Welcome home.
This is Audio EXP for April 26th, and the episode title is “Politics at the game table”.
[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #284]
[Also on Stitcher | Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
Keith DEdinburgh won the RPG Publisher Spotlight this month.
I asked Keith a question I often ask designers, “What makes a good core rulebook?” and he had a good answer, one often overlooked. He said, “A logical structure”.
I hear that. I use rules less often because I got fed up with flipping through rulebooks instead of gaming back in 2006.
My gaming groups, by the way, never had a “no politics at the gaming table” rule. I understand that the prohibition is pretty common, though.
It’s never been an issue for me in forty years of gaming because I’ve always gamed with friends with similar political beliefs as me. Oh, we often disagree, for example, on what sort of traffic measures are appropriate in the city, but never on the big stuff. No one I know tries to argue that Ukraine actually started a war with Russia.
Nor would I want to actually be in a regular game with anyone who thought that human rights are an annoying obstacle to capital gains.
This week, I’ve been thinking about politics at the game table because politics might now be threatening the game table.
CMON will stop game development until the trade situation stabilises and that might only happen once the extreme right is removed from power and that might take a while. CMON has had to make game designers redundant.
Stonemaier Games who make classics like Wingspan and Scythe, are taking legal action in America to challenge the way and powers that brought tariffs in. There’s a call for more game companies to join them.
I don’t want to be negative but I don’t think they have much of a chance. If people can be deported without due process, and millionaires given access to personal data without Federal oversight, then it doesn’t sound like Stonemaier is operating in a fair environment. Maybe it’s important that they file the protest, though.
We’ve a different protest story as we return to the Diamond Comic Distributor saga. Previously, we’ve covered how Diamond filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and had a stalking horse bid from a buyer straightway. Then Alliance Entertainment seemed to win the auction only for Diamond to file the paperwork to sell itself to Ad Populum instead.
Alliance didn’t accept that and filed legal papers. The judge agreed with Alliance and told Diamond Comic Distributors that Alliance had won.
Flash forward to this week, and the winner, Alliance, has just announced that the deal is off. They’re walking away. They’ve not said why, but the speculation is, guess what, it’s the tariffs again. The market is dying, and the company don’t want to pay money to have more of it.
There’s good news, at least mixed news, from tabletop RPGs. Wizards of the Coast have done what they said they would do and, under a Creative Commons license, released the Systems Reference Document 5.2 for D&D. This is the free rule book and rules by which you can create your own D&D stuff.
There are two exceptions. The Orb and Dragonkind and Deck of Many Things have different names in SRD 5.2 and Wizards of the Coast says this is due to trademark issues.
Wizards has the trademark for both, and some have noticed that D&D owners seemed to have tweaked or, at least revised, those deals just days before releasing the SRD. I can see why that’s annoying but I don’t think third-party D&D lives or dies by having a magic item called the Deck of Many Things, so it’s not a grumble I find myself drawn to.
The release of D&D’s SRD was big news but not the biggest this week. On Geek Native, Emma Pearn was the big hero.
Emma won the jousting tournament at the Royal Armouries contest in England last week. It’s the first time a female fighter has won the overall contest.
The Royal Armouries published a picture of a young woman with blue hair, looking confident in plate mail and raising her hand in victory. Emma was fighting for the British, but the team from America pipped the locals to claim the overall team total.
I think the big computer game news is the Elder Scrolls: Oblivion remake. That’s a story Bronwen got to quickly and we had the placeholder for the live stream up on the blog. You could have watched it with us. In some quirky news, the Speecraft training video, in which the voice actor asks for a retake, is being kept as it is. Some mistakes are golden.
It was a close run thing but I think my favourite computer game story, also blogged by Bronwen, was Hulu and FX’s Alien Earth videos for Earth Day. A lovely positive corruption of the day and with cat videos.
We’re told that the release of May 13th from Random House Worlds will be a children’s book based on a dark adult series. It’s The Little Witcher. I’m not sure how wholesome it’ll be, and I hope it’s laden with secret adult jokes, but we’ll have to find out!
Safely on the wholesome side is news from Son of Oak who is helping to recruit gamers with visual impairment for study. They’re not making any money from this and aren’t really involved; they’re just doing what they can to make future computer games more accessible.
Lastly, I want to talk about the Street Fighter 6 Limited Edition makeup collection from Game Beauty. It’s a beast, and Bronwen has thoroughly tested the box for a lengthy review, complete with videos.
There’s one deal in the Bundle of Holding to mention before I sign off for the night, and that’s the remastered Sigil Stone collection. Worth a look.
On that note, take a stand, stay safe, and see you next week.
