Art, Agency, Alienation - Essays on Severance, Stanley and Root: The RPG 

As someone with a Root playgroup, a failed lets-play series of The Stanley Parable, a reverence for Severance, an austistic partner and thousands of video essay watch hours, this was so insanely up my alley and I'm not even up to the ABA bit yet. Thank you in advance for making me feel things

Hearing "150 moves" made my blood run cold.

calling roleplay a fetish ritual is absolutely wild

God damn that is the most brutal and real portrayal of ABA therapy I have ever seen as an autistic person. Like holy shit well done

Preschool teacher here, this is hands down the best explanation of ABA (and why it’s horrid) I’ve ever seen. Wish I’d had this video back when I was in college trying to understand what ABA was for the first time.

Literally straight from Apocalypse World: "There are a million ways to GM games. Apocalypse World calls for one way in particular. This chapter is is. **Follow these as rules.**"

There is a huge leap in this video that I find a little jarring, and I'm interested in thinking about it more. Now admittedly, as a disclaimer, I came at this topic from almost the exact opposite perspective as CollabsWithoutPermission. I am NOT the target audience of this video, as my favorite games include Luke Crane's Burning Wheel, Vince and Meg Baker's Apocalypse World, and Avery Alder's The Quiet Year (all Forge designers at one point or another). There are of course others, but I would guess that most of the games that I love most are probably influenced by Forge design in one way or another, and I love these games explicitly BECAUSE when I play them, both as a GM and a player, I have so much more agency than I do inside of a game like DnD, or Numenera, or Castle Falkenstein, or Shadowrun. The leap for me was the moment this video went from ABA, which by all accounts is disturbing and creepy and ff'd up thing that is done to children, to Games that people choose to play for fun. Now it seems from comments that you are not saying that these are the same thing, but rather saying that people are pretending that they are the same thing in terms of how they write their games, but that seems false to me for several reasons. Several key differences come to mind. Games are chosen to be played, and can be walked away from at any time. If that is not the case, it is not play. It seems to me then that the act of choice plays a huge part in participating in the game itself. For instance, when we choose to play basketball, we are also choosing to take up the restrictions that basketball has within it. We are choosing to take up the limitations of not carrying the ball, and not fouling the opponents without minor consequence etc. and are choosing to value the act of putting the ball through the basket under the conditions of the game. There is no inherent value to putting the ball in the basket, if there were, we would come up with efficient ways to do that without the obstacles within the game. The same thing is true to me in TTRPGs. We take up the game and are choosing to abide by the rules of the game, and take up goals within the game. Sometimes those goals are self-chosen (a la Burning Wheel, Apocalypse Wold) sometimes they are chosen by the game (Band of Blades, My Life With Master), and sometimes by the GM (DnD, The Sprawl), but the principles seem to still apply. It's likely that CollabsWithoutPermission does hold a distinction between ABA and Games, but it isn't clear within this video whether that is true of some TTRPGs, or no TTRPGs. The video seems to be critical of "moves" in PbtA, but I'm not certain why "moves" are better or worse than "attack", or "cast fireball" in DnD from this world-view. Second difference is ABA is designed to change behavior outside the realm of ABA, whereas games only intend on affecting what is within the play space. I cannot stress enough how important this distinction is. Games do not intend to change your behavior outside of the play space. Third distinction that comes to mind is that the goal of ABA is to wall off behavior. The goal of moves in Apocalypse World is to propel the game forward, and to open up possibilities. You can do anything you want, but when you do something that is specifically a move, it triggers a role of the dice that propels the game into a new direction. I'll add that moves are NOT incentivized in Apocalypse World, nor disincentived. You are not rewarded specifically for doing a move, nor punished, it is just a game state. Triggering a move means you have chosen to trigger that move, and now are going to (probably) role dice to see the outcome. That doesn't strike me as a wall the way ABA incentives/disincentives are. This is, I think, the core of the difficulty, and I think what it comes down to is that CollabsWithoutPermission and I disagree on what a Rule even is. A rule is not necessarily a wall to bump up against. It can also be an enabler, permission to do things you might not have thought of, or a path that one follows in moments of play that matters. It is this last one that Apocalypse World does, and honestly relatively lightly. Honestly much more lightly than a Class in most class-based games. In Apocalypse World, there is no rule for sitting around a campfire swapping stories, and yet it happens. Or visiting a friend and finding out what they know. But the moves kick in when the player decides that their intent matches one of the moves in the game. If they are trying to manipulate that friend, or trying to uncover their secret intentions, or maybe they aren't your friend any more and you want to shoot them. But the moves don't control, nor do they try to control, the players. They are avenues to understand the agencies that this game is most interested in exploring-namely issues of scarcity and desperation in AW. It's not specific, it's open-ended.

