It's not really relevant to the art, but I wish you a quick recovery and a merry Christmas.

Thank you! I'm your undies, and I wish you a happy holidays too.

This is cute~

Thank you, my friend. It's good to see you again.

I havent been gone, silly. Ive responded to your stuff all the time on Bluesky~ Lappy Bluepaws

...So, where do you want to go towards with an RPG? I think people just like them because of how whimsical they are. Do you not like them anymore or is it something more? Also, merry Christmas.

thank you for sharing.

I do have thoughts on this.
It’s not just RPGs, it’s fiction in general. Sci-fi, fantasy, mystery… everything feels so generic because everyone lives in fiction instead of the real world now.
In the past, authors used to use their life and experiences as inspiration for their fictional stories. They had something they wanted to say, a feeling they wanted others to feel. Most famously, Pokémon was modeled after the creator’s memories of catching bugs in the forest behind his house, and after it was developed over with apartments he wanted to give kids the chance to have the same kind of fun he did.
But nowadays you have a generation (coming up on 2 generations now) of people that have grown up in those fictional worlds. Now most fiction isn’t inspired by the real world, it’s inspired by other fiction. It’s turned into an ouroboros, trope inbreeding, whatever you want to call it. It’s not like you can blame them, in America at least perspectives on child safety have changed and now there’s stories of parents getting sued for negligence if they let their kid run free, so they really don’t have any choice but to use online games as their socialization, their playground. I myself spent more time on voice chat with friends playing Minecraft than spending time outside with them.
I’ve also just sort of noticed that there’s a lot more anxiety among people nowadays. More aversion to going outside, going to parties, a fear of vulnerabilities and close relationships…

I don’t really know what the solution is as it’s more of a societal problem that simply reflects on fiction, but I can tell you that as long as you look to other fictional stories for your solution you’re not going to be able to get out of that rut.

I think there's some truth to this, but that it's not the whole picture.
For example, I think I could make a case that people now more than ever have near ubiquitous access to the means of creation and distribution.
More people are artists than ever before, more people are storytellers, and I think that we are completely saturated with meaning, profundity, and novelty.
What rises to the top in that environment tends to be the pieces that speak back to culture, and for a lot of folks now, culture is growing up inundated with shared experiences through media thanks to the intentional destruction of third spaces.

From my perspective, it has become an ocean of noise, and the vessel that all that water fills is limited by mediums and the locations in which we're able to produce them.
People's experiences with reality have not become any less meaningful, but the tools we have to express them have been revealed wanting, too limited to break outside of calcified structures of storytelling.
Every story has its agents, every agent bears its cultural signifiers and messages, and over and over we reproduce assertions about a proper order of things told through calculated and rigorously understood mediums.
Everything has become so self referential only as a matter of survival, because we are more likely to engage with a familiar character or setting.
Because people can connect to Pokemon, they experienced it too, and here is what it meant to them personally.

Which is not to suggest that this framing is any closer to the truth than your perspective, just another piece of it.
The reality of any situation as far as I can tell is always made up of a plurality of things.
Maybe in collaborating a clearer picture, the noise will be easier to parse.

Yeah, that’s true, and those are some good points I didn’t think about!
I didn’t mean to say that people’s experiences have become less real, by the way! I was more so just pointing out that they’d become more homogenized because we all experience the same few super popular pieces of media (which is what you’re saying just phrased differently I think). In the same way that every small town in America has the same handful of department stores, a Walmart, etc. and all modern buildings look the same, we all play Minecraft, Roblox, etc. so everyone is drawing on the same well for inspiration, and naturally that leads to the blandness you see in so much fiction. In particular with fantasy, it’s D&D and LotR. I know a friend of mine that instead uses the local architecture and flora and fauna of his home country for inspiration and his stuff is some of the freshest and most original fantasy designs I’ve seen in a long while. It’s not that his experiences are any more real than other peoples’, it’s simply that he’s drawing from a more original source. You could also link this to globalization leading to widespread homogenization and the erosion of local cultures as well (part of what makes this issue so hard to talk about is that fiction is a mirror of the world’s state at large so it inevitably ends up touching difficult topics).

The idea that the 3 act structure and/or hero’s journey is the only way to write a story is, in my opinion, total brainwashing. It is *an* effective way to write a story, but I’ve seen so many books and movies shafted by the fact that their story wasn’t suited to a 3 act structure but they try to shove a round peg into a square hole. Episodic stuff exists and does well! There are stories without antagonists and people like them just fine! That one just kind of frustrates me

This conversation is awakening an itch in me to introduce some kind of new shakeup to my furry Pathfinder game.
The need to make a complicated and engrossing situation addicting and compelling to my friend group is once again brewing and bubbling in my mind~
I think that creating those situations and sharing them with your friends, so that they can share in your excitement is just profoundly joyful.
Especially when the source materials that you're drawing from and smooshing together to create something new, with your own spin on it-- they haven't seen before yet.
So to them, it feels completely new and you can see in their eyes-- the same joy and wonder that you felt with you first experienced it.

Really enjoyed reading your perspective about this. it definitely speaks to how I've been feeling about rpgs at times.

I think it can be fun exploring the take on each of the colors and themes we have. Everyone has a different shade of 'green' they like, but yeah...finding strong meaning and a message worth telling... it can be tough. I think it can be paralyizing and stop you from making because it 'has to be meaningful'. And sometimes it can be good to express oneself just because. We don't owe it to anyone.

I hope your recovery is going well! It's cool to see your handwriting. You seem to have a natural propensity for lettering yup yup