Chase Taylor-Carter

@chasecarter.bsky.social

4263 Followers 897 Following

Co-owner of Rascal News. Tabletop and internet culture journalist. Avoiding unhealthy use this time around. ✉️: chase@rascal.news https://www.rascal.news/

Disconcertingly attractive version of Bilbo from The Hobbit lies on the ground, looking down lustfully at The One Ring glowing in a pool of water.
Text reads "Just Announced: The Official PUBG Card Game." Below is key art of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds video game, a mercenary wearing body armor and full visored helmet, with the logo in white. Dozons of other silhouetted figures flank the central individual, along with a fiery explosion.
Pokémon TCG is bigger not because it’s a better game (I would argue it’s a lot worse), but because it understands that players and collectors alike crave that experience, of having a strong emotional attachment to a character and then finding them on a little piece of cardboard after gambling on the purchase of a booster pack. The most expensive Pokémon cards are often the Illustrated Rares depicting fan-favorite characters with beautiful art. A card might be borderline useless in competitive play. But if it’s got a pretty Pikachu on it, somebody is going to pay thousands for it. Even today, the price of most Magic cards is typically determined by their usefulness in a deck, doubly so if it’s one of the special art variants. The lore and characters feel secondary, whereas in other TCGs, the characters and our relationships with them are the entire point.
An orange and white domestic long hair cat looking puzzled and empty of thought.
Can I ask - is the word "crunchy" typically used to describe TTRPG? I'm assuming "crunch" means a RPG that's very rules-heavy and needs a lot of GM oversight Short answer: yes Long answer: you've just stepped on a discourse trapdoor, haunted house style
I can see in the feedback we get when we write about Harry Potter, with younger people saying, “Why would I support this fandom? Why would I support this IP?” And maybe she should just shut up, and it would be fine, and it would become the power center that it is. But you’ve got creatives on your team. The last time you were on the show, you talked about being stewards of inclusion. How do you make this decision when the creator of the property is sort of actively reducing the fandom, and in fact, hurting a lot of people in that fandom? For me, it’s separating the art from the artist and going to what the core fans want. And I’m not going to get into the politics around it other than to say we very strongly support diversity and inclusion inside of Hasbro, we’re very proud of it. We’re very proud of the diversity of viewpoints and backgrounds that we have in our employee base. I think Harry Potter is a wonderful franchise. I think it’s done a great job of bringing joy to the world, and I’m looking forward to being part of that, just like I am with all the other brands we support.
My personal point of view about what AI is going to do to at least... I can’t talk about the economy as a whole, but what it’s going to do to how we employ people and how we deploy people is… I think it’s going to be a labor savings tool, but I think it’s going to be ultimately savings that you redeploy into the product and you redeploy in the partners. So there might be some changes about the nature of who we employ or what we pay for, but the total number of people that we pay and the total amount of labor that we deploy, I don’t see going down. My hope is that redeployment drives growth, and that goes up.
To be perfectly candid, I think it’s a structural weakness of most large companies: thinking about new category development. You tend to get focused on your existing business and very obvious adjacencies, and then you tend to lose sight of, “Hey, this new thing that’s kind of coming up the pike.” And I think we’ve been as guilty of it as anyone.
You can see it in games, actually. You mentioned gamers don’t want AI anywhere near their games. Even the audience in some categories really doesn’t want this to happen. How are you managing that inside a company like Hasbro? How are you keeping your designers and your creatives protected or empowered instead of fearful? Well, it’s really giving them the tools and putting them on the vanguard of it. And if Joe or Sally Sixpack feels like they’re suddenly like an avant-garde creative with these powerful tools, take a legitimate avant-garde creative and give them these tools, and they just level it up way more. And I think what we’ve found is when our creatives have a chance to use it, and then they’re able to collaborate with other creatives who are using it and see all the playful ways that they can bring ideas to life, it hasn’t been a difficult tour to get us to get people to adopt. And at the end of the day, it’s all about delivering a better idea. Who knows what’s going to happen with an explosive technology like this? So I don’t want to make too many long-term prognostications because I’ll be as wrong about this as I was about NFTs. But from our perspective, I don’t see it costing creatives jobs, I see it only making the quality of the creative we have better. And that’s how we’ve been deploying it to date, and that’s how I think we’ll continue to deploy it. It’s a tool that kind of levels us up and makes what we make better.