This was a really bizarre video for me. I loved the beats of this video but the conclusion was so bizarre and so contrary to my personal experiences with these kinds of games. I can’t talk about *Root: the RPG* or any of Magpie Game’s games particularly but I am talking about my experiences with games descended from The Forge ideas. With my friends, the play I’ve gotten out of games like Fellowship, Ironsworn, Blades in the Dark and yes Burning Wheel and Dungeon World are the most freeing and the most creative play I’ve gotten out of TTRPGs. These are the games where players have had the most input in play not the least. It’s where are art felt the most folk, the most ours I’ve had. Regardless, it’s given me a lot to think about and I do see behaviorism’s fingerprints over these games (especially when it comes to rewards). Maybe like the Forge we’re missing the actual experience of the players with these games 😂

I'm a highschool student currently taking psychology. This is the first time i've ever heard of ABA and it's absolutely blowing me away that this even exists. While taking my course, I never even considered how behaviorism, hell psychology as a whole could've been so strained and mangled into this hellish concept. I'm currently only an hour in to this video. But I had to pause it just to comment this. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I'm a massive fan of severance and I had this video saved in my watch later for a while. Thank you for making this video. It's amazing.

(49:57)I was an RBT for only about 2 months before I broke. I was only had two patients. The first patient was a child about to enter middle school. His file said that he was prone to violence. I later discovered he defaulted to aggression because he believed it was the only option. "Because it's fair" he would say. I had to tell this child to not defend himself, not to protect his self. He was being provoked by the people and environment around him and I HAD to tell him to let it happen. I never want to have to do that again.

My brother got the avatar the last airbender ttrpg books and looking back on all his forking out about it, he really only talked about the rules, about specific scenarios where you had to play certain characters. When he brought up the idea of running something for it and I could not imagine a character I wanted to play within the rules even with my lack of knowledge, I think I now get why. Thank you for rotting my mind to the point where I want to start out my gming with a better focus on the players and their desires first

I've been watching this in sessions, and I just got through the ABA section. And oh my _God_ that is everything I put myself through as a child. I tried everything I could to make myself less "strange" in ways people would like, to become like a neat package of a human person rather than who I was. Hell, I even glorified acting robotically and thought of what would happen if I made a button to make my voice go away that people could press whenever I talked too much. I just wanted people to stop being mad at me, or maybe even smile when I started going on tangents about things I loved, stimming and all. I slip back into old habits sometimes and go back into acting robotically, or just acting how I think "normal" people act/want me to act for the sake of acceptance or to avoid punishment. It hurt me as a child, and still hurts me now. That entire segment helped me understand what I was putting myself through, and I can't thank you enough for making this video.

Recently started running a Masks: A New Generation game with my group and your comments about Moves, Principles and Agendas as presented in Root: The RPG have really helped me in identifying some of the weird, nebulous confusion I was having with Masks. Having GM Moves presented to me as written was very jarring, since my brain kept going back to them and worrying if the things I was doing as a GM were aligning with "THE RULES" or not.

The future comes at you in the night. It is an empire of joy. It is a machine that manufactures love. It is the final and perfected technology of thought. "I am all that you are," it says softly. "It is impossible to imagine otherwise. It necessarily is so. Partake of my flesh, and live." There is blood on its outstretched hand/paw things. You look at its face. It is NOT a fish.

Adding this to my watch later with 27 likes with extreme trepidations and anticipation

As someone who mostly looks at PbtA and PbtA inspired games (actually playing games is very hard when everyone you know isn’t interested and you don’t want to play with randos) this gave me a lot to think about. I think the main idea I got from this is that you can’t get “democracy” from a “dictatorship”, if you have to always follow all the games rules as if they are laws designed to create an optimal play experience, you’ll sooner or later hit hard limits in what kinds of experiences the system can bring you. Kind of obvious in retrospect. And it’s not even necessarily about “democracy”, because that’s just creating a system where everything is equal shitty to everyone. The more that I think about it, the more that I start seeing game systems more as just frameworks to aid and hinder play, and rules as guidelines and best practices for starting and managing discussions and expectations.

