On both social media I still use, I followed bunch of indie ttrpg devs. I had to unfollow the ones on tumblr because they don’t talk about anything but how much they hate D&D, up to including writing weird headcanons about people who help popularize it (I actually seen someone on tumblr claim Brenann Lee Mulligan must HATE D&D because only dumb people could like it and is only pretending to like it for clout) or bich about how D&D fans only want to play D&D and get mad when you tell them they’re complaining about a small minority.
meanwhile indie ttrpg devs on Bluesky constantly promote their work and inform of sales of their products. I found many cool games through bluesky, meanwhile nove through tumblr.
Wait Tumblr still has users after they banned the porn? That’s messed up. I can’t imagine what kind of mental pretzel that place has warped itself into now. I think I’ll continue not finding out. Thanks for the heads up
Not only does tumblr still have users after the porn ban, it still has users after it became glaringly obvious that the admins/mods are anti trans rights. AFAIK it didn’t even turn into a full-on neonazi cesspool like X, though there is a significant presence of TERFs.
Gross, glad I only ever hear about them in this manner instead of first hand.
Why do the tumbler users not simply build a third party alternative to migrate to?
Well there’s wafrn, but I think tumblr is a bit of a special case because so many people find it hard to understand even compared to reddit or twitter, and due to how user-focused and offkey its content is it’s kind of hard to migrate to a different platform - with lemmy and mastodon, you can search a bunch of keywords and quickly have a feed with content that mostly interests you that you can build from, but this wouldn’t quite work for tumblr-style platforms. On top of that, lemmy and mastodon users tend to be focused on techy and political content, which is a different demographic from tumblr’s.
they tried with Pillowfort and it crashed and burned
It is a little weird that D&D is synonymous with tabletop RPGs, considering how many other great games are out there; especially these days. But D&D is by no means a bad game and people should still play it.
No one complains more about a product than long-time fans of the product. They’re the ones who have had the time to feel betrayed by something, be it minor design choices, or things the owners have done, and who also feel a deep sense of ownership over the product.
Haters are just fans that feel alienated somehow, and can’t move past it.
On Tumblr (and LJ), the indie devs get to be honest about their feelings. On BSky, it’s all advertising. Because I’ll tell you this - every dev who’s not part of Hasbro despises them. So do most players.
I sure did not learn anything about ttrpg development or even what cool indie games I could support from following them, because all they do is complain about D&D. If you are D&D hate blog a) jsut say so instead of pretending to be something else and b) you are a D&D blog. Being defined by hatred of the thing is still being defined by the thing.
I imagine that Brennan Lee Mulligan walks a fine line as a public figure.
He still plays D&D often enough to (seemingly) not alienate people at Wizards whose work helped launch his career.
But he also plays significant amounts of other games, including some that I think are Indie developers, like Kids on Bikes.
I’m sure he’s aware of the issues and concerns in the community around D&D under Wizards - and probably shares many of those same concerns, as a fellow player and DM.
But, yes, the idea that Brennan secretly hates anything sounds pretty silly. Brennan has been pretty direct with his epic rants about things he really hates.
I’m pretty sure Critical Role has also done some Monsterhearts stuff, which is also indie. I don’t personally like that game for a myriad of reasons, but I do believe Mercer ran it one or two times.
Some people just love to bitch, especially if that’s all they do. James Wallis said (IIRC) “Game designs aren’t tools, but some game designers are”.
I’ve literally never heard anyone blindly hate D&D on Tumblr. There are a lot of complaints, for sure, but the biggest blogs there post about how D&D is fundamentally a game about dungeons and not meant for other things, and most of them celebrate the system when used right.
