DunDraCon 2024

My triumphant return to DunDraCon!

No pictures of the con as it didn’t occur to me to take pictures of any of my games besides the game I can’t share (see below).

I bought a badge.  Been ages since I bought a badge to local con, as I just run stuff.

And, that has been the problem.  Local cons have felt like chores.  I run stuff part of the time.  Help out other events part of the time.  Don’t sign up for events.  Don’t end up playing stuff.  Or, like play a pickup game I don’t care about that I could be doing outside of a con.

So, I made an effort to do stuff at the con.

And, I did.

I submitted my prereg choices like first or second day I could.  I don’t get into either of my Friday afternoon choices.  So, I crash a 2PM game.

Exalted

GM intended a 10 player game for 10 hours where we fight a god.  We have five players, so the adventure gets modified.  Which I think was a good thing in multiple ways, but it did have a problem.

We are Exalted heading to Cadun to find work.  Cadun is looking for superior adventurers to go steal Hephaestus’s hammer.  We talk about just going to find Hephaestus and act as liaisons between the city and him to achieve what city truly wants, which is to be an exporter of manufactured goods rather than raw materials.

We get joined by an all-knowing NPC.  We go through Hephaestus’s labyrinth (a very extensive dungeon).  Our challenges are all puzzles.  We meet up with Hephaestus, talk a bit, become his smith lieutenants piloting fantasy mechs.

So, what was good?  The ending was amusing.  Didn’t bother me that it got very wild.

Cons?  So, this is Exalted.  I’ve played very little Exalted, but Charms are kind of important to making you feel like a demigod.  None of our Charms mattered.  We never got into combat having a slew of combat abilities.  Expectations fail.  I would avoid all-knowing NPCs.  I’ve played very little Exalted, and I still don’t really know anything about the world.  It’s such an opaque setting to me.  And, I own the game!  I just don’t care enough to read more than what I’ve read in the past.  And, it’s a White Wolf resolution system, and those are bad.

Saturday morning, I got into my first choice.

Feng Shui

I have some misgivings about Feng Shui convention games.  Last one I did wasn’t fun.  Too many are just Big Trouble in Little China either as complete replays or essentially the same thing.

This was very good.  The adventure was based on years of a home campaign, so there was lots of content, content I didn’t already know, and it was coherently put together.  The GM knew the genre, so scenes went like they should.

We are all gang members (including the cops, who are functionally a gang in San Francisco).  We are at a sham wedding, where ninja attack.  The whole point of the wedding was to trap a sorcerer who was trying to sacrifice lovers for power.  We take that sorcerer down.  Our cop friend who set the trap dies mysteriously offscreen later, so we reunion to go hunt down the killer.  We uncover a conspiracy to do some magic stuff, with a giant snake shapeshifter being used as an assassin.  We take out a drug kingpin, the snake, and, finally, “The Necromancer”.  They may have been trying to bring back Gao Zhang, but this game wasn’t about the setting’s time war.  I played a sorcerer and got to lean into doing thematic wind magic stuff.  I’m in favor of my convention one-shot characters getting to do things that are interesting.

There was only really one con – Feng Shui system is bad.  I used to love it.  Oh, I thought some parts of 1e were ridiculous.  I thought 2e just made things worse by losing flavor from 1e and for really not being designed for anything besides one-shots.  But, having argued for years on how bad d20 is as a resolution system, how bad percentile is, how bad 3d6 is, up die/down die is just bad.  It’s just not fun.  It feels a system of failure in a genre when failure should be of the botch sort where things explode when you don’t succeed.  The initiative system sucks (and always has).  Attacks are boring.  It plays slow, which is the opposite of how FS should play.  2e schticks are boring.

There’s a reason I created Feng Shui Tu Huo, my homebrew Roll & Keep system to play a FS game.  What system would I use for FS play if not some homebrew?  I don’t know.  I think most systems are inferior.  One of my goals is to play more non-L5R … so that I can remember how much better R&K is than almost every other system.

1e’s schticks are so cool.  I get the IP.  I can tolerate the system when good GMs are doing stuff.  But, this sort of game shouldn’t be saddled with a system that is worse for action than various other systems I’ve played.  I can believe there’s a d20 system that is better for this genre.  It’s possible Mutants & Masterminds is better for this genre; maybe I’ll find out in coming months.

Saturday evening, I didn’t get into my prereg choices, so I went home.  Being old and decrepit, this worked well.

