Aaron Voigt

@aavoigt

Portfolio and contacts at aavoigt.com TTRPG Videos: Co-host: Games: He/him

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Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· Jun 14

Not to sugarcoat 2013 but goddamn

Our research method also had one substantive empirical finding: Cultural homophobia
has decreased to such an extent to have made this method possible. Of the thousands of
people who heard our announcements, we encountered just one person who expressed
homophobic views. Conversely, we heard hundreds of responses from straight men who
commented in one form other that they wished they were bisexual as they needed the money.
When one mother's young son asked her, 'Mom, what's bisexual?' His mom replied, 'Well, we don't know what you are yet, but it's about who you love' Given the wide range of locations in which we recruited participants, the time spent doing so, and the diversity of
people to whom we announced our message, this is evidence that the expression of
homophobia has become stigmatized in these cities.

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· May 29

It's Civil War Summer baybeeeee

Letterboxd recent activity screenshot. Films are: Glory (3.5 stars), Red Riding Hood (2 stars), Snow White and the Huntsman (3 stars), and Gettysburg (4 stars)

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· May 15

Hrmmm idk about this one

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· May 5

Got my contributor copy of Interstellar Flights Magazine and noticed a familiar name! @percypropa.bsky.social

WELHAMIN: THOMAS HA'S SHORT STORY
"GROTMATTA":
UNDERCURRENTS OF THE COLONIAL PLIGHT OF THE PHILIPPINES
KYLE TAM

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· May 3

wow, that's so weird

passage from "Storylines as a neglected cause of crime" The highlighted text reads "Unfortunately, I am not aware of any quantitative studies that contain good data on the experience of these storylines." I have drawn a big red exclamation point next to it

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· May 3

starting to think the field of criminology isn't quite as respectable as i've been led to believe

Graph from the journal of research in crime and delinquency. "The Distinction between Background Factors and Storylines, Using the Level of Self-Control of a Particular Individual over Time as an Example"
It shows a graph with the x axis labeled month 1 through month 6, and the Y axis labeled "level of self control," with High at the top and Low at the bottom. The graph fluctuates, becoming significantly lower at months 3 and 5. I find it difficult to interpret any meaning from this graph.

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· Apr 26

I don’t know if I’m winning Titanium Court, but I do know that it is Good

Screenshot of Titanium Court- “now that you know the difference between right and wrong, it’s time to give you a gun!”

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· Apr 9

so did everyone already know there are like 6 Blades in the Dark novels just floating out there

Screenshot from bladesinthedark.com

Doskvol Novels by Andrew Shields.

This is how the books fit together:
Summary of the Blades in the Dark Novels - Shields Up! Publishing (wordpress.com)

. Silk and Silver (ebook/paperback/hardback)
. Mirror and Bone (ebook/paperback/hardback)
. Copper and Salt (ebook/paperback/hardback)
. Breath and Burns (ebook/paperback/hardback)
· Raining Sideways (ebook/paperback/hardback)
· Sleet Rising (ebook/paperback/hardback)

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· Mar 13

Winston Churchill quote from “Winston Churchill: Accusations of anti-Semitism, economic inexperience and the blunt refusal that led to the deaths of millions-“ I hate Indians, he later stated as the resistance movement strengthened. “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· Jan 7

if you could use a laugh, RFK Jr’s new plan is to turn the food pyramid upside down

An inverted food pyramid. Protein, dairy, healthy fats on top, alongside veggies and fruit. Whole grains at the bottom

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· Dec 29

Okay about 30 minutes until the big video goes up. Expectation setting- it's about 90 minutes long, contains a lot of clips of interviews, and occasionally long shots where it's only me talking over the background. Overall I think it's about a B, production wise. And remember this above all:

I do not recommend you get your opinions from YouTubers framed over field of wheat

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· Dec 29

Lastly, from Avery Alder. I'd just been personally curious about how she felt about the Quiet Year being used as worldbuilding, and I think she has a very gracious response.