When we have a little bit more time, we can even program in a character, and the character from the IP can actually be a co-designer with us and help us with ideas and help us with like, “That’s authentic, that’s not authentic.” And that’s actually been pretty wonderful in how we’ve been creating things. Wait, so you code in the personality of a character from one of your franchises? Yeah. So we have Peppa Pig co-design Peppa Pig products with us. Optimus Prime co-designs Optimus Prime Transformers products with us. Optimus Prime and Megatron are two of the DJs that we have in the main hall of our office building, where people can ask them to play songs. And Optimus is always very serious and tells you the soulful reason about the song, and Megatron basically makes fun of you for not picking thrash rock. And it’s just a fun way to bring the creative process to life.
Is it true that KPop Demon Hunters was a surprise to the industry, and you weren’t ready for Christmas this year? Oh yeah. Netflix, to their credit, shopped that around quite a bit, and no one bit. And I remember it was the weekend it came out. I’m an old business person, so I was flipping through LinkedIn, and someone was posting about KPop Demon Hunters as, “Not only my daughter’s favorite show, but it’s my favorite new movie of the year.”
Map of Bluesky users realized as galaxy clusters. My username, in pink, is positioned squarely in "TTRPG Creators & Community"
We are mostly responsible for overproduction: from authors who want to be signed to buyers who want something new, not to mention publishers who need to produce and shops/distributors who need to meet buyer demand.
Short answer: yes Long answer: you've just stepped on a discourse trapdoor, haunted house style
Email titled "Gaming studios like Embark should be applauded for AI transparency, not rebuked." Body reads: "Hi Chase. Gaming studios should be applauded when they are transparent about their use of AI in game creation, two of the UK's leading AI experts have said -- all the more so when they have adopted a 'human-in-the-loop' architecture to create or evolve their games."
Screenshot from Hero (2002). Character on left is labeled "me"; character on right with sword is labeled "this fucking game"
Koegler said of Asmodee’s new crowdfunding strategy during the latest earnings call, “The reasons behind the crowdfunding strategy is that some products in the way they are structured could probably not exist only through retail, that’s both linked to their margin structure but also because crowdfunding is actually a very strong consumer engagement way of launching the product. “It drives demand, it creates excitement and it’s really a way of interacting with the consumers in a digital way that is quite different from traditional product launches. “So for us its complementary to the other product lines that are launched in the more traditional way. It’s true that with games with a lot of miniatures, board games with a lot of miniatures, this model has been seen in the past as quite successful.
Message from Regis Bonnessee, the creator: To be fully transparent, it was actually Gamefound who advised us to set an easily achievable initial goal, to help build confidence among backers at launch. According to their experience, setting a higher target often slows campaigns down in their first few days. We trusted their expertise, with no bad intentions, believing we were following sound advice based on thousands of past projects. Looking back, we understand that this choice may have been perceived negatively, and your reaction is completely valid. We can’t undo what’s been done, but we can assure you that there was never any intent to mislead, only a misjudgment in how we presented things.
Noting the €50,000 crowdfunding goal for Seeds of Unity, and the note on the Gamefound page describing it as more than 1,000% funded, Equinox said, “The funding goal displayed on Gamefound is symbolic, as it usually is in crowdfunding campaigns. “It’s chosen to help build early momentum but doesn’t reflect our actual needs. Setting the bar too high sometimes makes a project feel out of reach, while a more accessible goal helps get the collective energy moving right from the start.”
The person behind the official Instagram repeated this explanation, specifically mentioning the application of low-rank adaptations, or LoRAs, to ComfyUI in order to replicate Ruggeri’s preferred style. As artist and programmer Joseph Wilk pointed out in response, both tools require a pre-trained model that likely contains millions of publicly scraped images. In a separate comment, the official account claimed the team “trained a model with some of my old art and some from my wife and other acquaintances.” It later admitted that the wife and friends were not credited on Kickstarter nor within the book because “not all artists like to be associated with the word ‘AI’, so I didn’t even feel comfortable asking them if I could use their names in the credits.”
discord screenshot from me (Chase), that reads: "Thomas, this is so fucking funny ho my lord."
“Music consumption is shifting,” a Lofi Records label manager, who goes by Berrkan Bag online, told 404 Media in an email. “Short-form and scroll-driven platforms have changed how people engage with lo-fi. Some of the long-form, narrative visuals that helped define the genre are being challenged by algorithmic trends.”
