2024 Bloggies Snubs!
Extolling the Virtues of Eliminated Bloggie Finalists
This week’s blast coming early in light of the Gameable category of the 2024 Bloggies having its voting going on right now! For those that have never heard of it, the Bloggies are the most prestigious awards for DIY TTRPG writing, held annually in January on the blog of the previous year’s Platinum Bloggie winner. It is a tournament-style competition between 64 of the best blog posts of year.
My most popular blog post from last year, Overloading the Random Encounter Table (chances are you’ve read it, but if not, I think it is worth checking out, especially if you like the idea of encoding as much gameable information as you can into a single toss of the dice), is currently in contention in the gameable category. And it faces some tough battles ahead! Currently it combats a d20 list of merchants written by none other than the dread pirate lord, Skerples. If it survives that, it will have to face off against the winner of Mindstorm Press’ Person-Shaped Hole post, where you can build an entire campaign around a single important NPC that’s no longer present, and Among Cats and Books’ encyclopedic post on Dolmenwood Factions. And as if that weren’t already a gauntlet, if it were lucky enough to make it out of that unscathed, it would still have to slug it out against the winner of the entire other half of the bracket!
The Bloggies are a lot of fun because every category winner has to face off against similarly stiff competition every year. Lots of upsets, lots of Cinderella stories, but most of all, lots of great blog posts for you to read if you missed them in 2024.
I come to you a few days early not only to encourage you to go vote for your favorite gameable posts of the year, but also so I can use a clickbaity headline (these blogs where snubbed!) and talk about some of the posts that were defeated in the first round for the first two categories of this year’s Bloggies (Theory and Gameable). What this is not is me saying that these necessarily should have won—in fact, when it came down to it, I may have had to vote for the competitor for some of these (the reason all of these lost is just because the competition was so fierce in every matchup). This is instead me extolling the virtues of even the posts that didn’t progress because the Bloggies highlights blog posts that are all incredibly deserving win or lose. Which is what makes each match devastating.
There are probably several thousand DIY TTRPG blog posts posted every year (a few thousand from Grognardia alone, probably, no one has ever done the math). Of those, about 300 or so are nominated each year for a Bloggie, meaning at least one person read that post and thought “damn, this is one of the best posts I’ve read all year!” Then that list of ~300 has to be weeded down to just 64 posts, 16 in each category. It is tough to even get on the Bloggies bracket, frankly, and my highlighting just ten posts that made it to the final 64 is itself a hard task. I hope you go give these posts a read. A like, comment, and subscribe even (actually just a comment, blogs don’t care about your subscribes… unless they’re a Substack). Without further bloviating:
1d10 Bloggies Snubs from The First Two Categories (Theory & Gameable):
Roll 1d10 and then go read all of these posts anyway.
Benign Brown Beast: Thermodynamics for Game Design (Some of the best blog posts write about something you felt in your heart was probably true but never articulated to yourself why it was so. This post articulated why rules and character sheets should be designed so that we write the most common direction and erase as little as possible. Tracking hit points is annoying! But Benign Brown Beast doesn’t stop there, showing different tracking methods, from other TTRPGs to board games, to even a lego creation to track spell slots, that can better deal with the entropy of the eraser).
Skeleton Code Machine: How fragile is your game design? (A common theme from the Skeleton Code Machine is taking some of the most interesting conversations happening in board games and applying them to our medium of TTRPGs. In this instance, board games sometimes assume a certain type of player behavior [e.g., that the strongest factions will behave selfishly, that the players will venture beyond the first door in a horror game, etc.) and if the players simply refuse to behave in that way, the game doesn’t work as designed. These assumptions are basically unwritten rules in the game, but these unspoken demands therefore make your game fragile. This post also presents a few methods for identifying where fragility may exist within your game).
Dododecahedron: Principles of Conflict (Many of us players of D&D and its adjacent games get tunnel vision around combat. It doesn’t have to just a war of attrition where both sides take turns shaving off the other side’s health tracker! Dododecahdron takes the question “Why would a bear flee from a house cat?” and uses that as a starting point for developing an entirely new framework and procedure for conflict that may, but also may not, descend into violence. Such an interesting procedure is laid out in this post that I suspect this won’t be the last this series sees of Bloggie fame).
Playful Void: What’s an OSR game? (After the first 10 years of the Bloggies, perhaps someone can put together a bracket that is just posts talking about the current state of the OSR. My finalist post from last year’s Bloggies would be among them, so I’m comfortable making that gibe. But within the genre of OSR-examining posts, the Playful Void offers her view of what makes a game “feel” like an OSR game, from a game’s rules, its playstyle, and how it intersects with its DIY community. This post also embeds a lot of the last 15 years worth of history of conversation around what makes each of these aspects more or less OSRy. It is well worth a read for veterans, but I especially recommend it if you have entered the hobby in the last two or three years. You’ll catch up on a lot through this post).