The Quiet Year, I think in large part because it showed up in both Friends at the Table and The Adventure Zone as a tool for laying the groundwork for a campaign that would then occur in a different system… because of that a lot of people were first introduced to the Quiet Year as a tool for setting up your D&D campaign or setting up your campaign in a different system.
And at first that really felt wrong to me or off to me, because The Quiet Year… My sensibility was that it was designed to be self contained, it was designed to be fleeting and ephemeral. It was designed to end on an ambiguous and never defined note. And all those things felt really integral to my play experience. And the idea that those things will be not integral and not even present for other people's play experience gave me this strong like oh no you're playing it wrong impression initially. Until I pulled back and reexamined that a little bit and i realized like there's no such thing as playing roleplaying games wrong. And if there is I built a career on playing roleplaying games wrong.

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· Dec 29

From Emily Friedman, whose generosity with her interview time is the reason I caved and bought transcription software lolol, and whose insights on Actual Play are currently filling a book:

We get into shifting ground of…there is this beautiful window where there is this kind of potential crossover possibility because everybody's playing online. I remember the first time I taught my actual play class is in 2021…B Dave Walters was saying, the conventional wisdom was,
“remote gets you the best choice of cast, and studio gets you the best product.”
But of course, for that window in 2020 and into early 2021, there's one product. There's only one kind of product. And so you get these kinds of contacts. The challenge is, this is all remote.
excellence the challenges are all remote. And without the ecosystem of conventions, or other kinds of ways of meeting people in-person, the way D&D Live was, and things like that. And as someone who started studying this stuff in a period like full time, because of the remote turn, and didn't come into conventions until, what 2023? I know the impact that that lack of…ability to make connections that feel organic and real. Authentic is not the word I want but…That's the tricky part is that by the time you have that apparatus, the schism’s already happened. Everybody's retreated into their different kinds of bubbles. Which are with actual play where you build trust.

So there's a certain part of the kind of symbiotic relationship between indie rpgs– and also just it's worth noting–game designers have always been actual players. There's this assumption that
actual play is full of actors and improvisers and comedians. And yeah. But also acquisitions incorporated is mostly writers.

Many many groups are kind of anchored by folks who are game designers, or who quickly decide that they want game design to be part of their portfolio. Which is a different thing. I mean certainly the influencer to game designer pipeline is arguably as strong as the game designer to influencer pipeline in different kinds of ways. And those have different kinds of impacts.

Especially in terms of you know authorship and ghost authorship. And increasing amounts of invisible labour of editing and all that kind of stuff.

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· Dec 29

And I could have spent a hundred hours talking to the Bakers and they would have kept hitting me with nuggets of wisdom:

Yeah, turns out, pretty good game. I am wondering, in the last 15 years, have you seen any innovations, not necessarily in PBTA, just generally, that get you excited for the next 15 years of the hobby? What have you seen that’s like “people are iterating and moving on.” Do you have thoughts on the way the hobby’s evolved over the last 15 years?

MB: Yeah. Online play. Easy as that. Like, This Discord Is Haunted? Amazing. Especially given the [COVID-19] pandemic, the ways that people figured out how to have whole conventions online. It’s amazing from an accessibility standpoint, from a global carbon footprint standpoint, tons of reasons. Do I love being in a room with a thousand of my friends? Yes. When that’s not safe or healthy, do I love being able to see a dozen of them online? Absolutely.

I think the way that gaming in general has changed in the past 15 years, or 20 years, is really interesting. It’s not just roleplaying games. The incredible rise of board games, the full on move to mainstream of videogames–from little phone games to big, giant AAA games. We are now in a place that we weren’t 25 years ago where everyone’s excited to talk about what kind of game they play. It gives us a common language in a way, even if we play very different games. It’s a way we can understand each other’s enthusiasm a little more. I’m hopeful we’re starting to move to a place where that is not just my rose-colored glasses, and we’re moving past some of the, “Oh well you’re not a real gamer” nonsense of the past. Because the potential now to hang out and play games is huge. Boardgame Arena? Playing boardgames, online, with friends? Do a little voice call over Discord, which didn’t exist? Amazing.

And I think that’s what’s interesting about PBTA as a phenomenon over the last 15 years. I think it takes those core ideas, that your result can produce this fiction forward result at the table–I think that’s really fascinating. People really latched on to that. Arguably PBTA is the biggest game system–I know y’all don’t like to think of PBTA as a system–

MB: It’s definitely a design philosophy.

I actually wanted to ask you about that. I’m wondering if you’d like to clarify what the difference between a system and a philosophy is? Because you call it a PBTA philosophy.

VB: I don’t.

Oh, okay.