Sunday morning, I got into my first choice.

John Carter of Mars

Our Conan group tried playing Modiphius’s Conan.  We kind of hated it.  The oppressiveness of the metacurrencies was ridiculous.  We could just play d20 Conan, a d20 game I enjoyed despite it being d20 resolution, so why do we need to deal with Momentum, et al?

This was mechanically okay.  Maybe being a one shot and not being Conan, a game we played for 7+ years, helped.  Maybe having individual Momentum pools rather than a single Momentum pool helped.  Okay.  I still find all of these games that pull the player’s attention away from thinking as a PC and thinking like some GM/PC hybrid to be completely unnecessary.

Our group was really slow to do things.  However, the things we were doing were generally fun and mostly appropriate to the setting.  One thing this game brought out is that some of us really like the setting.  It’s really sad that some people only know JC from the movie, a movie I can barely remember which got his personality completely wrong and did some jarring things with the setting.

I was playing a bodyguard/duelist and got to do a lot of bodyguarding stuff for the daughter of our boss.  I didn’t realize for quite a while my character sheet said Firstborn, but I think I was essentially just playing the character as a red martian rather than a black martian.  First Born would make the character’s name make more sense as it didn’t follow red martian conventions.  I got to heavily damage enemies.  I got to avoid doing other things than fighting.  … ??  Yeah, see, I may not be normally into combat that much, and I may normally be into social interaction or knowledge crap or whatever, but I also appreciate being part of a party and knowing my role and embracing it.  In this setting, with this character, the only thing I should be doing is fighting.  If I was on my own, sure, sneak around, learn crap, talk to people.  But, I’m not.  And, I enjoyed fighting or choosing not to bother when the party was just shooting some poor animal to death.

Good game.  I might play more JCoM outside of con.

Playing this game, I missed our Traveller events.  They were very busy.  This just points out how much running stuff interferes with my playing what I want.

Playtest

I hung around in the boardgame room so that we could do a three-player playtest of the boardgame we are creating.  We have a long ways to go.  What’s interesting to me about creating games other than CCGs is that I may overestimate how open-ended CCGs are.  In both the CCGs Jeff and I worked on for extensive periods, I had a sense of play from very little playtesting.  With other games, I don’t get that same sense.  Though, that could just be that I’m a CCG expert in a way that I’m not an expert on other game types.  Or, maybe it’s that CCGs are inherently a much more similar experience to each other than I think.  Or, both.

Different boardgames really try to achieve different experiences.  Agricola is not Settlers.  Chariots Lords is not an 18xx train game.

So, I was reminded of yesteryear with DDC 2024.  I got some good stuff in.  I met more gamers even if it’s unclear how impactful that ends up being.  I saw people I gamed with in the past, including a VTES player that might play in the South Bay.

Am I motivated to run a RPG?  Not so much.  I did think about what running would be like while playing, including what running at a con would be like.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get enthused.  I imagine my running a RPG at a con would be too much like my running at cons in the past.  None of these three games have systems that get me excited by the mechanics of a particular RPG.

I’m planning on running Traveller CCG at KublaCon.  But, if Kubla ends up feeling like a chore, maybe I’ll attend as a civilian more often in the future.

CCG February, Part 2

Sunday was just as busy.  Gaming didn’t start until 1PM, though.

Played two games at Victory Point Cafe.

Game 1

Rick (AUS Ass) -> Ian (I Love Cheap Thrills) -> Mark (Saulot Wall) -> Alex (Newlubri)

Rick brought out Tegyrius, Al-Ashrad, and eventually Tariq.  He rushed me once through Priority Contract and Lost bled me multiple times.

I bring out Marino Reymundo Vásquez, and a Tupdog.  Later, Ladislas Toth, The Torch.  I drew barely any combat cards in this game.  So, Ladislas blocks Saulot’s Magic of the Smith at three stealth and gets beat up.  I had bleed cards early.  Drew bunch of Redirections, which would have helped, but I lacked wakes.  Then, drew Mirror Walks.

Mark tooled Saulot up with a large amount of junk so that he could hit for 6 Agg.  He had three other vamps.  He had early Powerbase Montreal, which I took, then Rick took, then Alex.

Alex got to do some stuff with Salubri, but he couldn’t really deal with the combat around him.

Eventually, Rick conceded to Mark, though it was funny to see someone rush Saulot when he could do 6 Agg at close.

