Chase Taylor-Carter

@chasecarter

Co-owner of Rascal News. Tabletop and internet culture journalist. Avoiding unhealthy use this time around. ✉️: chase@rascal.news

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Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· 20d

Hobbits in the upcoming MTG set are too sexy, and not in a fun way. Bilbo is constantly yassified (as in attached art) or depicted as some scared twink. Where is fat Bilbo? He ain't even slightly cherubic.

Disconcertingly attractive version of Bilbo from The Hobbit lies on the ground, looking down lustfully at The One Ring glowing in a pool of water.

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· 29d

If there ain't 99 other players running through a physical room to find the KAR98K and Level 3 helmet cards, and then one of them domes me from behind and calls me a slur... Well, then it ain't my PUBG.

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Jul 6

One last gripe before this microblog drops the "micro". The author fails to recognize that UB is exacerbating this exact issue. Pretty Pikachu is bad, but pretty Cloud Strife is good! Gambling on collector boosters is morally okay when it feature my IP blorbo!

Pokémon TCG is bigger not because it’s a better game (I would argue it’s a lot worse), but because it understands that players and collectors alike crave that experience, of having a strong emotional attachment to a character and then finding them on a little piece of cardboard after gambling on the purchase of a booster pack. The most expensive Pokémon cards are often the Illustrated Rares depicting fan-favorite characters with beautiful art. A card might be borderline useless in competitive play.

But if it’s got a pretty Pikachu on it, somebody is going to pay thousands for it. Even today, the price of most Magic cards is typically determined by their usefulness in a deck, doubly so if it’s one of the special art variants. The lore and characters feel secondary, whereas in other TCGs, the characters and our relationships with them are the entire point.

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Jun 8

The very expensive boy, as both payment and emotional manipulation

An orange and white domestic long hair cat looking puzzled and empty of thought.

An orange and white domestic long hair cat looks up with wide, black eyes.

An orange and white domestic long hair cat stretches his paws up a scratching post

An orange and white domestic long hair cat snoozes in a white, leaf patterned chair with a gray herringbone blanket beneath him

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Mar 25

The exchange that inspired the post

Can I ask - is the word "crunchy" typically used to describe TTRPG?
I'm assuming "crunch" means a RPG that's very rules-heavy and needs a lot of GM oversight
Short answer: yes
Long answer: you've just stepped on a discourse trapdoor, haunted house style

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Mar 10

Wholly unsurprising, but worth noting the precision with which Cocks snaps to boilerplate PR speech when discussing Rowling's transphobia and profiting from the Harry Potter license. Also, the bullish AI adopter would subscribe to separating art from the artists! *cue Statler and Waldorf laugh*

I can see in the feedback we get when we write about Harry Potter, with younger people saying, “Why would I support this fandom? Why would I support this IP?” And maybe she should just shut up, and it would be fine, and it would become the power center that it is.

But you’ve got creatives on your team. The last time you were on the show, you talked about being stewards of inclusion. How do you make this decision when the creator of the property is sort of actively reducing the fandom, and in fact, hurting a lot of people in that fandom?

For me, it’s separating the art from the artist and going to what the core fans want. And I’m not going to get into the politics around it other than to say we very strongly support diversity and inclusion inside of Hasbro, we’re very proud of it. We’re very proud of the diversity of viewpoints and backgrounds that we have in our employee base. I think Harry Potter is a wonderful franchise. I think it’s done a great job of bringing joy to the world, and I’m looking forward to being part of that, just like I am with all the other brands we support.

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Mar 10

Cocks is talking here about AI automation inside Hasbro's IT dept, and this is just plain speaking out of both sides of one's mouth. Turning everyone into vibes-coding engineers to churn out infinite product ideas will require laying off actual creatives. Pig in lipstick stuff.

My personal point of view about what AI is going to do to at least... I can’t talk about the economy as a whole, but what it’s going to do to how we employ people and how we deploy people is… I think it’s going to be a labor savings tool, but I think it’s going to be ultimately savings that you redeploy into the product and you redeploy in the partners. So there might be some changes about the nature of who we employ or what we pay for, but the total number of people that we pay and the total amount of labor that we deploy, I don’t see going down. My hope is that redeployment drives growth, and that goes up.

