No Plot, Only Lore

What is the difference between Goblin Mode and Goblin Core? Dive into the ecology of the internet's most feral archetype. We explore why embracing your inner "cozy swamp creature" is a coping mechanism for millennial burnout and the pressure of perfect adulting.

One Page Rules (OPR) started as a quick, simple alternative to Warhammer 40,000, but now it’s charting its own path with unique lore. The results? A minefield of mixed audience reactions.

In this episode, we dive into the difficulties OPR faces transitioning from a '40k knock-off' to an original game system, and how the inherent differences in audience expectations—especially those conditioned by the constant feedback loop of the internet—make that transition so volatile

Welcome back to No Plot Only Lore! This week, your hosts Josh and Chris dive deep into the most chaotic and complex anime powers to figure out how to import them into your favorite TTRPG (like Dungeons & Dragons). If you love D&D mechanics, worldbuilding, and outlandish character concepts, this episode is for you.

We break down the rules and roleplaying challenges of:

• The Social Credit Hero: A power set based entirely on a character's popularity and public trust. What happens to a superhero's power when their social score tanks?
• Death & Reset Mechanics: Examining the genre of "Groundhog Death Day" anime where a character resets time upon death, including the protagonist who killed himself 4,000 times to power up.
• Magical Garbage: Analyzing the unique ability to imbue mundane trash with extraordinary TTRPG powers.
• The Turbo Granny Problem: How to run an encounter against a villain with a bizarre, high-speed power, and the logistics of powers drawn from the series Dan Da Dan.

Discover the best (and worst) ways to integrate these plot-bending abilities into your next D&D campaign or tabletop adventure.

Let’s talk about being cringe! 

• Pretend play is an essential part of growing up and learning social roles and shit.
• This goes back to Piaget and Vygotsky - pretending is how we experiment and try on identities and learn empathy and problem-solving. 
• Adults often repress that because it’s fucking cringe as hell.
• Sitting down to play a role-playing game reactivates that early developmental muscle, but it’s occasionally awkward and weird.
• Kids: The floor is lava! 
• Adults: If I do enough pretend violence I might be able to afford pretend real estate! 

Irony is the Armor of Sincerity

• Memes, quotes, and in-jokes make the table feel safe — a shared cultural shorthand.
• Emotional detachment also feels safe. Not caring about fake people is cooler than caring about fake people, and we usually want to be cool.
• But irony can also block emotional engagement. If everyone’s half-laughing through their character arcs, no one has to risk being sincere.

The Cringe Frontier

• Why do we generally cringe at sincerity? 
• Is cringe just a way of enforcing emotional conformity? 
• Can being cringy be brave, or is it always the absolute worst? 
• We both come from improv backgrounds where being cringe is kind of a necessity. Has that better prepared us for cringe at our tables? 

Circle of Safety

• I was reading a post recently from someone who was wondering if maybe we’d gone a bit too far on making game tables a safe space. I’m pretty sure I disagree with that person, but I will agree that the tools we have aren’t ideal and probably never will be.
• What are your personal safety mechanisms? 
• How do you invite people to be sincere without forcing them to “act” at the table? 
• What is the DM’s role in creating an emotional stable space for Big Feelings? 
• Huizinga’s Magic Circle suggests that normal rules, even rules about social conformity, are suspended during play. Does that work if the real space (outside of the liminal shared imagined space of play) is not safe? 
• How can we support emotional safety in service to enabling bravery?

It Belongs in a Museum - The Archeology of Games

Games include several facets. Some of those are physical remnants, evidence of play. Those can and sometimes are treated as objects of discovery. If you've ever started a D&D campaign to discover that it was a continuation of the DM’s campaign world from a decade ago, you've taken part in gaming archeology. If you've ever acquired a second hand board game or found a half-finished character sheet, same deal. 

What does it mean to play in the ruins of someone else’s story?

• This includes adaptations, I think - playing an RPG in Wheel of Time or Game of Thrones often feels weird because you’re never in your own story.

Games Archeology has a few fronts: 

Physical materiality

• Dice, boards, miniatures, are ritual tools.
• Basically votive objects - mass produced, but made personal through imbuement of meaning.
• Your lucky d20 is as culturally relevant as a Roman gaming die found in an ancient grave. 