Game 2

Ian (DoC SB) -> Alex (Ravnos SB) -> Rick (Toreador Vote/Bleed) -> Mark (Nefertiti)

I bring out Anarch Convert on turn one, and he gets various bleeds in and some Blood Doll hunts.  I put Yseult and Gael in play.

Alex gets new Ravnos in play.

Rick gets midcaps in play and one becomes Toreador Justicar.

Mark gets Nefertiti in play, brings out Khay’tall right before the end.

Rick just hammers Mark, so Mark is doomed.  Alex drops Week of Nightmares and finishes off Rick.  I bleed out Alex with Heidelberg moving J.S. Simmons around (I did play multiple Aires of Elation earlier, so Alex didn’t have much pool for me to eat through).

My comment at the end of the game, “You have now seen the true power of Polaris Coach.”  I had a Polaris Coach in my hand when the game ended.

Even with VPC being rather expensive place to play, it was a pleasant experience where I got to get home much earlier than expected, even had time to add yet another task for the day on way home.

So, we didn’t do a lot.  What was my takeaway?  I had one, I think.  I need to build new decks.  I don’t have much reason to build certain decks in casual play.  It was different from Shadowfist the day before.  Shadowfist requires far more … well, far more thought, though I’m not sure that’s the optimal word.  Even though the result of the second game was not predicted and not expected, VTES is just much more predictable in what happens.  It’s the surprises on the margin that make it sufficiently surprising, where Shadowfist is too swingy for how I play games.

Obviously, VTES is vastly more comfortable for me.  I understand situations far better.  Alex took out Rick a turn earlier than I might have expected, but it wasn’t unexpected for him to get Rick before Rick got me.  I had good pool after using Vessel, Blood Doll, and Villein with minions that had plenty of blood due to Concert Tours.

But, VTES isn’t so much about deck construction to me, anymore.  What makes the game entertaining is how games play out with all of the individual moves and the impact they have on the other players.  With Shadowfist, I don’t have the context of deck interactions to see the downstream impact of plays.  But, I also can build lots of decks that I haven’t made before.  Ultimately, in any CCG, a bunch of stuff is functionally similar or the same, but it still feels different because of theme.  VTES doesn’t have nearly as much theme to me.  The first game had some pretty anemic combats.  That was great.  I tried to point out that the appeal of soccer is not in scoring but in the potential for scoring, and the appeal (to me) of VTES combat is not in carnage but in the potential for … doing more than 2 damage to an opposing minion.

Playing a CCG, actually, playing any game gives me ideas.  Oh, I don’t necessarily remember the deck ideas I got from Saturday and Sunday.  As I’m attending a game convention this weekend, one where almost everything I preregged for was a RPG event, I’m not in a CCG frame of mind.  I actually have a variety of things to deal with, including getting around to sending in a True Dungeon transmute box.  My new VTES precons just arrived yesterday, so I can try to think of how to use even more new cards.

I’m just rambling.  Playing CCGs is great.  Wish it was weekly and not like quarterly.  Because of the discourse being competitive focused, it would be good if I could actually test tournament ideas, but I won’t be able to do that for … three weeks.

I can only play when other people play, so I hope others maintain enthusiasm for local play.  Deck lists?  I’m not as into posting VTES deck lists as the Shadowfist ones are much funnier.

Obvious next post should be DunDraCon 2024.

CCG February, Part 1

I decided to split this up as I want to post decklists from Shadowfist play, so this should be long.

Saturday, I played, apparently, seven games of Shadowfist.  This was part of our quarterly playday scheduling system.

Game 1 (3 players)

Earl (Monarchs) -> Ian (Multifaction) -> Paul (Multifaction)

My deck shall remain a mystery as it didn’t do what it was supposed to do.  In fact, it didn’t do anything.  Paul’s deck also didn’t do anything.  Earl won pretty easily.  I remember playing some foundations and Paul trying to get his second faction running.  Wait, some of this is coming back to me.

Earl played Flambards.  He played Fire Mystic.  He played Fakhir-al-Din for the win against really nothing.  One of my first two sites was Proving Ground, and Earl took it pretty early, and that was when the game essentially ended.  My Gao Family Banquet Hall slowed him down slightly.

Game 2 (3 players)

Miguel () -> Ian (Corrupted) -> Tim (Scrappy Kids)

I tried to rein in some recursion with Scroll of Pain in response to Inauspicious Return, but I only got one Scrappy Kid with it.  What smaller dudes I put into play just got wiped by Final Brawls.  Miguel didn’t have a lot going on, either.  Tim just kept progressing until victory.

