justice. Lord Rightmaker dispatched you to find the witch.

Before you dive into creating characters, read out loud the opening paragraph. Treat it like a movie’s opening credits scene. Frame the scene as Lord Rightmaker’s initial visit that happened about a week prior.

Depending on your campaign, consider reviewing the gods in Appendix I. This may help players frame their Faith.

Converting Cash

The initial offer in the game is 3000 cash. That seems like a lot of cash, but the adventure is implicitly intended for OSR games that reward 1 XP per 1 unit of cash collected—Lamentations uses a silver piece standard, most other games assume a gold piece.

Consulting both Lamentations and Burning Wheel for references, my first thought was 300 cash equals 1D for resources. From a mechanical standpoint, a 10D offer sounds good—I’m certainly up for players bargaining and seeking to get non-tangibles, promissory notes, letters of credit, land, property, etc..

Looking from the fiction standpoint, it feels a bit much that 300 cash would be 1D of resources. I think of 1D of cash resources as a small purse of silver.

Adjustment: For Witchburner, divide all cash values by 10 to find the number of silver coins. Each 30 silver coins counts as 1D for resources.

Disadvantage

Throughout the adventure, Witchburner uses the 5E concept of disadvantage—Using keywords in place of hard mechanics helps increase the portability, requiring one less mental mapping step to go from one system to another. For example: if you go a day without sleep, you have disadvantage on social activities.

Adjustment: Disadvantage increases the obstacle by 1 (e.g. +1 Ob). Advantage adds 1 dice to the test (e.g. +1D).

Disposition of Villagers

Witchburner provides guidelines on how villagers view the characters. As time passes and the PCs move throughout the village, these dispositions become more important.

“The Circles test could be considered a system for determining NPC disposition towards the players. Sure, you find who you’re looking for. But what do they think of you?” Burning Wheel Codex by Luke Crane

Leverage the Circles attribute. Since the players are in the village, ignore Place obstacle modifiers. As we already have a time pressure mechanic through tracking watches, ignore Time modifiers. We’re not interested in what the villager does, ignore Occupation modifiers.

This leaves Station for setting an obstacle, which seems appropriate to determine their base response.

Adjustment: When characters seek out, or meet a villager, have them roll a Circle test. Set the base obstacle using Station (ignoring occupation, time, and place). The Circle test makes a great Linked test for further interactions. Failure invokes the Enmity clause; Make sure to follow the advice in Witchburner on how to work with this. Adjust the Circle test based on who the villager knows and how the PCs have treated those relations.

Other Details

To avoid spoilers, I leave those other details as an exercise for the reader.

Witchburner by Luka Rejec

Posted on October 28, 2018 by takeonrules

“Witchburner” by Luka Rejec

Each October, I feel a call to run a new set of adventures; Maybe even start a new campaign. As the light fades ever quicker each evening, my gaming eye turns from heroic towards looming lean times.

My gaming group continues to work its way through the Tomb of Annihilation, now a half-dozen rooms into the Tomb of the Nine Gods. The good times continue—They found a massive hoplite shield that behaved as a magnet for all metals within a 50 ft. radius. Any metal touching the shield disintegrated. They wanted to bring this heavy tool along, but couldn’t justify stumbling around with it. Maybe if they were all druids this shield would not be such a problem..

Yet October calls. In its folly. Soon, holiday events will begin wrecking all best laid schedules.

With this hunger for something different, I downloaded the Witchburner: Burner Edition (Preview) by Luka Rejec—The Ultraviolet Grasslands episode for Fear of a Black first drew my attention to Luka Rejec; Though Luka has been active for quite awhile, I must’ve missed it..

Review

I’ll attempt a spoiler free review, and instead speak to the situation and tools. The adventure resolution depends on the actions of the characters.

I read through the preview, and saw the bones of a game that I’d like to run. Within these “burnt” pages, Luka sets up the situation and the clock to advance events to their conclusion. Most of the adventure remains system neutral.

Below is the text of “The Offer”; a framing not quite read aloud text, but one that sets the mood of events.

The Mayor pats down her forehead with a napkin and looks left, then right. The councilors arranged around her in their finery nod assent. She looks down at the motley witchfinders, spoken for by the Lord Rightmaker.

“Our request is simple. Find the witch before All Saints’ Night, before the month ends, and we shall pay you 3,000 cash[Some systems adopt a gold piece (eg. “Sword & Wizardry”, “Labyrinth Lord”, “D&D”) standard and others a silver piece (eg. “Lamentations of the Flame Princess”) standard, so Luka provides a general notation..”

