The best posts in the meta category of this year.
What are the Bloggies?
The Bloggies are back. A yearly celebration of blogging in tabletop roleplaying games. It’s one-part award show and one-part battle royale. It’s silly. It’s intense. It’s an opportunity to read great posts from across the blogosphere.
What is this series?
I love RPG blogs, but my friends don’t. They’re not going to read the 80+ blog posts that make up the entire Bloggies competition. But maybe they’ll read the best ones if I give some solid recommendations. If you’re someone who already plans to read all (or most) of the Bloggies, this isn’t for you. This short series will proposes the best posts from each of the five Bloggie categories this year: advice, critique, gameable, theory, and meta.
Other posts in this series
Meta for Casuals
An all new category for ideas about taxonomy, creativity, and beyond. The posts in this category either comment on the scene itself or on the artform of tabletop roleplaying. Some are jokey, some are taxonomic, and some are manifestos. This is the category for RPG philosophers and community leaders.
Mapping the Blogosphere
Part cool technical side project, part RPG community visualization. It’s not only fun to play around with the tool, it captures a vital aspect of RPG community history that was probably lost in a sea of RSS feeds. The gif that shows the rise and fall of blogging communities is really intriguing.
P.S. Elmcat has a later post comparing the Blogosphere in 2025 versus historical records with some wowing stats.
What is an OSR?
I finally have a post to link to for my friends when they inevitably ask me what this OSR nonsense I keep casually mentioning is all about. For context: Over/Under was a real-time, play-by-post, wargame/LARP set on a space station from Mothership’s Pound of Flesh.
The Expressionist Games Manifesto
Another thought-provoking piece from Jay Dragon. This manifesto was all anyone in the RPG space was talking about for weeks. I once tried to discuss with a friend how you can write rules to encourage players to push back (and past) them. They thought I was crazy. To be fair, I probably wasn’t expressing this idea I was grappling with very well. This post clarifies the idea of a rules text that creates “friction” with players.
Sam’s Three-Question Taxonomy
A longer post that covers a lot of RPG taxonomy. While I try to avoid that most of these days, Sorensen calls out elements of my own playstyle in a way I enjoy. He ends with the following quote which really sums up a lot of RPG theory talk I’ve ever engaged in: “In my many years of playing, most of the unhappiness I’ve experienced or seen experienced at RPG tables comes from a mismatch somewhere in these [three questions I’ve provided].”
Series complete! Bloggies voting is over so if you were waiting for this to come out in order to vote… too bad. I’ll try to actually get these out before voting next year.
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