Game 3 (3 players)

Ian (Ancestral River Home) -> Tim (as above) -> Miguel (Butterfly Raid)

I didn’t have a good start in that nobody was coming for my Ancestral River Home.  I finally hardcast Queen of the Ice Pagoda.  Someone did my Ancestral River Home in and I put out White Ninja.  I should have taken a picture of this game rather than the other games as it got dumber.

What was really dumb on my part is that my deck actually requires Monarch resources for certain cards, and I couldn’t get a second resource.  Not that it mattered as I had the game under control pretty much throughout.  Queen got attacked some but never went away.  They were concerned with Netherworld Returns, which of course wouldn’t be in this Modern deck.  Now, if Queen did go down, I could play Fire Emissary to … end up with smaller character and still have only one Monarch resource.

I won without ever playing Fire Emissary.  In fact, in the entire course of the game, only one card ever hit my smoked pile.  I finally got a second resource off of Aide de Camp (after I already had seized Kinoshita House and Fox Pass was doomed).  Miguel couldn’t get in the game as his Butterfly Knights weren’t threatening enough, and I started bullying his dudes.  Tim couldn’t get in the game between not being able to defend from my monsters and because I run Diamond Beach in this deck, which wrecks his strategy.

In the end, Queen had a Hovercraft.  White Ninja had Living Legend.  Beaumains was bullying.

I posted recently that the aphorism “I win because nobody else does” applies well to both my Shadowfist and VTES play.  I can win good VTES games.  But, I only ever seem to win bad Shadowfist games.

Game 4 (3 players)

Tim (Eunuchs) -> Miguel (Ascended) -> Ian (Badger)

Miguel kept messing with my power generation, using Sulphurous Cenote to stop IKTV Radio Outpost flips.  He had a much, much cooler play than that, though, in this game.  He was doing well, and he played Inside Job against me.  Inside Job where you play for free a card in someone else’s hand.

I had two copies of Attack of the Fifty Foot Badger in hand.  What he didn’t pay attention to (not that he would have chosen differently) was that I had a copy of Abandoned Old Shop in hand.  I had already discarded another Old Shop.  I got bailed out by the sheer geniusosity of my deckbuilding.

I play Abandoned Old Shop, bounce Badger back to my hand.  End up playing a Badger.  End up putting Specialist and Stance of the Wandering Toad on my Badger so that it would grow by 2 every turn.  Miguel had some annoying stuff, but he lacked fighting and stuff got cleared out.  I did Brain Tape one of his guys as I didn’t want to do mine when The Emperor left play.

Meanwhile, Tim was just winning.  Wasn’t like we did anything to his Eunuch army.  So, he just did stuff even with a Badger in the ‘hood.

Game 5 (4 players)

Drew (Lotus) -> Paul (Battle-Matic) -> Miguel (Battle-Matic) -> Ian (Corrupted)

Tim was going to get picked up soon and Earl sat out.

Well, I did stuff in this game with my Corrupted damage deck.  … just not Corrupted damage.  I put Stalking Horrors in play, and it had zero damage bonus.

Drew was quite strong for a time.  But, I Poisoned Wound his Infernal Army, and he didn’t have much in the way of characters after.  I never had much in play, though I was a threat for a bit.  Paul wasn’t doing much offensively, but he was in the game.  Miguel won.

So, this was a good game.  Everyone got to do stuff.  This was the game where I commented “If only Lotus had some way to remove characters.” as Drew and I failed to murder the souls of dorks with Battle-Matics.  Actually, if I had another turn, I would have drawn Incendiary Blast.

Game 6 (3 players)

Ian (SWS Ascended) -> Earl (Revivication Shard) -> Paul (Multifaction)

Drew and Miguel left.

This was a sad, pathetic game.  So, of course, I won.

My Bunker Security did a lot of early work against Earl.  This allowed me to burn for power with Old Buzzard and Shamali Storm help.  Earl couldn’t recover, having only Registry of the Damned in play at one point.  Paul was struggling with resources, then I took his Netherworld Trickster with Katerina Sa to remove his only Dragon resource.  I finished things up with The Mouse, never using her to steal stuff as there weren’t things worth stealing.