The shadow-skinned councilor smiles, “And the council will cover your stay at my inn.”

The bushy-haired priest looks uncomfortable, “Now go, find that witch, before she brings Winterwhite’s hunger on us all!”

From here, Luka provides guidance on how to run Witchburner: bringing a witch to trial, a worksheet for tracking the state of the village, an interesting mechanism for tracking time (more on that later), encounters, stats, and write-ups of the key villagers, timeline, calamities, and rules for social visits and extracting information. Enough to setup a few evenings of play.

Tracking Time

As a timed investigation with strong social elements, Luka breaks each day into 4 watches—with consequences to dice rolls if characters fail to sleep at least one watch per day.

Space, distance, and accuracy are secondary to mood so time is abstracted to the basic unit of the watch. A watch is about six hours long and there are four watches: morning, afternoon, evening, and night.

During a watch the heroes can do one thing thoroughly: make a social call, investigate a house, travel to a nearby wilderness location, visit the shops, go carousing, and so on.

This half-page of guidance/rules provides a solid framework for GMs to navigate what in my experience has often been the arbitrary movement of time in towns and social interactions. Character have a finite number of watches before the end of the month.

Write-up of Key Villagers

I appreciate that each key villager has its own page; nice for note taking, printing just what might be needed. Each key villager has a name, job, tags, narrative story, details of their home, their household, and some other notes.

The brief narrative vignette provides insight into the character; Enough to bring this character to life with nuances. Maybe even a bit of history that others in the village can reference as well.

Conclusion

You could run Witchburner for the same group multiple times. Witchburner has some preliminary setup to establish initial rumors on who was doing what late at night—Scenic Dunnsmouth, but certainly enough to provide some replayability.. I think any GM should take a look at the burner edition (free). Take a look, and if you want more, drop some coins on getting the full version. Or consider joining Luka’s patreon.

In reading Witchburner, I thought of the Bamberg witch trials and how Witchburner would fit in a game set during the Thirty Years War—The 17th century is the now default timeframe for “Lamentations of the Flame Princess” or “Warhammer Fantasy RPG”. I also think “Burning Wheel” would be an excellent ruleset for this adventure.

Go download the free burner edition and see if this adventure suits you.

Postscript

I kept this short and at a high-level. I plan to pitch this adventure to my group, perhaps as the initial situation for a larger campaign.

King of Feathers Brings the Chomp

Posted on October 26, 2018 by takeonrules

King of Feathers in Omu

This session report got away from me. Distractions surfaced, and I set this aside. I’ve lost the energy to report this out. So I’ll gather the highlights.

The characters lead the silenced—I had previously ruled that Silence could be placed on an object. Because a plan that involves a silent T-Rex should be rewarded. King of Feathers into the camp, right up to the guards busy dicing instead of keeping watch. Quick chomps, failed morale, and the King of Feathers had slain two guards and routed the other two—Morale, play with it!.

Also inside the silence, the characters ambushed a wizard, though the wizard managed to bolt outside and cast improved invisibility. Just in time for the King of Feathers to round the corner and see that wizard. <chomp>

I had forgotten that the wizards had alarm, and would’ve cast alarm on the perimeter.

As the melee and missile combatants fought, a battle of spells and counterspells ensued. Tides turned as the wizards dispelled the silence, a wizard suggested that the ranger/rogue kill the King of Feathers, counterspells prevented fireballs, and silence fell again.

The flesh golem, 13 veterans, 1 wizard, the King of Feathers and all of the skeletons perished. Two wizards got away. One of the veterans joined forces with the player characters.

Observations

This combat consumed the entire 2+ hours of the game session. Even though the characters got the drop, and had a powerful “ally”, it was a tight battle. Three mid-level wizards are dangerous. The characters drained many resources.

Terrain played an important element: Buildings, rooms, rooftops, and trees. Everyone shifted, jockeying for pinch points. This also split the combat, so that at times it felt as though there were two or three different conflicts.

By far, my favorite thing about this combat is that we all knew it was coming. I prepared a few random tables to adjudicate the state of the camp. With this preparation, I was thinking about a dynamic “living” camp, not “how do I setup a challenging encounter.” Instead I presented a situation for the players to interact with.

Seventh level 5E characters have a lot of options. Each round, everyone spends their action, bonus action, and often reactions. In 2E and earlier editions, the wizard is your nuke and others grind opponents down. In 5E, anyone can bring a nuke.

