THE POST NOBODY IS ASKING FOR

i first put up this one in may of 2018, i think? thats what the interface says. idk if itll push it to the front or just republish it in 2019. i find the way that i was writing around this time pretty goofy, i was having a time, and i reverted this post and some others from back then to drafts so i wouldnt have to look at them. mostly this is a blog for me to look at, ill publish it again and see where it puts it on the blog. then maybe ill write an addendum or something. i dont really go by matt rundle anymore for trans reasons


WHO IS THIS PERSON MATT RUNDLE

i'm a game designer. i did games at uni and i got a bs in video game design. i care about games and i have made games. i come from a video games background; but RPGS is my focus, and i have studied every game. video games, board games, card games, tabletops and args. not jsut hte new and not just the old. i have studied the games i don't like. i know from what i speak.

alright, so jack macnamee, a friend from uni, the best rpg designer i have yet met, a dude i bonded with over PROBLEM SLEUTH, he came to me a couple years back with this book, VORNHEIM, by zak smith.

WHO IS ZAK SMITH?
he was very excited about this book, even though it be hard to read. i couldnt get him to shut up about it. so i bought a copy, and i played in MACKNAMEES's vornheim game locally. and over time i've come to see that it was the best rpg book that existed at the time.

vornheim led me to read zak's blog, to follow zak smith on googleplus, to follow all zak's friends also on googleplus, to play very occasionally in a couple of zak's googleplus games, to play in a bunch of other googleplus games run by and populated by key luminaries in the zak-centric old school revival FLAILSNAILS & CONSTANTCON google plus community. because ZAK runs games at wird times that also puts him in my LOCAL D&D GOOGLEPLUS COMMUNITY, which is AUSTRALIAN CRAPSACK, about which, ask jez gordon. or ANTIPODEAN CRAPSACK if you want to include scrap princess, and we must. she is the best of us. but this is also the zak community, they are the same. all of this is good and right.

i am fond of these people because they love the game, and while they are d&d experts, i was not. but now i am an expert. i've studied every edition of the game. i've studied all the key not-published-by-wizards texts about the game that i would need to study in order to know the game and how to talk about it. i have played the game. and i play it well. i know from what i speak.

but zak, and the zak community, are better than any discourse on the game that has come before. before i was into d&d i was into pixel art, roguelikes, webcomics, and making characters and maps. this is the best pre-zak discourse I had on d&d, and the HISTORY OF ART AND GAMES AND LAW AND CHAOS. this was the best discourse I had. do not fight me on this point. it was not good enough, those guys don't appreciate me and they don't even understand why i wirte the shit i do. but now i have this community i don't really need all that legacy stuff, which was only a shadow of actually playing the game.

so ZAK is a big deal for me, what zak has to say is a big deal for me. I listen to zak and i care about his opinion and i care about his livelihood (which is his relationship with women - his girl mandy morbid, who is sick, like physically ill, and also sick of being harassed by shitty games nerds. his players, many of whom make their living doing porn, including mandy).

ZAK doesnt make his living making d&d, though. I'm not sure how he does it but i'm led to believe he makes it mostly in these two other spheres: art and porn.

art and porn and d&d. they have a lot of things in common. they are a good monad: all the best ideas come out of these spheres. at the very least, ZAK comes out of those spheres.

but there's this fourth sphere we must speak about: the CONTROVERSY. and so we have a field. art and porn and d&d and the CONTROVERSY.

all this shit exists without zak smith but I must listen to zak, i'm invested in this community. we cannot fail to listen to zak.

zak's a really weird dude though. anyway i try to keep this blog for d&d, i have other blogs for art and porn and the controversy. the thing is i've backed myself into this corner where i cannot ignore zak smith. zak can ignore me but i don't give a shit about this. i will write in the zak smith style; wherever i am and without apologising for myself. I see all this shit and it goes in my head and swims around in there, i can not be rid of it. i will not go away.

i could block zak but i do not wish to. he writes well and he knows what he is talking about. he is, in his own words, the hottest designer of the season. this is not a defense of zak smith though, because zak is also wrong. he does not care about those poeple he can't understand. but he still sees his enemy, he still complains about his enemy, and he still hurts people. I wouldnt even know about any of this shit if zak did not complain about it constantly. but i have also had to listen to zak's detractors, because zak will nto shut up about them. but we must listen to zak. if i blocked zak (and i do not wish to) i would still hear all this CONTROVERSY shit through intermediaries. in fact, the controversy would exist, even without zak. zak is a maven for the CONTROVERSY.

should i keep writing about this shit? probably not. there's not profit in this for me. but i give a shit. and i do all this stuff for free anyway. i'm in this for myself and for my friends. mods bless us all.

 

 addendum (jan 2025)

so thats all from back then

to be real i dont think i know zak well enough to be a character reference for him. my work is better for having read zak's. he's an influential designer and i have benefited from reading his criticism. i think his is an important point of view and its never sat well with me the way the rpg community treated him. i never took the claims against him super seriously and i don't really believe that he did any of that shit. i belonged to a an ad-hoc community on googleplus, that community from my position was zak-centric and zak was a defacto moderator of that community. i played with him a couple times and i liked and admired him, i think he's a singular designer. as well, i think zak is kind of a shitty moderator and I think his rules for how to conduct an argument are asinine. i don't really like forums and moderation in general, i don't hope that zaks weird rules for how best to conduct a discussion are adopted more widely

he was right to identify that he was the unfair target of a hatemob and he didnt and doesnt deserve to have his life destroyed by these people. i think that this review of red and pleasant land sucks and is bad: https://daegames.blogspot.com/2021/11/a-red-pleasant-land-meaningless-modern.html i dont have any real insight into his relationship with mandy and cant speak to it

hows the familiar meant to work

ive notice that the writers of 5e (mearls, crawford, perkins, et al) are reluctant to tell you what to do with familiars and like animal companions and stuff in interviews - like i think that the strictest reading of the rulebooks wants it to be

familiars (only as a class feature, not useful in combat)
animal companions (only as a class feature, useful in combat)
and now sidekicks (anyone can have, useful in combat)

and like, as written the rules sort of deliver these things, sort of not

and in interviews they'll be like, of course, anyone can have a familiar, of course - and i can see in streams and adventures that this is the intended way to play - and now because theres an explicit system in sidekicks, anyone can have a guy whos useful - and in a game that doesn't use sidekicks, we can see the same system is still intended in late-release beastmaster class features like the ua beastmaster ranger and the artificer

and the boring answer is like, they want you, the dm, to decide, because of course i can decide stuff, i can make up whatever dumb rules i want, but hows it actually sposed to work