5 Posts You Loved and 5 Posts You Hated in 2025 So Far
A little midyear check-in for the Prismatic Wasteland blog. Some real bangers so far, but perhaps some mash.
We are halfway through the year, and I wanted to update my Blog Leaderboard (basically, I wanted a neutral way to order my sidebar, so I list them in the order by which other bloggers send readers to my blog, based on my internal analytics). While doing so, I also looked at my posts so far. There were some ones people really seemed to gravitate towards, and others that perhaps got lost amidst the noise or perhaps simply sucked. I wanted to highlight both categories of posts. I find this kind of thing interesting—I read most of the posts I come across, from the true bangers to the theoryslop, but I don’t have a sense about which ones are HITS until the Bloggies comes around. I guess even then. You never know what post inexplicably gets thousands of views a month from people frightened and googling the word “doppelganger”.
My Top Performing Posts of 2025 So Far:
You Don’t Need a Game System Before You Play: The Calvinball Experiment: if this turned out to be one of my more popular posts of all time, I would be pretty happy with it because it documents both an interesting thought-experiment-as-game, but also details a short campaign I had a lot of fun running late last year.
The Languages of D&D Imply a Specific Setting: that people enjoyed this post so much proves that you are all intellectuals.
Monster, Maiden, Madonna, Medusa: this is another post for the intellectuals but also a post I have been stewing on for a couple of years now ever since my initial deep dive of Keep on the Borderlands. Luckily D&D 2024 and the discourse around it (wow, throwback to when anyone was still talking about that game) gave me the final push to type this up. It is one of my more researched posts, but I think has some good, widely applicable conclusions for game designers.
Divine Magic Works in Mysterious Ways: a lot of (I hope) interesting ideas, but I think this one did as well as it did largely because of all the buzz around the Blogclave, which is the real star.
2025 is the Year of the Beta: this inspired a lot of cool stuff! I do wish I was brave enough to follow my own advice though.
You Personally Hated These Posts:
Remember Books? They’re Back, in Blog Form: this was written as a bit of promo for Knock #5 but also for my own book Prismatic Wisdom (I have already sold through the majority of my stock, so thanks everyone!) but I think is also a genuine call-to-action.
Sharing the Spotlight is Insufficient: c’mon, guys, this is good advice! You should read it, and do it!
Playing Card Initiative: did I post this just to get more mentions on the Knight at the Opera blog? Yes, yes I did. And it worked.
Steal This Idea: Cardinal Sins: obviously I have had Pope Madness in 2025, but this was actually written pre-Pope death. Some suggested it may have caused it, but I won’t dignify such accusations with comment.
Babies in Dungeons: a very silly post, so I am not surprised it didn’t garner a ton of interest. That said, I did actually get a lot of responses to this one with people pointing to media with “protect the baby” aspects that seemed like fun fodder for games
I did not count my latest post “What Is a Roleplaying Game: The Roleplaying Game” mostly because it is brand new but I assume it will end up in the bottom five at the end of the year regardless because it is very much a joke-post. I gave it the “ashcan” tag for a reason! I am allowed to be a little silly. Although I am posting more and more stuff that I give the ashcan tag, and some of them, like Slush Magic, actually do pop off. Ya just can never tell what people want to read, which is why you should absolutely post every single thought you have online, just in case.
What about posts from this Substack? Well, I’m gonna be honest, this ol’ thing don’t do the numbers the Classic Blog does (which honestly, feels kind of good). The top substack posts would be solidly in the bottom five from my blog. Why is that? I think that it is mostly that these posts tend to be ephemeral, whereas blog posts are forever. People go back and revisit old blog posts. Even just counting hits from this year, my #1 post written in 2025 is only my 4th most popular post. And that’s beautiful.