I loved the first half of this video. And as it turns out I'm gearing up to run Root RPG next week and was getting kind of excited about it. And then I watched the second half of this video and am now filled with all kinds of anxiety about it. So thanks for that. I guess.

Great video. I happened upon it because I love Severance and the original Root game. I was intrigued, but never tried the Root TTRPG. I'm a bit older now (I'm 40) and I haven't played TTRPG since I was in my 20s, but they were an very formative part of my life. I remember when I was very young, maybe 13 or 14, we played D&D, but from the beginning we generally took the rules very loosely. Some of the most magical moments of playing those games in my childhood/adolescence were when the players became so immersed in the story, that the DM/GM (who was sometimes myself), intuitively knew to drop all the restraints of rules and completely rely on the natural unfolding of the story. In the most immersive moments, we would just stop rolling dice and just wing-it, dictating and speaking the story from our imagination. In was a magical, and I would even say spiritual experience where the personal/collective unconscious dictated and expressed itself spontaneously. They were some of the most precious experiences in my life. In my opinion a true RPG should facilitate that kind of emergence--the structure of the game mechanics and rules are only be there to fall back on when the storytelling is in need of prompts and structure to harmonize the player's imaginations. I haven't played TTRPGs in over a decade at this point, but it saddens me to hear that it seems like the general games of the industry have lost this quality. I feel like video games have had a negative influence, as they enforce these sorts of incentives and expectations for game mechanics that leave little room for the imaginal.

"To apply this to games, you'd have to think that your players are dogs that you have to train..." In this moment I realized that when designing encounters for players at my table for D&D, I've viewed them in exactly this way. Perceiving that they have no idea on how to interact in this boundless world and as such I must teach them, punish them, to interact correctly so that "the game can go on". Well, shit.

Coming back to this vid after a few months to say thank you for making this. It’s a hard watch. It pushed me to really consider how I was letting game design and ABA type behaviors permeate within me and in the ways I interact with the world. Have a great day ❤

My then-partner-current-bestie and I decided that we were going to play Root WRONG, by making it an RPG without the help of the TTRPG book. (This is in Tabletop Simulator) We stitched together the original board and Lake board together with a few paths and a river, threw in all the Oath cards and locations, and then scattered all the faction pieces through all the clearings and cards and made the factions work with that placement in mind. All the Hirelings, all the factions, all the Landmarks, and we played two Vagabonds navigating this world doing weird stunts for the sake of it. Sometimes we drew an Oath card or a Root card to see what happens, and made NPCs when we needed them, and just... played make-believe. Like we used to do, when we couldn't read the rules of a game and just... did things.

This is amazing work, I've come back to watch it again, months later. Hope you can continue to create

"TTRPGS are folk art" Absolutely nailed it

i'm only 9:23 into this. accidentally ran across it while trying to fill the severance void. this is so amazing. thank you.

59:00 “it reduces ‘autistic behaviors’ in a way insurance company spreadsheets can understand.” Is one of the main reasons I finally stepped away from the health care field. I felt like I couldn’t actually help anyone because what someone needed wasn’t considered “billable”. It was just a fight with insurances everyday and I couldn’t do it anymore

Thanks for helping me leave the game design mind set that I hadn't realized I was in. Unfortunately, Adam Koebel was my game design role model when I was just entering the hobby. I stopped supporting him and his work, but I don't think I had any perspective of how RPGs can be beyond his teachings of rewards and mechanics controlling player behavior. Now I understand why I never actually played Burning Wheel though it seemed clever and deep on the surface, and when I tested these sorts of behavior mechanics at my table, they never felt better than the game without them.

I watched this months and months ago when I was big on ROOT and making my own Root video. Revisiting it now because I love the structure and presentation of this whole video, and I wanted to say that I loved this work!! The way you explore your disparate topics with a strong hold on your central ideas is very satisfying to see. I would describe it as "controlled chaos," the way we fly from show to game to [HORRIBLE THING WE DO TO THE NEURODIVERGENT] to TTRPG. Truly a multimedia clash that I often think back on. Love it!!