He's open, however, to the use of AI to come up with ideas. "But the final product, the thing that you see, will be made by a human being. And that's our position on it. So we're not using generative AI to create the artwork for our cards or games." He thinks that AI could be used to help out in the development process, though. "Absolutely, we're looking at that." He stresses that any uses of AI will be examined "on a case by case basis" that questions how it's being used. "Is this displacing the human soul, spirit, creativity in doing it? Because we don't want derivative work. We want that innovation. We want things that people have dreamt up.
“I'm worried for my colleagues and all the indie developers who don't have a stateside shop set up. You shouldn't need to have that,” Nohr said. “It also fucking annoys me to have to comply with Trump and do what he wants in terms of producing more within the states. But I don't know what else to do right now, really. A majority of our customers are in the USA. We have to sell there. Somehow.”
“It is no coincidence that staff who left the company years ago, suddenly started a campaign against Zatu in the same month that the individual was arrested,” he added. Rascal was not able to verify this information with police. They also added that “the publication of any defamatory and untrue information published about Zatu and/or its employees will expose Rascal to legal action (including but not limited to a defamation claim).”
"This is the age of Dungeons & Dragons" As more people watch D&D for entertainment, more people seem to be playing it too. Though an exact number of players is hard to track, Bilsland said something like 85 million people have engaged with the game, associated video games, and the movie Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves over the past few years.
An issue with hypertextuality is linkrot, which is another thing you gain from having the blog published. I'm worried about blogs, especially my blog — I don't think that Google can be trusted to maintain that forever. At some point they're going to pull the plug on blogspot, and there's going to be a lot of writing lost. It's going to be a burning of the Library of Alexandria. Having my writings living in a book means it can survive. My blog uses Squarespace. I'm sure at some point they could go bankrupt and sell all my stuff.
Text reads: The Realm of Radia LAND OF ADVENTURE Long ago, Radia was home to the Aura, a good people that ruled over the land with fairness. Then the scourge Vardas appeared, destroying the realm of the Aura and plunging the World into Desperation. The goal of the game is to travel all over the World to bring Hope back to the realm of Radia. After collecting enough Hope, the Champions will be able to open the Fortress of Evil, where they will face Vardas in an epic battle. But first, they need to find a way to get their hands on the legendary Twilight Sword, an amazing power that takes on a different form depending on who wields it.
Cocks assured everyone on the call that “Magic’s engine of growth is durable; it is diversified; it is accelerating,” but also admitted that the TCG’s 70% men demographic was a place where they could “do better.” How? Would you believe their plan involves more UB sets? “Don’t be surprised if you see us poking into romantasy or K-Pop in future IP releases,” said the CEO like he’d just revealed his family’s pasta sauce recipe. Hasbro is about 20 years behind other entertainment media in believing Barbie will bridge the consumer gender gap, but it also reveals a callous relationship with their players. We are no more than an itemized list of special interests they can monetize, one by one — settings on the money-printing machine to spit out an endless stream of blorbos, nostalgia, and (apparently) BookTok special interests.
The second conclusion is that the American consumer may not be as bad off as originally suspected. The economic outlook is clearly uncertain for the remainder of 2025 (thanks to tariffs and higher prices), and consumer budgets are supposedly tightening. Yet, miraculously, droves of TCG fans still have $714.42 to spend on a Final Fantasy Collector Booster Displays. While it might be true that the average American household is feeling the pain of rising CPI caused by tariffs, higher wealth individuals seem to be making up for that by dropping thousands of dollars on non-essentials (like high-priced Magic packs). How long that dynamic lasts into the future is unclear, but for the near term, it will likely continue.
For one, it basically gives WotC carte blanche to keep increasing prices on Universes Beyond Premiere sets. And, why shouldn't they? Apparently, the maximum amount the typical TCG fan will spend on a Magic Premiere set, with a popular IP attached to it, hasn't been breached yet. It is possible that WotC is actually undercharging for their products and could get away with raising the prices on future Collector Boosters to $49.99 and the Play Boosters to $9.99. If a strong IP was attached to these boosters (like Marvel), it's a solid bet that fans would gladly pay it and demand more.