Game 7 (3 players)

Earl (as above) -> Paul (Monarchs/Lotus) -> Ian (Influence)

I failed my Influence deck.  I overcommitted when trying to clear out annoying characters in play, and Earl played Underworld Coronation.  After that, I had nothing that mattered.  Earl was impaired by Paul’s Sacred Wigwam.  I probably made a mistake not going after that.  We kept trying to rein in Paul, but it’s hard to regulate someone far ahead in three-player, so Paul eventually won.  His recursing Avenging Darkness was so, so bad for me.  Syndicate does not like having its characters messed with, and Catching Bullets never works for me.

Decks

I’m not going to post every deck.  Just the ones with fewer than 40 cards.  Just happens to include the two that won games.

Badger Time!
(30) Jammers/Guiding Hand

Jammers (14)
Characters (10)
4x Absolute Maniacs
2x Attack of the Fifty Foot Badger
4x Netherworld Scavenger

Edges (3)
3x Aftershocks

Events (1)
1x “What’s the Worst that Could Happen?”

Guiding Hand (4)
Characters (3)
3x Wasteland Gardener

States (1)
1x Stance of the Wandering Toad

Factionless (12)
Feng Shui Sites (7)
2x Abandoned Old Shop
1x Ancient Trollbridge
1x Beached Supertanker
1x Echoing Cavern
1x Golden Sky Island
1x Salt Mine

Sites (3)
3x IKTV Radio Outpost

States (2)
1x Brain-Tape
1x Specialist

Echoing Enclave
(35) Ascended

Ascended (25)
Characters (15)
2x Bunker Security
2x Cut-Out
2x Katerina Sa
2x Kennedy Rose
3x Old Buzzard
1x Shamali Storm
1x Street Rat
1x The Mouse
1x The Professional

Edges (4)
1x Deep Pockets
3x Long Term Investments

Events (4)
1x Anonymous Tip
1x Forged Orders
1x Inside Job
1x Playing Possum

States (2)
1x Framed!
1x Ghillie Suit

Factionless (10)
Feng Shui Sites (10)
3x Echoing Cavern
1x Golden Sky Island
1x Isolated Banyan Grove
1x Salt Mine
2x Sunken City District
2x Walled Enclave

River Running
(35) Monarchs

Monarchs (21)
Characters (7)
2x Aide de Camp
1x Beaumains, the Mongrel Knight
1x Fire Emissary
1x Lord Hawksmoor
2x Queen of the Ice Pagoda

Edges (3)
3x Summoning Circle

Events (10)
1x Amnesty
1x Avenging Thunder
2x Blood Lust
2x Brain Fire
1x Deafening Thunder
1x The Warrior’s Calm
1x Twin Thunders
1x Vengeance in the Ashes

States (1)
1x Soul Fire

Factionless (14)
Characters (3)
1x Sprung-Li
2x White Ninja

Feng Shui Sites (7)
5x Ancestral River Home
2x Diamond Beach

States (4)
1x Hovercraft
2x Living Legend
1x Public Enemy No. 1

VTD 21

Not a great sign when my most recent post was also VTD.

At the moment, 2025 token development is in progress, and it has just made me irritable.  I could rant and rave about how players should not be in charge of what game mechanics get made.  Oh, sure, they should provide ideas.  And, it’s not like players really make the decisions for this game.  It’s just constantly exasperating that players clamor for stuff that makes the game worse.  I should expect it.  I should also expect the publisher to care about sales and not what makes their product better.  But, even so, it’s just so discouraging.

Speaking of discouraging, half my runs had discouragement, though only a quarter of them for me.

First run was team run Friday night.  It didn’t go well (mechanically, anyway).  Whenever the group struggles, some players get frustrated.  Yet, to me, if we don’t struggle on highest difficulty with no dungeon knowledge, then where is there any challenge?  Without challenge, what’s the point?

Am I missing how different folks just get utility out of different things than I do?  Well, yeah, of course.  I always see flaws in things.  Everything.  Even if something is enjoyable, it could be better only if …  Well, maybe it can’t be better.  Maybe my expectations are just too high in terms of the types of value activities are supposed to provide.

I get utility from solitaire.  Multiple types of solitaire.  But, my expectations are different.  I don’t rail against the flaws in solitaire.  I know what they are and just flop with it.