I just lost the fucking game after 8 years holy fuck.

Oh My Gosh. I love Ttrpgs but always felt like I was disappointing my players (even if they said they liked it) after playing a session or two. Which often led to me ending the game. I’m realizing now that I was really feeling like I was disappointing THE GAME BOOK/Designers. Which is dumb because it’s a book and those designers don’t play at my table. WOW awesome video!

This was an incredible breakdown of why this game doesn't function. I say this fully as someone who backed the original Kickstarter and played a like 7+ session game of it (which never got finished for reasons that make a lot more sense now). I'm really having a real 'coming out of the enchanted forest' moment here. Like, oh that game didn't feel doomed from the start because the players had drastically different wants and I was too inexperienced to handle that, it's that the attempts I was making to try and bring the so-claimed all encompassing nature of the rules back into play were just actively working against what we all found fun. I remember, after several sessions feeling like the framework just wasn't working, ditching several of the book's stupid rules for play and just making up my own setting from what the art inspired in me and playing with the rules as we loosely remembered them when we thought it actually helped. Immediately after that, I started leading the story toward the idea of the Denizens rejecting all the factions and determining their own fate on a community by community basis. Now, I'm seeing that I was just blindly bumping into how the game wants there to be no right faction and then personally decided that, indeed, all the factions were bad LMAO. I had kinda convinced myself -- in my self-consciousness -- that it was my poor GM skills causing friction, I was newer at the time but I had been running games for multiple years still. I cannot say I am the same person I was before watching this video. I wish I could applaud for a thousand years. P.S. It's so interesting how the early frame work The Forge worked off of made the assumption that the players don't have thoughts of their own. That made me think of the how an early analysis of media was the Hypodermic needle model, proposing that audiences were just taking in any media's message without any of their own ideas or agendas. It's fascinating that these two mediums shared the popularization of a theory that thinks of the audience/players as machines that will blindly follow what is shown to them. It's almost as if capitalism is invading all forms of art it can get it's hands on........haha, almost.

This was an absolutely WILD ride, since I have been cautiously waiting on a friend to start up GMing a game of Root, and have personally only read the first bits of the book. I do think some of the criticisms aren't warranted; there IS some new lore, and the restrictions against deer are (as you discovered later) something in line with how they are already presented in the existing material or the board game. Plus, the fact that moose are the in-setting equivalent for dragons is absofuckinglutely hilarious. But that aside, this was a wonderful rollercoaster of emotions you took me along, and I'll never look at these cute animals the same again.

The section on Root's moves is cool and crazy at the same time. When you said "these are your buttons, push them" I thought of my wonderful experiences with Ironsworn, the first PbtA style game I ever played. There's also moves in it but I never thought about them "by name" so to speak; I would act out in fiction and only then think "what is a move that represents what I'm trying to accomplish" and go from there. A very big difference I think. Ironsworn always pushed for "fiction first" kind of play

This was such an amazing video. Not only an amazing explanation of all these topics, but as someone who wants to be making content about rpg’s this was very inspiring. Can’t wait to check your other videos out! ❤❤

The “ABA” section of this video was powerful. Great work!

Not my technology professional ass spending 30+ secs pondering how you are advancing the slides. 🤣

Separating the Woodland Alliance and the denizens was actually a good move, though i wouldn't have made the denizens their own "faction" with reputation tracking and all. Whilst insurgent groups obviously do like to claim they are the voice and arm of the people, it would be ridiculous to claim that afghanis are all represented by the taliban or that the irish are all represented by the IRA. This both erases the agency of the people, and politicises their very existence. How many massacres have been justified on the grounds that entire settlements were resitants or collaborators? Assigning the WA the role of "the people" is tacitly substantiating this mindset. How many conquests and regime changes have only been successful because of the engagement of locals dissatisfied with the status quo? Basically all of them, but by making the WA "the people" the ones in the marquisate are all helpless victims waiting to be liberated by your flavour of insirgent, rather than people living their lives and having nuanced opinions on one regime or another. The WA deserves to be a complex movement that a table can interact with intelligently. Whether it's spanish liberals being forced to choose between fighting to become a soviet puppet or abandoning the cause, panafrican socialists destroying local institutions and cultures thst survived colonial rule or Indian resistants having to fight for caste-believing bigots, most insurgencies have depths that can be fun to explore at a gaming table. By making them the sole legitimate representative of the people you're just arbitrarily assiging them the "good guy" status and calling it a day (assuming your table believes sovereignty is derived from the will of the people lol). Good bits in these essays tho keep it up 👍

