Dave Shramek

Dave Shramek

@dshramek.bsky.social

Game designer and writer. Currently Broadsword and Star Wars: The Old Republic. Distressingly typical geek interests. He/him.

1K followers124 following3.9K posts

My first five ttrpgs in the order I played them: 1. D&D 2. Feng Shui 3. Werewolf the Apocalypse 4. Call of Cthulhu 5. Spirit of the Century

John Harper@johnharper.bsky.social

My first five ttrpgs in the order I played them: 1. Gamma World 2. Marvel Super Heroes 3. Star Wars D6 4. Talislanta 5. Call of Cthulhu (+Champions, Cyberpunk 2020, and Paranoia, all overlapping -- not quite sure if CoC was first.)

TTRPGs owned, but never played is a much longer list. The number of books I thumbed through and imagined playing without the group to play them is immense.

I collect all kinds of games. But I have a particular love for session zero games like this. Buy in to the setting and the world is important for your players and they're not going to read a huge player's manual or a bunch of player facing chapters in setting books.

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Players don't want homework same as GMs don't want homework. So the best answer is that it exists at the table where everyone is participating and contributing.

This is good news. I did a little playtesting for Arkane in Austin after my first games gig blew up. It was just a "play through the level while we watch you play it" but at least Raphaël bought me lunch. And at least I got a credit for a game, unlike the prior 4 years of unshipped, canceled titles.

Jason Schreier@jasonschreier.bsky.social

Let me share some positive news for a change: Despite all the gloomy headlines today, my understanding is that there are multiple paths actively being explored that would save Arkane Lyon. Anything can happen during negotiations, but at this point I'd be surprised if the studio is shut down.

I mean, I never put "Special Thanks" credits on my resume, so you never saw me claim Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, but at least it was a game other employers might have heard of. Nobody played Hit & Myth on the Gizmondo.

Who needs VRAM when your whole game is a cartridge?

Dave Shramek@dshramek.bsky.social

Let's go back to games that don't need hardware acceleration and can be made at for a reasonable amount of time and money and sold for a reasonable price to people who can afford reasonable hardware.

Xbox wants you to subscribe to cloud gaming and sell you the next console for two grand. AAA games are too expensive to make, so they lay off all the people who made them after they release to acclaim from fans and critics. Let's just let the AI dweebs have the NVidia cards and go back to 2D games.

Let's go back to games that don't need hardware acceleration and can be made at for a reasonable amount of time and money and sold for a reasonable price to people who can afford reasonable hardware.

Taking Starlink from Musk and making it a full government operation is a slam dunk. This order specifically put US interests and citizens' safety at risk. It has an outsized impact on US foreign policy and our international interests. And we can't let a private citizen countermand US foreign policy.

They're a private company now. Surely they could've sold off BioWare and the IP assets to someone, but I think that's just how bad it is out there. Consolidation means there's no one to sell your parts to when you need to pay off the leveraged buy out.

Jason Schreier@jasonschreier.bsky.social

BREAKING: Electronic Arts is cutting 400 jobs and shutting down BioWare, the legendary development studio behind Dragon Age and Mass Effect. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

This, I think, is probably one of the biggest arguments for a boisterous trustbusting endeavor on the part of a less corrupt federal government in, say, 2029. Fuck Robert Bork in all sorts of ways for all sorts of reasons, but especially in this case his standard on consumer harm.

Dave Shramek reposted

the idea that empathy is dangerous has been permeating right-wing spaces for a while, but it's not an actual element of their ideology as much as it's a defense mechanism against confronting the reality of their cruelty

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Dave Shramek reposted

At long last, we have created a way for you to take away Nikki's free will, from the classic horror movie "don't take away Nikki's free will"

Bloody Disgusting@bloody-disgusting.com

Nikki from OBSESSION joins FORTNITE tomorrow. You wished for this...

Spent some time this weekend linking a whole Clive Barker connected universe so that Imajica, Weaveworld, The Hellbound Heart and Cabal are all in one universe.

Rolling back the protections of the Reconstruction amendments and re-legalizing moonshine feels like the Supreme Court has turned into a body that's entirely organized for the preservation of the rights of cartoon hillbillies.

jamelle@jamellebouie.net

ah we are going to get some nice reverse disparate impact where having too many black people is evidence of anti-white discrimination

I keep seeing people say "we need to encourage positive masculinity" as a kind of answer to people decrying toxic masculinity and men worried about gender roles. But I have yet to find a definition of positive masculinity that isn't just "being a good adult" and has nothing to do with gender.

Look, I get it. You gotta ease people into it. You can't tell the new recruits about Xenu. First, you gotta get them into positive gender roles before you get them to stop thinking about gender roles at all. But the final boss realization is, of course, there is no masculinity.

My ongoing thought experiment about taking mostly 80s properties and exploding them into Mike Flanagan-esque miniseries has finally started to think about doing that to Ghostbusters. It is possibly my most ill-conceived one (that I still kind of like).

The un-frivolous thing would be a big house, but the frivolous part is the ridiculous custom gaming table for the game room. The house is kind of frivolous, because it's largely a wrapper for the table.

Peter@notalawyer.bsky.social

question for the audience: if you were ultra rich (let’s say $25M), what completely frivolous thing are you buying?

This is a Kristen Wiig character, right?

Bill Grueskin@bgrueskin.bsky.social

Poor Scott Jennings. All that groveling every night on nationwide TV, and he still comes up short. At least he can go back to having long, languid conversations with Mitch McConnell, covering everything from Chilean copper prices to Homer’s use of metaphors. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

It turns out Eisner's outfit Tornante has the film/TV rights to Shadowrun. So the former CEO of Disney and Paramount has the chance to do the funniest thing.

Dave Shramek@dshramek.bsky.social

Universal, Disney, or Sony have the chance to do the funniest thing.

I was discussing the strange convergent evolution of Cyberpunk the RPG and Shadowrun's terminology. And then the strangeness of Cyberpunk AND Bubblegum Crisis being influenced by both Blade Runner and Streets of Fire of all things. And now I have "Konya wa Hurricane" playing in my head again.

Man, the point of government is not nor has it ever been for the entirety of human history about efficiency. It is and has always been about mitigating disasters. That's why we band together and take care of each other as a social species.

Gil Durán@gilduran.com

“Democracy has been hailed as, like, the holy grail for the last couple hundred years, but democracies are inefficient,” said the crypto billionaire. “If you get a benevolent dictator, it’s actually extremely efficient." Hmm, where have I heard this before? www.nytimes.com/2026/10/01/b...

I was way too young to have seen this, but afterwards, I couldn't get the image of grasping, mummified corpses everywhere like the streets of London in the third act of Lifeforce.

Sleepy Hollow Reviews 🎃🐎@sleepingvillage.bsky.social

In honor of scary media month: what is the first piece of media you remember truly frightening you as a child?

Dave Shramek reposted

This period will go down as one of the greatest moments for Democrat attack ads in history. We're seeing LBJ "Daisy"-level spots daily.

Polling USA@usapolling.bsky.social

Jesus Christ dude

I wish I could block a particular podcast advertisement as easily as I block something on social media or tell YouTube to never recommend a channel.