MB: I do. I do for shorthand, and it is a shorthand. When I think about other creative schools, like the Hudson River School of painting, or the Surrealist School of wordgames, it’s the closest I can get. And with our open letter about PBTA, what it means to call your game PBTA, at the heart it means you’re inspired by our work. And so that’s a philosophical thing. To be inspired by something is not quite quantifiable, in the way a philosophy is not quite quantifiable. So that’s why I use the word philosophy, not game design. I understand the desire to call it a system, but I feel like the work, the real, actual work, that so many people have done to develop their own systems for their own games that are PBTA…some of them can be really close, in the ways they are in dialogue, communication with Apocalypse World, but they’ve done the work to design their own system. Monsterhearts is a different system. Alas for the Awful Sea is a different system. I guess that’s why.

VB: There’s a chapter in Apocalypse World that I called the Ludography that lists a whole bunch of influences on Apocalypse World. It lists probably a third of the real influences. The thing I like to say about it is your own games seem really derivative to you because you’ve read all the same books you have, and you’ve seen all the same movies that you’ve seen. But to another person who hasn’t read the same books and seen the same movies and played the same games, your game is a revelation. Your game seems new. Your game seems novel and seems innovative. So to me, because I’d read all the same books that I’d read and seen all the movies, Apocalypse World was just me continuing to do the thing we were doing. And I knew we had hit on something. I knew it was going to take off. But it didn’t appear from nowhere. It appeared very much from the place that it appeared from.

But there’s another really important thing to me about game design. And this goes to “Have we moved beyond the Bakers,” and it goes to “is Apocalypse World a system,” and it goes to this same question now. Which is that games don’t only copy each other, they don’t only descend from each other in that way–they contradict each other. You answer back to the games that influence you. Apocalypse World contracts a bunch of the games in its ludography, really intentionally. It says, “What if we do it the opposite way?” To me, what’s valuable about PBTA games is that they contradict Apocalypse World. That’s what they all have in common. They all disagree with Apocalypse World in some important way. So every PBTA game moves beyond the Bakers. That’s the point.

MB: That’s the point of the whole enterprise.

VB: That’s the point of making a game, is to tell me, personally, to shut up for once.

The last thing I wanted to see…What do you hope future RPG historians and fans will remember about your contributions to the hobby?

MB: Oh glory.

No pressure.

VB: I hope they remember Under Hollow Hills. I really like that game.

MB: That’s a big question, Aaron, I don’t know man. What do I want my epitaph to be?

Sorry to bum you out on Monday night.

VB: Sometimes I’ll encounter an idea that is a late-stage PBTA idea, a 2025 PBTA idea. And I will say to our kid, Elliot, “Oh my god Elliot, we screwed it up for everybody.” So maybe that should go on my gravestone. “Vincent Baker: Screwed it up for everybody.”

MB: One of the things that is easy to have slip away is that we just did it because nobody told us we couldn’t. We did it because we wanted to and we didn’t know any better. Everything that Vincent said about all the antecedents, all the games we played, all the people we talked to, all of our life experiences, all of that is really true. But also there’s a piece that was very punk rock, saying “Goddamnit, we’re going to do a thing.” I don’t know? Just do it. To do it, do it. And you can do it too. And here’s tools that we found that maybe will help you. That’s what I want. Not that we were trying to change the world. No. We were just like, “Look. I think you can do it.”

VB: Any historian who says Meg and Vincent made it easier for other creators…[holds up the sign of the horns]

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· Dec 29

Some insights from John Harper that I thought were super neat, especially wrt prototyping video games using tabletop RPGs

I like the idea of game design as mutations on the evolutionary tree. Eventually you get far enough away from one system that it becomes a wholly different species. That’s really cool.

It’s cool too that in some ways…play culture-wise this isn’t necessarily true, but for people who want to do it, games don’t expire. You can go back 50 years, it’s not that long. You can go back to the oldest, earliest games. And maybe they’re not written the way we expect them to be now. Maybe some of their politics are really sketchy in places. But they don’t expire. Chess isn’t like, “Oh nobody plays chess anymore, that’s stupid.”

That’s what I like about the hobby too. It’s broader and wider and more diverse. For players and GMs it puts you in a position where now…you can play a game about anything you want, that someone’s already made, in addition to making your own games. That’s what I love about it. You can go back in time and play old stuff, or be on the cutting edge, and there’s tons and tons of stuff to have fun with.