2:25:17 So I was aware of what Adam did but didn’t realize he blamed lack of rules. Lmao

Always entertaining and thought provoking. I do tend toward What Is Your Game About designerisms. We know a cut and paste from the d20 SRD or one page microlite 1d6 rules can be games with the same setting and it can be used for anything, Jane Austen romance? Sci fantasy action adventure? Law and Order police procedurals? Sure! I do like game mechanics that are made on purpose that have something to do with the themes or intended activity of the game. Blades in the Dark giving XP for "desperate" actions comes to mind off the top of my head.

Thank you so much for the video!! It's given me so much to think about as someone who has been super immersed in that 'story games' milieu for a long time. I still believe that self-imposed restrictions can be a tool for storytelling, but this video has definitely made me question where those restrictions should come from, and what they implicitly call 'problematic play.' My only question is about adventures, which is... in what way are they not a set of rules for recreating a particular storyline (a journey into a dungeon, a mystery, etc.)? I've never really enjoyed using them, neither as a player nor as a GM, because I can feel the hand of some writer not just governing the rhythms or tones or languages of storytelling, but also the moment-to-moment events. Settings I get (to an extent, I still like being able to collaboratively worldbuild at the table), NPCs I get... but I'd love an advocate of adventures to explain to me how they break the mould of mind control, because I'm sure there's something I'm missing in my approach. Again, great video!! Three hours well spent lol.

I think this video would have worked better if you'd critiqued some of the better regarded "forge"/pbta games like apocalypse world, ironsworn or even masks. I've seen a lot more good said about these games. Why is it that despite all this forge theory being wrong, people still get meaningfully different roleplaying experiences from playing these games? System clearly just does matter for some people, myself included. Why? What's your actual positive position here? And I do want games to continue telling me what they are "about". It's useful information to know what the rules trying to do. It's like a partially built social contract. There may be some drift as we play and the interactions of those particular people together play out, but we all agreed to start with these rules because we were all interested in a particular type of story.

Woaaaah this was the perfect thing to end up on my feed! Incredibly well researched and super thought provoking! I'm slamming that subscribe button

Look ma, the best tabletop RPG video ever made!

This is the best thing I've ever seen. If someone invites me to movie night and busts this video out I'm proposing right then and there

Love this video essay. A lot. Gonna share it to all my friends. Really made me rethink why I love TTRPGs and how I design them.

Holy shit. I've been brushing up against this tension in games for literal years and you laid it out so clearly! Thank you! Subscribed

Great video! Resonated like hell for me in a lot of ways. That ABA quote from the dog trainer gives me chills. While possibly out of scope for this video, there's also an interesting intersection of the trend of gamification in corporate settings. I work at a corporation as my day job in the training department and, at least about 3-5 years ago, gamification was the big buzz word in those circles. As a game dev, I eventually learned to hate the word and actively pushed back on it and offered "game-based learning" approaches instead. It was always just a bunch of boomers sitting down in meetings saying "Oh I heard about gamification at a conference last week. Can we add points and badges to our WBTs? Can we track leaderboards and make weekly challenges?". It was always the most meaningless addition to training material to "drive engagement" but to me it always seemed to be just useless fluff at its best, and at its worst it felt very invasive and as if they were trying to "dopamine hack" people into actually caring about corporate training, which was already too abundant and taking up their time they need to actually do their work. At least in my case, they never developed much infrastructure to actually make the damn systems and I think the hype has mercifully died down. And as much as I love game-based learning too I've learned it has no place in corporate. The material is just too thin and flaccid for a game to be beneficial and games take so long to make as-is (especially since I was the only dev in the whole department). Just feels like I'm making propaganda.

this video is great and cant wait to see more! im so glad i was recommended this, i hope others will be too. you deserve so much

Hey thanks a lot for changing how I perceive TTRPGS forever with this vid. Blades in the dark always intimidated me with its rules and procedures but this made me realize I can just roll the dice pools and ignore everything else and the game will be fine and fun because I like my gaming group as people and collaborators.