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Mar 10

Thank god Hasbro is injecting mean-reduction slop extruders into its ideation processes. Witnessing the doublethink of CEOs from the outside can be really baffling.

To be perfectly candid, I think it’s a structural weakness of most large companies: thinking about new category development. You tend to get focused on your existing business and very obvious adjacencies, and then you tend to lose sight of, “Hey, this new thing that’s kind of coming up the pike.” And I think we’ve been as guilty of it as anyone.

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Mar 10

This is a pretty old and lukewarm reason for LLM-powered tool adoption, at this point. But I'm very curious what Cocks thinks makes a "better" idea. Also: "I’ll be as wrong about this as I was about NFTs." You sure fucking will, buddy.

You can see it in games, actually. You mentioned gamers don’t want AI anywhere near their games. Even the audience in some categories really doesn’t want this to happen. How are you managing that inside a company like Hasbro? How are you keeping your designers and your creatives protected or empowered instead of fearful?

Well, it’s really giving them the tools and putting them on the vanguard of it. And if Joe or Sally Sixpack feels like they’re suddenly like an avant-garde creative with these powerful tools, take a legitimate avant-garde creative and give them these tools, and they just level it up way more. And I think what we’ve found is when our creatives have a chance to use it, and then they’re able to collaborate with other creatives who are using it and see all the playful ways that they can bring ideas to life, it hasn’t been a difficult tour to get us to get people to adopt. And at the end of the day, it’s all about delivering a better idea. Who knows what’s going to happen with an explosive technology like this? So I don’t want to make too many long-term prognostications because I’ll be as wrong about this as I was about NFTs.

But from our perspective, I don’t see it costing creatives jobs, I see it only making the quality of the creative we have better. And that’s how we’ve been deploying it to date, and that’s how I think we’ll continue to deploy it. It’s a tool that kind of levels us up and makes what we make better.

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Mar 10

Technofeudalism means even if AI models gain sentience at some distant point, corporations will immediately turn them into unpaid labor. You've been fired and replaced by a shackled simulacra of Peppa Pig and thrash-metal loving Megatron.

When we have a little bit more time, we can even program in a character, and the character from the IP can actually be a co-designer with us and help us with ideas and help us with like, “That’s authentic, that’s not authentic.” And that’s actually been pretty wonderful in how we’ve been creating things.

Wait, so you code in the personality of a character from one of your franchises?

Yeah. So we have Peppa Pig co-design Peppa Pig products with us. Optimus Prime co-designs Optimus Prime Transformers products with us. Optimus Prime and Megatron are two of the DJs that we have in the main hall of our office building, where people can ask them to play songs. And Optimus is always very serious and tells you the soulful reason about the song, and Megatron basically makes fun of you for not picking thrash rock. And it’s just a fun way to bring the creative process to life.

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Mar 10

Many such cases.

Is it true that KPop Demon Hunters was a surprise to the industry, and you weren’t ready for Christmas this year?

Oh yeah. Netflix, to their credit, shopped that around quite a bit, and no one bit. And I remember it was the weekend it came out. I’m an old business person, so I was flipping through LinkedIn, and someone was posting about KPop Demon Hunters as, “Not only my daughter’s favorite show, but it’s my favorite new movie of the year.”

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Feb 9

Apparently tabletop culture is at risk of having OSR meaning recolonized as Old School Runescape.

Map of Bluesky users realized as galaxy clusters. My username, in pink, is positioned squarely in "TTRPG Creators & Community"

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Feb 4

While it's refreshing to see a publisher talk realistically about product glut, somehow I don't think it's the fault of designers forced to work as permanent creative freelancers.

We are mostly responsible for overproduction: from authors who want to be signed to buyers who want something new, not to mention publishers who need to produce and shops/distributors who need to meet buyer demand.

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Jan 21

My response to most questions @crapstacular.bsky.social asks about the tabletop hobby

Short answer: yes
Long answer: you've just stepped on a discourse trapdoor, haunted house style

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Dec 10

Calling out the AI voice to text in Arc raiders will apparently set a "dangerous precedent" and result in "unethical AI practices." Businesses are too scared to disclose the truth As if we're talking about people living with addictions and not hypercapitalist ghouls who hate paying people for work!