Keeping the RSS Fires Burning

Posted on October 18, 2018 by takeonrules

Demogorgon Dreams’s post OSR Blog Rennaissance sparked this blog post.

Gondor Calling from the Return of the King

Google shutdown Reader on July 15, 2013. Even though I hopped over to feedly.com straight away, it took over a year to stop reflexively going to reader.google.com.

Google Reader was a publication consumer. Google+ looked to be both consume and produce publication, without exposing an open publication standard for others to consume. While Google+ thrashed to find its eventual grave, blogs continued chugging along, publishing content. They were the producers in the equation. Google+ provided enough ways to push content from producers into it’s closed ecosystem. Some of what we, the heavy users of Google+, see in the collapse is an absence of a Google provided consumer of blogs end point.

This past week, Google announced it will be shuttering Google+; a place in which the game community initially flocked to, and from which great game collaborations developed. As Google+ goes through it’s death throws, those remaining are looking for safe harbor.

Proprietary platforms have risks. They exist at the whim of their owner. This is doubly true if you aren’t paying for use of that platform—Hint: You’re attention and concentration is their payment.. For Google Reader, the platform leveraged an open standard (RSS and Atom feeds). Google+ did no such thing.

It is great to see that many game blogs survived the loss of Google Reader (a consumer of content) and the threat of Google+ (a somewhat self-contained consumer and producer of content). It appears to have reinvigorated blogging (a producer of content)—I am a bit nervous about so many great blogs over on Blogger. Were Google to shut down Blogger, we’d lose a tremendous amount of content. There is an export option, but that requires active involvement. Hopefully we’ll get a heads up and can plan a life raft if this apocalypse occurred..

As blogs resurge, they’ll continue exposing their RSS and Atom feeds for others to consume through a common and open publication standard. And the heirs to the shattered Google Reader kingdom will keep the RSS consumers fed (Feedly, The Old Reader, and Inoreader).

Personally, I’ve used Feedly for years. But the “Subscribe to an OPML file” feature of Inoreader is perhaps a killer feature; Allowing a centralized OPML file that groups of people could share—I recommend subscribing to Save vs. Total Party Kill’s OPML feed for lots of OSR blogs..

Inoreader provides a Save to Drive feature, allowing a quick snapshot of a blog post. Feedly defers to the IFTTT integration hub for such things.

As it stands, I’m testing Inoreader in parallel with Feedly. Thusfar, Inoreader’s edging out Feedly.

An Analogue

I see analogues to Google’s efforts in Wizards of the Coasts licencsing of D&D editions.

D&D 3E created an open system via the OGL. As Wizards of the Coast looked to pivot from 3E to 4E, they looked to tighten up the license. Paizo’s Pathfinder became a rallying cry for many D&D players, while numerous other systems popped up around the open game license. A healthy ecosystem of games developed because of an open standard.

And D&D 4E floundered in part because of its mangled license. It is hard to go from an open standard to a closed standard.

Wizards of the Coast recognized the thriving ecosystem built from their previous open standard. They chose to release D&D 5E under the OGL. And gaming has never been better.

A Late Aside

I’ve also been reassessing my dependence on WordPress. I pay a bit of money each year for them to manage the hassle. This is their business model, so I know they have an interest in improving my experience. Yet, I want more freedom.

My thought is that I want to have strong ownership in what I write as well as how that is distributed.

I’ve exported my content out of WordPress into a static site (see takeonrules.github.io) generated by Jekyll and hosted on Github). I now have extreme portability in all of my content, control of its presentation, and multi-site backups (thanks to Git).

Go visit Technical Grimoire for a tutorial on Jekyll and the related technologies.

I have yet to flip the switch as I’m weighing the value of comments. I’d need to use something like Disqus to provide comments for my static site. I’m not very thrilled about that. I’d prefer someone write up a response and contact me with a link to their response.

For now, I first write to takeonrules.github.io, then massage the output HTML into something for my WordPress site.

Top Content of 2018

Top Content 2017

Top 2016 Content

Top 2015 Content

Top 2014 Content

Top 2013 Content

Top 2012 Content

Top 2011 Content

Comparison

The Little Things

Whither Goes the Comments?

Whither Goes the Banner?

Onward

Fuel

A Tangent that Loops Back

Framework

The Pivot

Postscript

Focus on the Situation

Converting Cash

Disadvantage

Disposition of Villagers

Other Details

Review

Tracking Time

Write-up of Key Villagers

Conclusion

Postscript

Observations

An Analogue

A Late Aside