It’s just hard for someone with my personality to not be more demanding given that the potential for certain activities is so high.  Or, at least, higher than the average.  Just writing that points something out.  So, let’s say you have a career .320 hitter (MLB) where going with batting average for sake of this analogy.  If I’m a fan of the player or the player’s team, I, of course, want that .320 hitter to go 4 for 4, 3 for 4, 3 for 5, 2 for 4, or whatever.  I want the player to do better than average … every time.  But, then, the average would be higher.  This player is going to have 0 for 4s, 1 for 4s, etc.  That’s the only way to get to the .320 average.

I have a certain level of intolerance with certain things.  Maybe I’ll follow up on this in my next post as my next post will be about CCG play, as I actually had gaming that maybe someone cares hearing about.

Anyway.  What would have made that first run better is if the DM had given us an idea that the final fight was winnable.  Based on my later runs, I think we were only 50 damage away from succeeding.  As a party.  With everyone besides one player dead.  That would have been … Epic.

Instead, it was just a death spiral with no drama.

Second run was Epic Double Down.  I enjoyed this run quite a bit as I was fully cognizant of how much the dungeon screwed melee and because we were so much closer to the right challenge level (still too easy but at least we had risk).  What this run reinforced is that the real value in VTD is doing the same dungeon multiple times.  Change builds, think about party composition, try to find the right challenge level to make it feel challenging even if victory is inevitable.

What about the puzzles?

The first puzzle was absurdly easy.  It was also the same as like two other puzzles in the past.  The second puzzle was so hard that even when multiple people had done multiple runs and knew the answer, still couldn’t figure out how to get to the answer.  When I finally learned the solution (by being told it), well, that was after my third run, so let’s get back to this run.

Third puzzle was failed Friday, got it here.  What was notable was even though my thinking leads to the solution and even though someone else got the answer from my thinking on this second run, I still didn’t understand the answer.  When I figured it out, I mostly felt that the puzzle’s creator and I just don’t think the same way.  To me, the clues are written in such a way to push me away from what was basically just an inversion of my incorrect first-thought solution.

The combats weren’t all that interesting.  The brutal room was the first combat in room 2, and it’s not like learning how to make it an auto-win makes it more interesting.  To me, the whole dungeon had good ideas that just needed editing to be more than good challenges.

So, why was this fun?  Because of the metagaming.  Because the metagaming was severe.  My Will save bonus on first run was +26.  In my three other runs, it was +3, +2, +3.  Knowing what won’t happen in a dungeon is freeing, while knowing what will happen opens up doing things wouldn’t otherwise consider.

I enjoy metagaming in CCGs, too, however it’s much easier with TD where you can know precisely what to contend with.

Third run was Anti-Cabal run.  It was okay.  Why wasn’t it better?  Maybe because I did all of my metagaming already and didn’t really do anything interesting with my build on this run.  Maybe because learned the solution to the second puzzle only by having someone just explain it.  Even the explanation was hard to follow.

So, the puzzle was clever.  Too clever?  Maybe not.  I do try to be consistent, even if I’m not as much as I’d like to be.  Consistency is being okay with the idea that certain rooms in TD are going to be hard enough that you can’t just deal with them after some … token … effort.

The third puzzle changed.  It was easy for pretty much every group as it had the same answer as another puzzle from not that long ago.  I didn’t find it that elegant, but at least there was an effort to create variety.

Room 7 was anticlimactic.  We went first, took monster down in four rounds.  The dungeon’s value to me was so much on the build level and not so much on the play level.

Fourth run, I was just poltergeisting, so it didn’t really matter.  Didn’t matter that I played at all.  Party was way, way overpowered for difficulty level.  My build can be summed up with “I chip in 35 damage per round and … that’s it.”

That didn’t help with increasing enjoyment.

Right this moment, I don’t really care about my damage tracking.  Doesn’t feel like anyone cares that I do it besides me.  I share stuff in part to hear myself talk but the other part, which is fairly important, is for the listener to get something out of my sharing.

I just don’t feel listened to.  That’s not new.  I don’t feel that my VTES comments on Discord penetrate.  I don’t feel that my Shadowfist comments on Discord accomplish anything of significance.  Many of the things I share don’t relate enough to my listeners or are too nuanced(?) to be understood.  Let’s say that nuanced is the right word.  If so, that’s not just on the listener.  The speaker has a responsibility to be understood.

But, right now, I don’t care.  If I can make an effort, listener can make an effort.  Or, they aren’t listening.  Which is a choice.  I guess I control myself but certainly don’t control anyone else.

Well, that was a post.  Maybe my next post will be more positive.