Some games deserve a second chance. Nathan talks about some of the games he plans on giving this chance in 2024 and what he hopes to get out of the experience.

We are not a news program. However, we are hoping to revisit old news stories that fell by the wayside. What ever happened with the OpenGL or Unity stories? What happened to the bad games that got apology jpegs? Probably subjects worth exploring.

It’s the beginning of the year and so we should do an update about what we are doing with TPK stuff, like Discord, Patreon, YouTube, our website and our merchandise. Housekeeping time!

Nothing gets Nathan in the holiday spirit like Die Hard. On this episode, we become John McClane and create a quest to stop an assault on a wizard’s tower. Is it part of a campaign or a one shot? How does our party get there? How do they stop the fantasy terrorists? Is Die Hard a Christmas movie? All that and more on this festive episode.

When Frank Capra made It’s a Wonderful Life, he could only imagine that one day we would use the premise to create an end-of-campaign scenario for a TTRPG. Truly this would be his crowning achievement. What would the world look like if your PCs were never in it? How about OUR PCs? Should we be afraid to find out? Also, a spicy Nathan explains why he didn’t actually like the movie.

Home Alone is the best Christmas movie of all time according to ‘90s kids. Since Kevin McCallister is the OG murder hobo, we can easily take his home defense strategy and apply it to… magical bandicoots? How would we defend an abandoned town from a furry swarm of destruction? And can we remember where the family went in the 1st and 2nd movie?

Sometimes you need an expert to teach you the basics. So, we looked at Will Wright’s Masterclass on writing game mechanics to see if his 5 tips are worth taking into consideration. Then, we try to parse numbers 3 and 4 to make it make sense.

So, what is the difference between linear and emergent gameplay? Can a chatbot give us half-way decent examples of games that use them? Do we have better suggestions? Can the two play nice together?

How many short-term goals go into a long-term goal? What are those? We look at how games and designers use short-term goals and build upon them for larger things. We also try to make an unnecessary number of levels for goals, which probably was just us over-thinking it.

There are many gaming mysteries, from glitchy pokemon to unattainable chests to questions about who kicked off a nuclear war. However, we have avoided discussing these things on the show. And now we explain the reason why.

We were once told we were bad at reviewing games. This is particularly weird since we do not review games. So, let’s discuss what we are apparently very bad at doing.

Drama alert? Not here. While we talk about industry news that might affect gaming or gamers, we’ve avoided discussing drama inside the community. This is intentional. We will now explain why.

The Game Awards announced nominees for 2023. Now, we here at TPK care so deeply for award shows that we almost forgot it was even happening. However, eagle-eyed viewers asked us about it, so we are going to look through some of the categories and see if we even know what these games are. What will win?

Every time a game asks you to build your own base, a variety of problems arise. How many resources do I need to collect? How does the game account for structural stability? How much time do I have to spend making it? What does the base let you do that you couldn’t do otherwise? We’ll figure that out, kind of, in this episode.

Base building mechanics are coming to D&D. In recent playtest material for One D&D, Wizards of the Coast announced the concept of “Bastions” which would let your character have a base of operations that could be expanded, protected and used to make items. Build a theater, get some bears to defend it, hire a bartender to make you a giant. Let’s talk about the way this would be implemented and whether this seems functional for a real game.

Big things are happening at The Escapist. Or I should say, big things used to happen at The Escapist before the staff left. We are talking about what happened with Nick Calandro and all the staff that followed him out the door. We also discuss what the future holds for Escapist ex-pats, most notably Yahtzee Croshaw from Zero Punctuation.

Blizzcon happened and Alex was very excited to discuss the future of World of Warcraft, while Nathan respectfully sat in pensive ennui. But Blizzard has big, long-term plans for their seminal MMORPG and we discuss what that will look like for the next decade or two.

Nathan got a pleasant surprise this week in the form of an unexpected game called Wartales. The medieval turn-based combat game keeps presenting new discoveries in both the game world and mechanics. On this episode we discuss what makes this game so engaging and why Nathan is ultimately going to go play it again as soon as he’s done editting.

Midnight Acres promises a unique combination of farming sim and tower defense game that seemed like a good idea when Nathan originally picked it up. Oh, how innocent we were… Perhaps there are genres that were never meant to go together and we are going to talk about it on this episode.

The act of playing tabletop games can be represented in video games, both through games that emulate the systems themselves and the ones who theme adventures around them. In this episode we take a look at Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands and how it tries to represent tabletop gaming. We also discuss the different benefits and limitations of tabletop systems on pen and paper versus video games.

A very old, odd article came across Nathan’s desk recently. Forbes discussed mentally strong people and the 13 things they avoid. This seemingly has nothing to do with gaming. However another outlet modified this to be about 13 things that mentally strong GMs avoid. Is it really such a great idea to try equating advice for executives to the landscape of gaming? We’ll compare a couple of these points and see how they did.

So, you’re adventure party is outnumbered and outgunned. Now they have to choose to fight or surrender. Can you explain the statistically small odds of them succeeding? Can you save them from near-certain death? We look at a Reddit question to offer some unsolicited advise.

Breathedge is what happens when you try doing survival crafting games in space. The results are mixed. Alex and Nathan discuss their experience playing the game and why they stopped.

Micro-gravity is a popular thing to add in games set in space. However, the frustration of these sections warrants additional discussion. What requirements do you need to have to make games less floaty and disorienting?

Have you ever tried a game that you thought you’d hate, only to heartily enjoy it? Well, Dadam asked this question of us a couple months back and Nathan had a couple games that fit that bill. Which ones? Are they the ones you’re thinking about right now? Probably not, but watch to find out.

Redfall hit a low of 3 concurrent players in October. Before the recent update, there had been a 4 month period of having no fixes for the poor state it was in at launch. The “Bite Back” DLC is still on sale though. Should companies eventually give up on games that don’t work? Is it worth salvaging a bad game at launch? What if you can’t imagine what a good version of the game even is? Let’s talk about that vampire game… again.

The Thing is considered one of John Carpenter’s best films. The story of a research team in Antarctica encountering an alien organism that takes on the appearance of it’s victims, the feeling of paranoia and questions about the unknown cemented it as a great horror story. But could we take the formula and make a tabletop quest out of it? What skills, characters and solutions could you use to make this a spook-tastic role-playing experience?