Parasocial relationships can be incredibly uncomfortable. They are also nearly impossible to avoid if you are an indie developer who wants to market your game. Platforms like Twitter and Twitch can be huge assets for catching attention and engaging interest.

The power of these platforms goes beyond business. In a world of constant stimulation, the loudest voice often makes the biggest impact. How do you get a loud voice in the digital world? Have a bigger social media following. Get more channel subscribers. But as your platform grows, your ability to know and interact with individual people rapidly diminishes. The parasocial relationships forms.

This is hardly a new problem; it’s been the problem of celebrity for generations. But now it’s a problem that many people who never wanted celebrity—who maybe just want to make games or make political change or talk about their passions or play games—face.

Today I want to dive into a bit of the psychology of parasocial relationships: why they can be so uncomfortable and some possible methods for easing that discomfort.

Earlier this week I made the decision to pull Karma in the Dark from public access.

Why?
As it stands now, the game needs significant revisions before I would feel comfortable keeping it available. Some of my problems with it are tied to the genre and original games that inspired it. Some of the problems are related to game mechanics that need a significant overhaul.

At the end of the day, it made more sense for me to take pieces of the game and start from the beginning to build an entirely new game. That game is  Ruralpunk: a game about the cyberpunk future in rural communities.

Once Ruralpunk's main playtesting is complete, I will re-write the world generator from Karma so people can create their own cyberpunk setting.

“I want to design a game…where do I start?”

I see this question come up frequently in gaming spaces—Discord, Twitter, forums—so in this post I want to give three different answers.

Why three different answers?

Every project and every creative process is different. I’ve used all of these techniques when starting a game design. Part of the design process is figuring out what approach works for you.

Because Forged in the Dark is a popular first-hack system, I’ll use it as my example. These techniques can be used for most projects that adapt an existing system. If you want to create your own system that’s a more complex topic for another day.

CW: Discussion of abuse, harassment, and mention of intimate partner violence

​I read two sides to the backlash against the announcement (and resulting interactions) of Ooblets being exclusive to the Epic Store.

Side 1: Wow gamers are super toxic and entitled.

Side 2: Wow the Ooblets developers were really antagonistic and deserve to be called out.

After reading through multiple twitter threads, blog posts, Discord chat, and seeing screenshots (some allegedly doctored) my take away has six points I want to explore at length.

Before that exploration, however, I want to make one thing clear: racist, violent threats are never justified. Harassment is not justified. Literally everything I write here must rest on that foundation or it’s pointless.

While I am going to use Ooblets as an example, these dynamics are not unique to their case. Much of what I want to explore occurs frequently, which is why it seems worth taking a closer look.

​One of my main design goals with Ruralpunk is to balance narrative decision making with streamlined advancement. Today I want to share the different group advancement mechanics I've created and how they all fold into the same theme: interwoven relationships.

In Ruralpunk, you don't have different crew types, you choose a town type. This determines your starting town, the local factions, the contacts you can make, and the improvements you can build.

​​You advance your town through three systems: managing corruption, contacts, and town improvements.

I ran into a problem with Karma in the Dark: the system incentivized roleplaying that could be...unpleasant. If you filled your stress tracker (which was even more common than in Blades because the system leaned into mechanizing overwhelming oppression/power imbalances) you gained a "jaded instinct." A little bit of your rebellious idealism wore away, replaced by tendencies to insist you were correct or distrust others or exploit others. If a player roleplayed this jaded instinct, they gained xp.

In theory, it sounds very cyberpunk.

In practice, it means that either the PCs become unpleasant people or the players give up a chance for extra xp.

I knew I wanted to find a new solution for Ruralpunk: something that still reflected back the wear and tear of pushing against an oppressive world, but allowed for a wider range of roleplaying. Something players could tailor to their own RP interests a little more.

I found the answer in a sacrifice/beliefs mechanic.

My favorite experiences involve contrasts. This is why games that mostly lean into a power fantasy, or games that try too hard to create a gritty experience, only hold my interest for a short time. When I designed Tides of Gold, I wanted to explore a game that tried to weave these two elements together. The fantastical experiences would be inspiring and fun, but the difficult decisions would introduce a sense of meaningful, weighty decisions.

There were two reasons for this.

One, I know in my game groups, our desire to play something light or challenging can be heavily influenced by real life circumstances. I wanted a game that allowed groups to adapt the tone of their campaign session-to-session, depending on their mood and IRL circumstances..

Two, my strongest memories in game campaigns are the bittersweet ones. The sessions that mixed humor with loss, heroic success with sacrifice, or over-the-top antics with a serious underlying theme. I wanted to design a game intended to create these moments more often in play: the contrast of inspiring and gritty.

The rest of this post is going to review how I designed Tides of Gold with this contrast in mind.

​"Social media is a toxic cesspool of hate and has no value"

"We all like and play games...a social hobby. Why does this keep happening?"

I only started really participating in online TTRPG communities in the past eight months. In that short time I've lost track of how many events led to escalating arguments that always seemed to end in hurt feelings, factionalization, and abuse of some sort (name-calling, dog piling, cursing out, all the way to targeted harassment and doxing). Listening to people who have been around much longer, this seems to be "normal."

Frankly, I find that horrific and about two months ago decided I need to rethink participating in any TTRPG community or designing games for the TTRPG community.

But cut-off isn't usually my first tactic, so I decided to step back a little and take time to analyze what I saw, in myself and in these larger community dynamics.

The dynamics are complicated. I quit writing my first draft of this blog at 20 pages because my response was spanning too many words and too many topics and still leaving out important factors.

So now, instead, I want to focus down on one specific dynamic I haven't seen discussed much: the commodification of community and the way that shapes interaction.

I've been quietly experimenting with idea of RuralPunk since last fall. There's always been a disconnect between me and traditional cyberpunk caused by its urban focus. I've spent most of my life in small towns and rural communities. While many of the stressors of the future between urban and rural places are connected, they manifest in different ways.

So that's the question that has teased me for months: what would a cyberpunk future look like in a rural setting?

I decided this month I need to dive in and explore that space. I am going to revise the Karma in the Dark rules and focus them on a ruralpunk setting. Immediately, I realized that this process would mirror my original process of adapting Blades in the Dark to a cyberpunk setting. Many mechanics will stay the same, but many others will need to be tweaked to fit this new setting.

The question became: what needs to change? And what does that look like?

The answer, I realized, is based on how I see and want to explore this ruralpunk future.