Email titled "Gaming studios like Embark should be applauded for AI transparency, not rebuked."

Body reads: "Hi Chase. Gaming studios should be applauded when they are transparent about their use of AI in game creation, two of the UK's leading AI experts have said -- all the more so when they have adopted a 'human-in-the-loop' architecture to create or evolve their games."

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Dec 5

A taste of what @newmadras.bsky.social has in store for you with this piece.

Screenshot from Hero (2002). Character on left is labeled "me"; character on right with sword is labeled "this fucking game"

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Nov 25

Asmodee's CEO wants to use more crowdfunding because of its risk insulation and reliable consumer hype. When retail fails, these platforms are backup for the industry's biggest publishers.

Koegler said of Asmodee’s new crowdfunding strategy during the latest earnings call, “The reasons behind the crowdfunding strategy is that some products in the way they are structured could probably not exist only through retail, that’s both linked to their margin structure but also because crowdfunding is actually a very strong consumer engagement way of launching the product.

“It drives demand, it creates excitement and it’s really a way of interacting with the consumers in a digital way that is quite different from traditional product launches.

“So for us its complementary to the other product lines that are launched in the more traditional way. It’s true that with games with a lot of miniatures, board games with a lot of miniatures, this model has been seen in the past as quite successful.

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Nov 4

The people in charge of the platforms that small creators must rely on to survive have very different beliefs on how they should be run.

Message from Regis Bonnessee, the creator: To be fully transparent, it was actually Gamefound who advised us to set an easily achievable initial goal, to help build confidence among backers at launch. According to their experience, setting a higher target often slows campaigns down in their first few days. We trusted their expertise, with no bad intentions, believing we were following sound advice based on thousands of past projects.

Looking back, we understand that this choice may have been perceived negatively, and your reaction is completely valid. We can’t undo what’s been done, but we can assure you that there was never any intent to mislead, only a misjudgment in how we presented things.

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Nov 4

Noting the €50,000 crowdfunding goal for Seeds of Unity, and the note on the Gamefound page describing it as more than 1,000% funded, Equinox said, “The funding goal displayed on Gamefound is symbolic, as it usually is in crowdfunding campaigns.

“It’s chosen to help build early momentum but doesn’t reflect our actual needs. Setting the bar too high sometimes makes a project feel out of reach, while a more accessible goal helps get the collective energy moving right from the start.”

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Nov 3

The person behind the official Instagram repeated this explanation, specifically mentioning the application of low-rank adaptations, or LoRAs, to ComfyUI in order to replicate Ruggeri’s preferred style. As artist and programmer Joseph Wilk pointed out in response, both tools require a pre-trained model that likely contains millions of publicly scraped images. In a separate comment, the official account claimed the team “trained a model with some of my old art and some from my wife and other acquaintances.” It later admitted that the wife and friends were not credited on Kickstarter nor within the book because “not all artists like to be associated with the word ‘AI’, so I didn’t even feel comfortable asking them if I could use their names in the credits.”

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Oct 30

discord screenshot from me (Chase), that reads: "Thomas, this is so fucking funny ho my lord."

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Sep 10

Great article from Nicole here about who gets to "police aesthetics" and how everything online is morphed into a business model. This quote rattled every bone in my body:

“Music consumption is shifting,” a Lofi Records label manager, who goes by Berrkan Bag online, told 404 Media in an email. “Short-form and scroll-driven platforms have changed how people engage with lo-fi. Some of the long-form, narrative visuals that helped define the genre are being challenged by algorithmic trends.”

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Sep 5

Sandwiched inside this interview is WotC president John Hight once again delivering two thumbs up for LLM-generated material in the company's games. He's gonna feed players however much slop they'll allow.

He's open, however, to the use of AI to come up with ideas. "But the final product, the thing that you see, will be made by a human being. And that's our position on it. So we're not using generative AI to create the artwork for our cards or games."

He thinks that AI could be used to help out in the development process, though. "Absolutely, we're looking at that."

