While at PAX this weekend I was asked by a number of people about running D&D with kids. I’ve recently switched up my home D&D game and I thought I’d share some of my key learnings.

I am always surprised when I learn that somebody missed something of ours, but it's not actually a surprise to any conscious being - I don't promote the stuff we do as much as I could. Generally it's because I don't want to annoy you. But too many people worked too hard on it for too long for me to allow my usual horseshit.

We talked about it a little bit on stage at PAX East, and I don't have any idea how successful The Division 2 is or isn't, but whatever its coordinate in the Matrix of Market Justice I can't help but feel like another theme would have better projected and perhaps advocated for the frankly incredible game they made. Or, in any case, made them more resilient to having someone ridicule their tasteful shemagh.

One of the things I like about From Software's whole historical fantasy… thing is its inscrutability. At least, initially. It doesn't remain so, and it is this process of progressively enhancing one's knowledge that is the main draw. It rewards novel thinking; we've found gameplay in strange places we didn't truly understand were part of these games, and to be seen by it when we're working some intuitive narrative angle only to get paid handsomely in the mechanics is a level of unification most games don't even attempt. In Bloodborne, you might see a monster the size of a building that is just... I don't know what it's doing over there. Hanging out. Discussions of their difficulty pop up from time to time, but the difficulty is part of the story: you aren't supposed to win. Look at what's happened, what happening, look at the worlds they occur in. Look at the foes arrayed against you, their alien motives, their size, their ferocity. Read the inscriptions. Failure is the assumption. Narrative and Challenge aren't two independent phenomena in this construction. My own "story" invariably ends long before the game does - I can't even git the kind of gud they're looking for, and I'm not even mad. The game is like a cosmic Coinstar, and it sorts us all.

Every PAX we do I try to update the number of shows I've done in my head. Usually, anyway. At a certain point it's just kind of an N+1 thing. I think it might be more helpful to be granular about it: this is the tenth East, a show that rose from the haunted warren of the Heinz center which could barely contain it even in its first year, to the BCEC, a building so large that I felt touring it was a waste of time because we could never possibly need it.

Man, this Thursday start for hashtag PAX East is something I still have to get my head around. Doing the first day of the show and then rebuilding my mind - from something designed for instant output to something more measured - is wild as hell mid-show. For West, it's after the third day, so I'm so tired that the words just fall out. Today's comic follows Wednesday's, in the terrifying nineties, and concerns a kind of dark equine prophecy.

I don't talk about it as much as it deserves, nowhere near, but I don't want to annoy people with it; this makes me uniquely ill-suited for the social media era. It's quite true, though: there's an Acquisitions Incorporated supplement for D&D coming, and what's more, it's an official book made in concert with Wizards of the Coast. This means, among other things, that when you put it next to your other D&D books it will look like it's part of that august tradition. Because it is!

Sekiro is pretty special, I think; of course, I'm invested in From's success because I like the weird stories they make, but I also need them to make a lot of money so they can make the Armored Core and Chromehounds games I need. I need them to make so much money that that can make a game that only I purchase and Q1 still looks okay.

I'm not sure I want a new gaming platform right now, one that isn't connected to anything I already own or any of the people that I know. At this point in the perpetual ebb and flow of centralization and decentralization, this is just what's happening: the real vigor is supposed to be elsewhere, and you're supposed to borrow it forever. I understand why it's a good business model, but it's so clearly a model in search of an audience that I'm content to just let their wet tentacle slap against the windowpane for a while.

This, or something very close to it, really did happen. It's a brand that brings people together, forging a connection between them, even if they should be discussing the infection that is - even now - gnawing at the root of his lifespan.

Kirby's Epic Yarn was cute and fun back in the day, that's a game I played with a younger iteration of my daughter Ronia, and the Extra version is similar except that it also allows you to play the game while driven by the very whips of hell.

One of the the things I like about Games Workshop's 40k shit is that one of the fundamental tenets of the grim darkness of the far future is that nobody understands how anything works. Not really. This doesn't mean that they are ineffective, or that they constitute non-factors in the events that surround them. Quite the contrary; it's just that the range of expression available to human beings is very narrow. Society has essentially been distilled into a weapon. It describes a culture where all of its points are in one thing.

Wow! Huge refresh on the AI shirts, with custom character art by Gabe, plus some real inside baseball at the end for the true connoisseur. I'll have you know I spelled that correctly the first time.

Gabe's "Brightgrave" campaign continues apace, revelations have been… revealed, and he literally had a point where something big happened and the Title came up. This is some pretty meta shit: it required describing, as an object inside the shared hallucination of the game world, a word materializing and then hanging in the air.

Gabe is literally playing Gambit Prime as I type this, and despite what we might say in the strip he's over there tooling team after team. It can't help but activate an ill-timed sympathy response: he's like a wicked ghost, iterating a malevolent grudge throughout eternity.