I’ve done a few projects, consulting gigs, where part of the playtesting for the videogame was paper prototyping tabletop, like “let’s play it as if it was an RPG,” essentially, to see if the parts were working the way we want, and the characters and the situations are flowing the way we want. And in one case–though, as usual, the massive corporate system that owned that group cancelled everything and fired everyone–in one case that prototype got far enough that the thought was just “we should just release this too. We’ll have the video game and we’ll have the tabletop game because we’ve already developed it.” So that’s another case where people are seeing value in what we do–culturally, and from a business standpoint. Which is great.

There was a long period of time when RPGs especially were pretty stigmatized and not well-respected as a hobby, and I don’t see that anymore. So hopefully we’ll continue to grow.

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· Dec 29

Evan Torner gave me some great context about the 2010 Fastaval and the influence of nordic LARP on the RPG scene, which I sadly had to cut.

Early on I saw, “Ok this is why people from the indie tabletop scene or going abroad to roleplay. It's because these folks are taking it seriously as an art form, while also melding it with geek culture. So their attitude, when they go to a convention, it's not “entertain me,” but the “attitude is ‘move me,’” right? Emotionally. I'm a distanced, nordic, folk type, and so I'm going to go for that.

We sort of all dogpiled the convention. And we discovered “Oh there's aspects of this that we're not comfortable with from our scene and also like, cool we're gonna design based on these ideas and we'll bring it back and to everyone in the US.”

You can do some more embodied play. And especially after 2010 you're doing the kind of meta play prime time adventures. You're you're just embodied in your character, doing moves. I think really important. That's why 2010 is important. Because in 2008 were like “okay so we gotta frame this scene and here's the scene and we're going to do this and this and this and this and then Microscope comes along in 2011 and kind of blows that out of the water. So Fiasco and Microscope are like the best possible versions of the like meta play genre and everything else is better off as PBTA.

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· Dec 29

We're about an hour and a half out from the End of Year Video dropping and I did want to share some stuff that got cut from interviews. For instance, I didn't end up using a lot of my first interview with Jay Dragon, on account of how I didn't know what the essay was yet, but here are some outtakes:

In that spirit of trying to create scripts or sheet music to evoke a certain style or mode or experience, when you are trying to think about designs or concepts or influences that have shaped the way you write those scripts, what would you say has influenced you to get to that appreciation for your art?

Kind of a hard question because it’s like, what paintings make you appreciate being a painter? Kind of all paintings, and all art, and several life events. There’s a boundlessness to it. Within games, I got started with LARP, and I was very critical of tabletop RPGs for a while. When you start with LARP, it’s really hard to go to tabletop RPGs. It takes a bit to figure out what’s good about them. Monsterhearts was an early one for me, Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist was an early one for me. Ten Candles was an early one for me. If you want to know why I’m this way, the fact that those are my first 6 months of playing RPGs says a lot of things about what kind of weird person I was. I owe a debt to tabletop RPGs that showed me what they were doing that LARPs couldn’t do. What it means to make an imaginative space that leaves the physical and becomes this strange, transcendent, other zone. What does it feel like to be at the heart of a machine? There’s an abstraction that tabletop introduces that was really exciting once I realized it was there.

Part of this conversation’s going to be about…starting from Apocalypse World and seeing how that DNA gets into the scene in the last 15 years. One of the questions I had written down was… “Thinking about Wanderhome, thinking about Sleepaway to some degree, you’re borrowing a little bit from Apocalypse World. In terms of playbooks, certainly. What tech do you think you’ve borrowed from Apocalypse World and PBTA generally? How do you think that’s changed? Obviously we get the Belonging Outside Belonging framework, but I am interested in what your thoughts are.

I think it’s completely impossible to talk about PBTA generally. PBTA generally is a little like saying “what have you learned from comedy, generally? What have you learned from watching movies?” There are things you can learn from those. But you have to understand the vastness…I saw someone this morning on Reddit.

Bad start!

I know. Someone was talking about how someone always brings up GURPS, and then other people recommend PBTA. And the thought of recommending, “Oh I wanna play PBTA” left me so befuddled that I felt like I was stumbling through a haze for the next hour. Look up any PBTA? No.

