Welcome home.
This is Audio EXP for January 4th, and the episode title is “Stats and the probability yardstick”.
[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #269]
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Sad Fishe Games won the RPG Publisher Spotlight this month. They’re the first winners of 2025, and you know the drill; I’ll get in touch and aspire to get an interview online.
I don’t know where the name Sad Fishe, with fish spelt with an e at the end, comes from, but it made me think of other emotion creatures with fantasy encounters in mind. What about rage leeches that make people madly angry thus dramatically increasing the chances of more blood in the swamp or shame golems made from debris such as discarded wedding rings that whisper evily to you from the darkness?
Thank you to patrons; you can vote in the February poll. The candidates are;
We’ve made it through Hogmanay. Bronwen went to an amazing burlesque meets Vegas show that lasted for until the wee hours. I went to the pub, ate chicken, and blogged. There’s a video of the crowd going wild as I sit in the corner with my tech.
However, I was inspired to write about the Scots word that D&D has made sort-of-famous. That’s cantrip. It comes from the Scots; cantraip, which in turn is probably the allegation of the Scots ‘can’ which means to sing or chant and the Middle English ‘trippe’ which means to deceive.
That was the first of two attempts at academic-style articles this week but most of the attention has been on the Roll20 provided data we’ve been sharing. There’s a bit more to go, but let me share the top three of four league tables in this podcast.
The top three selling DMsGuild downloads, regardless of when they were published, this year are;
We can filter that to the top selling products that were published in 2024 and the top three are;
There’s one more DMsGuild filter because we can also look at which Roll20 modules did the best. The top three being;
- The Wild Beyond the Witchlight
- Chains of Asmodeus
- Kit Gryloc’s Guide to Myths and Monsters – A Greek Bestiary
We even got data from other sister sites, such as WarGameVault where the top three are;
Phew. Are you standing up to all this data? I hope so as there’s more to come!
First, though, some indie action to balance all these big RPG and wargame successes. Designer Graham Gentz has released Breaking The Vault of the Viditya Voleti which is a cooperative story of possible redemption.
100% of the money raised by this tabletop RPG will go to the Trans Youth Emergency Project, which looks after trans youngsters in the South of the USA.
I also finally got around to writing up two freebies from the LGBTQI+ publisher Daylight Publications. They offer both Fantasy and Sci-Fi Core Lite free to download intros to their gaming system.
I went down a rabbit hole for my second so-called academic post and I liked what I found. I tried to explain that your dice aren’t random and probability probably doesn’t exist.
By which, science has shown that dice are imperfect and if you could perfectly recreate your throw you’d be able to get the same results each time.
When it comes to probability, we can get into the quantum phyiscs of it but I found the English hard enough. It turns out that British military intelligence has a yardstick to translate words into probability stats. When an MI6 agent says to you that something is “Highly Likely” what does that mean? On the probability yardstick, the agent rates it between 80% and 90% certain. If the same agent said something was a “Realistic Possibility”, it would be less than 50% but greater than 40% chance.
What do you think your chances of becoming a pirate or killing a vampire are?
I wrote up the first attempt to kill Nosferatu. I mean the German 1922 film which didn’t die and went on to become a classic.
The original team tried to make a Dracula film but Bram Stoker’s estate refused permission, so they changed a bit and made the film anyway. Florence Stoker, Bram’s wife, sued, won and the Judge ruled that all copies of the film should be destroyed.
It was too late, copies had made it to the USA which had different copyright laws and that was enough for copies of the copies to be made. Nosferatu survived.
Bronwen has been looking at more recent entertainment battles. Rather than steal her thunder, I’ll let her explain.
Thanks Girdy. You know, I’m a fan of self-torture by way of watching Big Dragon House, AKA House of The Dragon. And now it’s officially the most pirated show of 2024. Well, as officially as anyone can tell. It’s no real surprise as the title used to go to Game of Thrones and then Big Dragon House back in 2022 as well. But taking a look at the overall list – we’ve also got shows like Fallout, Silo, Shogun, Arcane and Halo. They seem to be really into sci-fi, superheroes and video game content, the people who are pirating these shows – in other words they are geeks like us.
So just to say, if you love watching something, support it and pay for it if you can, or you risk losing it and ruining it for everybody.
I’m not sure I’d call it self-torture but this week, Bronwen also documented her very first attempt to build LEGO. The surprise wasn’t that the kit was the Jurassic World T. Rex Skull but that anyone could tally up so many geek points without ever been exposed to a LEGO build before now.
Sticking with interesting choices, there’s a D&D and Koi collab that’s caught my attention. Koi are a fashion brand; mainly into shoes. They’ve some stompy boots with monsters on for this D&D range but they also have bright green Gelatinous Cube Wedge Mary Janes that, to my eyes, look like green shoes stuck to the top of green storage trunks. How anyone could move in them in a mystery but I’ll concede you’ll get comments!
There’s two bundles to tell you about. First up, on the Bundle of Holding, there’s a Fabula Ultima deal. That’s a Japanse-RPG style TTRPG from Need Games.
Bronwen picked up the Hellboy comics bundle a few days before it closes. There’s still time if you hurry.
On that note, keep safe, and welcome to 2025.
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