1:30:08 - it parallels "FU design" article by "To Distant Lands" blog - when the game / game book explicidly takes shortcuts and leaves it to DM to invent / define what otherwise expected to be present in the game/book and (importantly) provides no assistance in doing it whatsoever.

You are amazing. I laughed so hard. The writing, performance, the sets! Instantly subscribed and eagerly looking through your backlog.

Who are some designers / artists / publishers making the types of prosaic games/adventures you wish to see more of? All the people at Melsonian Arts Council are at the top of my list, but I struggle to think of more.

This was a really good video. I kept thinking of Dostoevsky's Notes From the Underground which includes a pretty robust rebuttal to the idea of scientific positivism. Essentially, even if scientists could prescribe all manner of behaviora that would be good for the human being, some people would choose to reject "good" behaviors just out of a desire for freedom, or a rejection of being controlled in some way. Even if they know those behaviors are good for them. It also reminds me of the poitical school of theories 'economic democratism'. Basically using economic models of behaviorism to explain democratic behaviors like voting. The problem is there are so many unaccountable variables that mess up their simple equations, they have to dump all that stuff (like emotions, beliefs, ideologies, etc) into something they call the 'D' term. All that stuff is super important and relevant to the decision to politically participate though, so when I was reading these theories in grad school I remember just complaining all the time that if you have to put 80% of what makes a human, human, into an unmeasurable term just to fit in your exonomic model because otherwise you can't explain why people are unpredicatable, maybe you needed an entirely new theory.

This three hour epic looks like it's going to be an amazing time, sadly however I have not yet played Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe and I simply cannot spoil that game for myself, so I will return once I have gotten a chance to play the game

i'm commenting entirely for the engagement metric boost because THAT right there is alienation

This is a really good video! I saw it on the online at 10pm and realoze I was ready to stay up until 1am.

I really really enjoy these crazy deep deep dives ... literally dropped everything and listened to all 3 hours!❤

I ran the Root Quickstart and really liked the way it felt for the most part. I'm disappointed to hear that the full release core rules are so cluttered and badly written, and they they require the second book. I was hoping not to have to read two novels in order to run the game effectively.

This video is great on so many levels. Thank you so much for making it :)

As for the Agency. Players want to feel effective. We want to have an effect on our environment. The rules tell us how to do that. Maybe fighting isn't effective against an incorporeal enemy, so the game makes us reconsider our options. But even in a straightforward game, an individual might NOT care about the implicit or explicit goals we define as designers. Maybe they want to just portray a character, and suddenly they make their own games within our games. But if you really want to get me started on shyte, let's talk about how running a TTRPG creates its own realities between different game masters. It's a performance. TTRPGs are instruments, not mere games we can just play through. They can be interpreted, and will change context easily by adding more players or swapping a GM. That's why I found testing Michtim kind of hard. The game isn't playable alone, it requires people that perform it, and weirdly it's not something many folks readily understand.

you are so incredibly talented and this concept is so well articulated. i came to this video via a tiktok promoting it and now i’m going to go through your entire backlog. what a fantastic composition for reading a theme over media. great job

Creíste que podías tirar el mejor video sobre trpg y que no nos daríamos cuenta???

I feel like this video essay was made for me! I love severence, stanley parable, and root! Great video, a really interesting deep dive into a huge variety of topics, spanning further than I thought it would initially :)

Amazing experience to see this video. Liked, subbed, shared. With board games (my primary engagement with Suitsian games) in the past I took the position that a good rulebook made for a clean game, punchcards to shove into my robot brain so I could play the game the way the designer intended it. This video is a fantastic and nuanced reminder of how that can kind of be an inherently narrow view that tries to define or codify fun and play in a way that forgets how imagination works. Sometimes the most important barriers and restrictions are the ones you've blown so far past that you can't even see them any more if you turn back to look in the direction you came from.

Oh my god. I’ve loved your video. It’s just great. I can’t imagine someone cried out loud all the thoughts I couldn’t gather. Love your work. I’d like to chat with you about issue.