Rancourt: A Survey of Overland Travel (There are [at least] two types of blog posts that I consume voraciously: posts that are about overland travel, one of my favorite parts of old-school games, and posts that examine how a variety of systems handle the same problem. It was therefore beyond a doubt that this post would interest me, and it lived up to my expectations, thoroughly delving into how 9 systems handle overland wilderness travel. Especially if you are designing your own game that features overland travel, this is well worth a read).
Benign Brown Beast: 10 Minutes and a Knife (You are an amateur in the wilderness with 10 minutes, a knife, and a carcass you need to butcher. This is a really evocative system for harvesting from a slain creature. Many of the methods that tackle this question focus overly on the physical components you harvest, but this post does more. There is a chance that, instead, you butcher the beast and learn something about it or its species. But you can also use the result of your butchery to augur the future, which feels very evocative of the setting this mechanic implies. Not all characters harbor our modern biases. If I were to cut open a deer, I may learn something, I may extract some venison, but I probably wouldn’t learn a truth about a question that’s on my mind. Maybe I don’t belong to the setting this method implies).
Slow Loris Press: A Perfect Wife (It is honestly always a shame when someone drops a whole-ass adventure onto a blog and it doesn’t immediately claim a Bloggie medal for it, but this is a real gem of an adventure even beyond that. But of course it is; this is a Zedeck Siew adventure. That guy doesn’t write even mediocre adventures! This one is a pontianak-themed horror adventure in a more modern, urban setting, that, although it is about a monster, is a deeply human adventure and a deeply social one. I hope it one day sees its way to a print format so it can grace my bookshelves).
DIY & Dragons: Summer LEGO RPG Setting Jam (If an adventure deserves a Bloggie, surely a post that launched a bunch of different adventures [which DIY & Dragons later highlighted in another post] deserves one. I myself participated in this jam but what I love about it compared to other jams is the essential DIY nature of working with another IP [Lego] that itself has a DIY history. I love blog posts that spark DIY community enthusiasm and this is a great example of a post in that mold. Two of my favorite entries were from Benign Brown Beast [speaking of DIY attitude, this entry recreated “Star Wars [sic"]” based on hazily recollected vibes from a child], Rise Up Comus [a massive setting based on the Lego Castle line of sets], and Knight at the Opera [doing something similar that I did, taking a more obscure, less obviously gameable Lego theme—in this case the Lego Studios monster movie sets, and created a highly polished adventure]).
Occultronics: OSR Social Resolution Procedures (I am a bit of a sucker for more mechanical heft added to the things that are hand-waved and also think that the vaunted reaction roll is one of the best tools that newer games could pick up from old-school games. This post really revitalized the reaction roll to differentiate it based on the PCs’ approach (persuasion, deception, intimidation). This is not mere skill check! And it looks like it would be relatively simple to implement and wouldn’t just undermine the actual roleplaying element the way many social resolution procedures unfortunately do. I especially like the idea that the modifiers get inverted if the players evoke them but totally misread the situation. This is an incredibly elegant part of the entire set of procedures this post presents).
Luke Gearing: Reputation Tables (Speaking of elegant mechanics, I love this one from Luke so much that I’ve stolen it—the highest form of praise TTRPG design can receive. You can see some of this thievery in my recent blogpost on bartering mechanics, but there is a lot more of the Prismatic Wasteland [the game, not the blog] that is going to lean on ideas from this blog post. One thing that makes this blog post so stealable, so hackable is that it isn’t overbaked. Luke gives you an idea and details a few ways it can be used. He then leads the rest up to you to figure out exactly how you would like to implement that into your system, or into your adventure, or into your own blog post riffing on these ideas. Another reason is that this is a very fiction-centered mechanic. It isn’t just numbers on a sheet and dice doing the work. It taps into what has actually happened over the course of the campaign and how the people in the world [or the specific group of people, depending on how you implement this] view those happenings).
Once you’ve enjoyed these, go and read the other 54 finalists for this year’s Bloggies! And don’t forget to vote. Voting today probably ends around 2pm-ish (it seems to vary) eastern time, at which point there will be a new poll up for the next round. Then on Monday, there will be a vote for the ultimate winner of the Gameable category. And voting doesn’t stop there, it keeps going all month long in this year’s celebration of blogging excellence!