Stratigraphy of Design

• Rulebooks and editions create layers of interpretation.
• Scholars can excavate mechanical shifts from wargaming to heroic fantasy to narrative collaboration. 
• Same with board games - Monopoly to Risk to Settlers of Catan to Pandemic Legacy showing cultural shifts through methodologies of play.

Play Traces

• Character sheets, annotated maps, house rules, are all artifacts of lived experience. 
• These are the residue of performance - a site-specific record of ritual and play.
• A coffee stained, cigarette burned character sheet is a relic of a social event. 

Archaeology within Tabletop Play

• Dungeons are based on archeological excavation. Dungeon delving simulates excavation…Sometimes while the subjects of study are still there defending their stuff.
• Ethics of excavation in shared imagined spaces: How does archeology in the fiction of your games intersect with ideas like imperialism? What responsibility does a game or fiction have to representation of archaeology as a practice? 
• There are also games that reveal themselves through play. You play as civilizations that rise and fall, leaving layers of history across the map (Dialect, Microscope, Legacy games)
• Once those games are over, what is left is an artifact of both the art object and the experience of play

The idea of Archeogaming comes from video games where we are actively working against digital decay and the materiality of digital experience. In tabletop, it is about the persistence of the objects and experiences of the art. 

Further Reading:

Andrew Reinhard, Archaeogaming: “An Introduction to Archaeology in and of Video Games”

Florence Smith Nicholls & Michael Cook: “The Dark Souls of Archaeology: Recording Elden Ring” and “That Darned Sandstorm”

Sandy Louchart, Daniel Livingstone, Stuart Jeffrey: “Archaeological Storytelling in Games”

Ian Bogost: “Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames”

We was talking clowns and that got me on the ha-has. 

The Party as a Comedy Troupe

• Most D&D tables accidentally become improv comedy theater.
• “Every game starts as Game of Thrones and ends as Monty Python.”
• Long campaigns kind of naturally develop bits and recurring gags
• Players have a tendency to start to fall into roles associated with ensemble comedy subconsciously.

Quotes

• I don’t know what to tell you, man - people are gonna quote D20, Critical Roll, Monty Python
• They aren’t necessarily meant to be funny? They’re more like a cultural shorthand and rituals for belonging.
• They say “I am one of you, I know the right scripts, I can do the call-and-response!” 
• It’s like a meta-textual handshake of sorts.
• Often, the quotes mutate or change over time to become more specific to your group.

The Bits

• Every group, whether gaming or not, develops an internal economy. 
• A bit is currency - you can buy attention or affection with it.
• You trade a bit for laughs or groans or the DM watching their soul evaporate into sighs.
• In some ways, tables will self-regulate this economy.
• Good bits live on, bad bits die, Legendary Bits may transcend this table or this game and be used at others. 

Modern table comedy is deeply parasocial.

• Many players have internalized the cadence of Brennan Lee Mulligan, Aabria Iyengar, or Matt Mercer.
• Quoting or mimicking them isn’t laziness — it’s a way to align tone and show respect.
• But it can also blur identity: Are we referencing their games, or ours?
• Is the humor derivative, or are we participating in a shared meta-culture of play?
• This creates a kind of folk comedy canon — the oral tradition of Actual Play media.

The Function of Comedy in Collaborative Play

• It defuses tension, reinforces bonds, and stitches continuity across long gaps.
• Laughter is a feedback loop of participation — even disengaged players rejoin the moment when someone lands a good bit.
• Table humor = the heartbeat of the group.
• In many ways, the group’s sense of humor defines its culture more than its ruleset.

The Meta Bit: When the Table Knows It’s a Show

• For Actual Play games, humor becomes performative.
• The “table” has a secondary audience.
• Every joke carries dual awareness:
• Does it land here?
• Does it land out there?
• The bit becomes both a bonding mechanism and part of the brand.
• You joke different if you know your joke could be on a mug forever.

Time to get real pretentious with it again! Buckle up! Talking about the friction that takes place between a game's mechanics and that game's story, and how that impacts the art of gaming in general.

How do you make sure your players are ready to re-enter reality after the campaign is over?

This week we talk about board games you can play all by your lonesome!

Raising kids is hard. It would be harder with cockatrices and manticores and shit.