He stresses that any uses of AI will be examined "on a case by case basis" that questions how it's being used.

"Is this displacing the human soul, spirit, creativity in doing it? Because we don't want derivative work. We want that innovation. We want things that people have dreamt up.

"But on the other hand, is it allowing us to explore different things? Is it allowing us to take the drudgery out of things?

"For instance, generating an audio performance so that a writer can hear their words before we go into the recording studio I think is going to help us make those recording sessions go a lot faster and smoother."

The idea here would be to see how players respond to AI-generated lines first and to examine how the dialogue works in game, with the recording sessions with real actors being left as late as possible in the development process – so by the time the sessions happen, the dialogue is honed and complete, enabling the actors to give the "best performance".

He also thinks machine learning could be useful for checking for errors in code, thus helping to avoid 'breaking the build' when introducing new elements into a game, or highlighting problems that could occur further down the road of development.

"AI is really good at that," Hight says. "Humans, it's a little bit clunky for us to figure out."

Dynamic difficulty is another area where he thinks AI could be useful. "Right now, it kind of stinks," he says in regards to difficulty settings, with binary choices between, say, easy or hard difficulties that don't allow for nuance.

He gives an example. "I'm pretty good at puzzle solving, but I'm kind of crap these days on dexterity stuff, and yet I like games that have both. So wouldn't it be great if the AI was analysing a little bit about how I'm playing?"

He suggests the game could, perhaps, increase the difficulty of puzzles but reduce the difficulty of dexterity challenges if it sensed the player was breezing through the former, but struggling with the latter.

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Aug 29

“I'm worried for my colleagues and all the indie developers who don't have a stateside shop set up. You shouldn't need to have that,” Nohr said. “It also fucking annoys me to have to comply with Trump and do what he wants in terms of producing more within the states. But I don't know what else to do right now, really. A majority of our customers are in the USA. We have to sell there. Somehow.”

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Aug 21

This story earned us our first (implied) legal threat from a subject. Neat!

“It is no coincidence that staff who left the company years ago, suddenly started a campaign against Zatu in the same month that the individual was arrested,” he added. Rascal was not able to verify this information with police. They also added that “the publication of any defamatory and untrue information published about Zatu and/or its employees will expose Rascal to legal action (including but not limited to a defamation claim).”

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Aug 7

Dr. Friedman raises some great criticism of the linked piece, but I wanna hit it from the journalism side. These pieces are always reductive, astonished windows for a non-existent layperson to gawp through. Perennial trad media pablum that bins nuance in favor of, well, this:

"This is the age of Dungeons & Dragons"
As more people watch D&D for entertainment, more people seem to be playing it too.

Though an exact number of players is hard to track, Bilsland said something like 85 million people have engaged with the game, associated video games, and the movie Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves over the past few years.

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Aug 6

An issue with hypertextuality is linkrot, which is another thing you gain from having the blog published. I'm worried about blogs, especially my blog — I don't think that Google can be trusted to maintain that forever. At some point they're going to pull the plug on blogspot, and there's going to be a lot of writing lost. It's going to be a burning of the Library of Alexandria. Having my writings living in a book means it can survive. My blog uses Squarespace. I'm sure at some point they could go bankrupt and sell all my stuff.

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Aug 1

Oh, I'm familiar.

Text reads:
The Realm of Radia
LAND OF ADVENTURE
Long ago, Radia was home to the Aura, a good people that ruled over the land with fairness. Then the scourge Vardas appeared, destroying the realm of the Aura and plunging the World into Desperation.
The goal of the game is to travel all over the World to bring Hope back to the realm of Radia.
After collecting enough Hope, the Champions will be able to open the Fortress of Evil, where they will face Vardas in an epic battle. But first, they need to find a way to get their hands on the legendary Twilight Sword, an amazing power that takes on a different form depending on who wields it.

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Aug 1

Two Little Mice's new tabletop RPG, Twilight Sword, is unabashedly Legend of Zelda in both art direction and play: awakened heroes and fabled swords in a world full of monsters, landmarks, and sidequests. If you're gonna transmute a video game, do it with your whole ass!

Chase Taylor-Carter@chasecarter· Jul 28