I'm a graphic designer and this makes me think of the way "design is mind control" alienates us from art as an expression of human nature and contorts it into an expression of function

First off! Thank you for making such a engaging 3h long video. It's not something i'd normally watch with ADHD, but you had me all the way through even though i''m not a theatre or phyc or lit student who know wtf you are talking about. Im just some league of legends player trying to find out how to play TTRPGs so i can stop being a league of legends player XD. I found this video from a top comment on "Are Dungeon Masters CHEATING in Dungeon World" comparing this video to the one i was originally watching. I have never played PBTA and only know about it from Me Myself and Die Real play of IronSworn, a free to play PBTA clone that does 2d10 vs 1d6+ ability score to resolve how many successes you rolled. Such a wierd rabbit hole i found.

Best video on gaming ever.

I'm 9 minutes in and I need to like, take a smoke break or go hike up a hill for a minute. Great so far.

great video :)

WE'RE IN THE LONG HAUL WITH THIS ONE LETS GOOOOOO

Loved this, do think it would have worked better as two different videos

incredible video; impactful, funny, and insightful. one of the best RU-vid recs I've gotten ! commenting so it knows to share it with more folks

This is amazing!! Watched it twice already

I’m going to throttle you and your excellency and hipocracy. All this talk of art and how companies sell control yet you undercut your own work as a Gm For many?! YOU are putting in so much effort into this work of oral storytelling, of human expression, of shared creation and collaboration! Alls to say, you’re an artist in so many ways. This is beautiful vi. Thank you for sharing your thoughts as always.

Attention to detail is so good in your videos. I just noticed the blurry lizard behind the glass at around 1:49 XD

What a journey. Took me two days but was worth every second. When I read the Root RPG it bored me and I could never conceptualize why. This essay gave me a lot to think about. Thanks Vi.

The cutaway at 29:15 broke me, great stuff! Back to watching the video. 38:30 Jared jumpscare! “Trying to be Kind” is great. 1:15:00 WHO LET RON EDWARDS OUT OF THE BAG?!

Oh wow, it really is the best rpg video ever made

This was Awfully beautiful I lov3 this video so much

New to the channel- absolutely beautiful essay! I think this did a lot to clarify feelings I've been having for a while about certain heavily thematic story systems, which at times are claimed as being "superior" for role playing to all others, a claim I've always found bizarre. But the recurring elements of these systems, I've found, are that they always gamify RP. They dictate when feelings are had, how long they last, what actions characters take in certain modes. I'm sure that's a form of play that appeals to some, but to me it seems so much more closed off than freeform RP supported by a toolkit for resolving actions you can't talk out easily. I've seldom played at a D&D table in either edition I've played (3.5 or 5e) that struggled with RP as a concept and at many of my tables it was central to progression and enjoyment of the game. And players didn't feel that having their characters' mental and emotional worlds constrained diminished the game. It expanded the possibilities of play, the possibilities of pivoting campaign goals and of interacting with one another. The rise in belief that RP is only "good" or "fun" when systematized honestly alarms me. It encloses what I find to be the most creative part of any TTRPG. I'm sure that these rules at their best create challenges that players can find very fun to work within, much like frenzy in VtM, but with some of these systems and the playstyles and methods of interaction they seem to want... I don't know. In some ways I can't help but think backlash against elements of the mentioned "FU game design" in D&D 5e has created this counter movement of players who think only the most systematized and narrowly defined (but not necessarily the most crunchy) games are "good," when truly that misses the range and potential of the hobby. It's refreshing to see someone recognize that form of play and lay out the potential problems it can have, and it's refreshing to see a defense of freeform RP in this conversation. I'm always saddened to see that reactionary move when the breadth of possible games and styles really just means that everyone can find something they enjoy- and yeah, some people will even continue to enjoy 5e. Anyway, long ramble but great video, had a lot of fun and great insight into Root: the RPG.

Oh god I'm so excited to watch this

I was really interested in a lot of the discussion of this video and your perspectives made me rethink some stuff, but was a bit put off to find it was just a groundwork to basically say "here's why I'm morally good for disliking PbtA". It's not too far removed from instincts of some of the guys at the Forge who disliked DnD and tried to justify that they were morally virtuous and enlightened for doing so. I dunno, calling a TTRPG corpo-mind-control seems kinda absurd to me, or maybe I'm just too brainwashed.

So much dang jumping, fantastic!