When we think about technologies and tools that have been used over the past 15 years–obviously PBTA, but also BOB–

Forged in the Dark?

We’re awash in SRDs at this point. Do you think that when we are using these systematized schema that have been given to us over the last 15 years, are these systematized ways the best ways to–Is this a systems matter question? I hope not. Oh god.

I think that I don’t…I don’t know that I care? It’s just a matter of…people need to make games. And there are advantages and disadvantages of a system that has already been made elsewhere. It’s a tool. It’s a memetic tool you can use to help people understand. I was reading a book that referred to them as “ludemes.” A ludeme is a way to say “this piece moves the way a bishop does.” It’s taking a piece of tech from another game and putting in your game. That comes from The Rulebook by Markus Montola and Jakko Stenros.
I don’t think ludemes are unique to the past 15 years. If anything, the past 15 years are defined by the fallout and the shadow of the 2008 recession, and the D20 bubble. The period of time when there was an enormous glut of d20-style games that flooded the market and ruined the RPG industry for a while. And 2010 comes in the shadow of the aftermath of that. So it’s hard to say everyone’s using systems nowadays. That’s not new. For as long as there’ve been RPGs, people have found it useful to learn from other people that continuously reinvent the conceptual wheel.

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· Dec 10

an excerpt from the end of year video

[Aaron Narration:] From what I've read, there were certainly some folks on there that needed to chill the fuck out-it is possible to care about games too much.

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· Dec 10

Let’s fucking gooooooooooo

Screenshot of a podcatcher dated December 10- I’ll Be Pod for Castmas

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· Dec 6

I believe what Meguey Baker says here is true. This is also not going to stop me from releasing a near-hagiography about the influence of AW at the end of the month

Bsky post of @megueyb.bsky.social. #Ttrpgs are potatoes, not carrots. There is no one true taproot origin
story for any game, ttrpg or otherwise. Instead, all the nodes of
experience & culture & family & etc etc go into whatever eventually
springs forth. The interconnected web of all that came before
contributes to whatever is "new."

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· Nov 19

Lord of the Rings "Return of the Queen" meme

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· Oct 30

kind of unfair that Thomas Manuel is so fucking funny on top of being an incredible writer

Tom Vasel's whole shtick is that he's a man of the people. He's just a regular guy. A normal dude. An innocent man. He's a gamer and his reviews reflect how much of a gamer he is, because he reviews games that other normal gamers like. It's so simple. It's surprising there's any salt left in the earth, given that Tom Vasel seems so full of it.

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· Oct 17

1. Thomas remains the best essayist in RPGs. Come for the Midsommar comparison, stay for the critique of Hindu nationalism. 2. Don't threaten me with a good time

Maybe you can write the essay that I didn't - an analysis of Encanto as "folk horror
without the horror". What if the land hungered ... for everyone to be nice to each other?

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· Sep 24

1 week until the Tools Jam starts! Sign up today! itch.io/jam/ttrpg-to...

"Give someone the gift of being annoying about their work. Join the Tools Jam today!" The image shows a large pair of eyes looking at a present

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· Sep 23

It does! Settings > moderation > muted words and tags

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· Sep 22

picture of the Spire from "Spire: The City Beneath." A bulky, green tower in front of a setting yellow sun

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· Sep 17

I’ve spent a decade trying to define “good writing” for myself and he throws the answer into his intro like an afterthought

The goal is to haunt—to have them think about your words before bed, see them manifest in their dreams, tell their partner about them the next morning, to have them grab random people on the street, shake them and say, "Have you read this yet?"

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· Sep 5

Really sharp insight from this piece—it’s worth talking about art, and it’s worth giving people the time and resources they need to do it well.

is a conversation. There is a shared thing between the critic and the reader, an experience had or yet to be had, that the critic is trying to build a bridge to. A critic can offer clarity about complex or formally difficult works. She can lend words to experiences as yet unvoiced, offering understanding to marginal art and perspective beyond the mainstream.
A critic can be wrong or right. When she's good, it doesn't really matter. There is a

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· Aug 27

new video tomorrow?

screenshot from video editing software. The name of the file being rendered is blocked out. The software indicates that 5 minutes of the current job remain, and it is currently 12% finished rendering.

Aaron Voigt@aavoigt· Aug 26

Huh. How convenient for me.