I’m not a huge tabletop guy, but I’ve got some experience with TTRPGs That all being context for the fact that I adored this video, it was fascinating and incredibly well produced. Raddagher sent me, and I’m so glad she did. This is amazing. You have a new subscriber in this internet/SCP writer/podcaster (I’m sure that’s 100% your demo haha)

Well now I just feel bad about buying all that Root RPG crap impulsively but as is the case with every game I get, I have no intention of playing the game the way it's intended. Brilliant analysis of the game and it's place in the post-Forge rpg scene.

Some tiktoc brought me here, now im an hour in

Oh dang, that was great!

OK! I have made my illustrious return, played through all of the new content in Stanley Parable: Ultimate Deluxe so this video couldn't spoil me, and have now made it to the end of the three hours. This comment it going to be long because this video gave me a lot of thoughts lol First off, what a triumph of a video. Easily the best video you've made yet, standing shoulder to shoulder with your Mothership review (gone but not forgotten) and your video on Dread, which i should really rewatch sometime soon as well. I agree so much with your feelings towards the end about the state of the industry, about the way that games are reduced to sets of rules that attempt to prescribe a "correct" way to play the game. So much of it feels very churned out, rule sets for the sake of rule sets. The whole section on ABA was very moving. I had no idea this existed, though given the other things I know about the way autistic children are treated by the public school system and the psychiatric field I am sadly not surprised. And the Carillon section especially was so well done, just huge props for that. I've been thinking a lot about alienation and intellectual property and art lately, so it was cool to see a lot of the ideas I've already been ruminating on reflected in this video. Just the other day I was talking to a friend about how the concept of "canon" is often used in modern works to denote what is and isn't monetizable by the company that owns a work's intellectual property. I used the example of Star Wars, and how the only real thing making one piece of Star Wars media more "canon" or more "official" than another is that Disney can monetize the work. A Star Wars story written by a fan could be just as impactful to people as one written by a screenwriter hired by Disney, but only the one that can be monetized by the intellectual property holder is considered to be a "canon" story, is lent the air of legitimacy that comes with canonicity. And it was interesting to see a lot of those thoughts reflected in how you talked towards the end about the way companies propose rulebooks (things they can monetize) as the sole defining factor in what kind of play "counts." Legitimate play isn't play that tells a story, engages the player, or even just makes everyone at the table have a good time. No, instead to these companies "legitimate" play is the play that derives solely from the objects they can sell to you. It's really insidious. Also, just as a final little aside: When you were reading Ron Edwards's forum posts, I couldn't help but be struck with how similar his prose sounds to the way the Narrator talks in TSP. They both talk with this sense of self-importance, an unbridled sense of certainty that their opinion is the only correct one. Very funny to see that tone coming from someone unironically. All told, lovely video, and I look forward to whatever you have planned next! (I also look forward to the footnotes, which I'm going to watch after I finish this comment)

this video expanded my understanding of the ttrpg space as a whole a bunch and i thank you so much for that. it also helped solidify why i fpund the books so uninteresting to read. i was drawn in by the beautiful art just to be met with rules thay just seemed so restrictive and boring. incredible video. wish you the best.

This is both a rambling mess and one of the most interesting things I've seen in years. I don't think it could get to be the latter without the former.

Listened to it on a long drive. It's really good.

i genuinely thought that chapter 8 was actually called 'can of worms'. unveiling that it wasn't was so funny for reasons I cant articulate

I am very excited to see what your ideological counterpoint to this will look like!

Hello, hope you are doing well :), I was wondering where did all your old videos go ? Do you have a secondary channel now ?

i don't think this is related to the video at all but maybe, have you seen the doc Secrets of Blackmoor? it's mostly about the creation of the Blackmoor setting made by Dave Arneson and brief history of war gaming in Lake Geneva (i think? at least an area close to there if i'm wrong) from the perspective of Dave Arneson's gaming group. it's almost entirely first hand accounts of players of those war games and their remembrance of the proto-D&D games they were creating in the group much earlier then D&D. it's worth the watch

Damn Vi, that conclusion hit home hard. Great video, gotta work through some of the other vids now 👀

Loved your MakeCraftGames reference!

THE RETURN

This is like one of those deep cross-sections of niche niches and rabbit holes that feels like are exclusively up my alley but then someone goes to make a 3hr video about them and I love it

only an hour in but fuck, this is an incredible video essay