It has made my job much, much harder. I do not allow genAI in my classes. However, because genAI is so good at producing plausible-sounding text, that ban puts me in a really awkward spot. If I want to enforce my ban, I would have to do hours of detective work (since there are no reliable ways to detect genAI use), call students into my office to confront them, fill out paperwork, and attend many disciplinary hearings. All of that work is done to ferret out cheating students, so we have less time to spend helping honest ones who are there to learn and grow. And I would only be able to find a small percentage of the cases, anyway.
Twelve RPGs and tabletop games of various colors, mostly black,arrayed on a white duvet.
“Regardless of what number comes before the percentage this time, the overall picture is still chaos, instability, and unpredictability — all words that drive daggers at the heart of business,” Hicks said. “Economic chaos as made manifest by this administration means we have to dial in our ambitions.”
"Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive. Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge), by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets), and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying. The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what you’re like—what’s going on—what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your"
"The suit alleges that when the true nature of WotC’s cancelled agreement came to light via unredacted documents on April 17, Diamond “feigned outrage”, calling the termination “shocking”, “coming out of nowhere” and a “slap in the face” given its 25-year relationship with WotC. AENT’s filing claims Diamond’s falsehoods were finally laid bare on April 21 during a video call between the pair and WotC, with the latter reportedly confirming Diamond were aware of the termination last December, and adding that it was due to WotC’s business with them having declined more than 8% over the past four years – despite rising sales from WotC’s four other distributors."
“I'm not convinced that whatever the Trump administration decides will last for more than a few weeks because that guy is just not reliable at all,” he said. “Listen, if nothing changes the American people will have much more serious problems than getting my roleplaying game."
Screenshot of an old children's computer game. A blue robot stands in a cave, with a T-Rex skeleton in the background and a green frog in a bowl in the foreground.
“Even with Hasbro’s relative strength and flexibility, logistics are becoming more complex and changes in receivables and shipping dynamics present a challenge,” Cocks said. “Ultimately, tariffs translate into higher consumer prices, potential job losses as we adjust to absorb increased costs, and reduced profits for our shareholders.”
“We feel really good about the back half releases as well, especially the new Universes Beyond sets. It’s very clear to us that Universes Beyond as a strategy has increased the active install base of Magic players,” Cocks said. “Final Fantasy will be the best-selling set of all time on day one. It already is.”
I wrote the first five commanders—a legate, an archbishop, a grand princess, a king, and a khan—but each subsequent commander is randomly generated. New subordinate commanders get a relationship to their superior commander (often, but not always, family), their age, and a few traits—older commanders get more traits but are worse in hand-to-hand combat (a relatively uncommon occurrence). These basic tables have resulted in some remarkable dynamics and relationships: one faction is entirely composed of family members of a dead former king; another involves a secret parent-child relationship; another still is composed of no family at all, just work colleagues trying to get along. My players love these relationships. While Cataphracts could basically be played entirely in clipped sentences and spreadsheet math, so far, every single one of my twenty-three has, to a greater or lesser extent, gotten into character and spent a lot of extra time and effort in their letters and messages to each other.
Caterpillar shaped cake, named Colin, light green face and limbs with a dark brown body. Four candles and candy buttons decorate his back. Two tiny cake caterpillars crawl nearby.
text reads: Don't just take the 200k wishlist stat as a sign of life for Hawthorn. Cerlan recalled the day the video went wide, waiting for the embargo to break—and a feeling of anxiety as few outlets picked the story up (sorry guys, we needed a few hours). But stories did drop throughout the day, and shortly after, videos from content creators followed.
text reads: Smartphone screens are not the toy industry’s only technology challenge. Cocks uses artificial intelligence tools to generate storylines, art, and voices for his D&D characters and hails AI as “a great leveler for user-generated content.” Current AI platforms are failing to reward creators for their work, “but I think that’s solvable,” he says, describing himself as “an AI bull” who believes the technology will extend the reach of Hasbro’s brands. That could include subscription services letting other Dungeon Masters enrich their D&D campaigns, or offerings to let parents customize Peppa Pig animations. “It’s supercharging fandom,” he says, “and I think that’s just net good for the brand.”
text reads: Cocks plays regularly, including a campaign with his sales team last Sunday, for which he constructed an adventure featuring a Scooby-Doo theme, mini figures, sound effects, and an “incredibly elaborate” PowerPoint presentation. “It was Scooby-Doo and The Haunting of Merkmiss Manor, and they had to go and figure out who the Merkmiss monster was, and unmask a bunch of local townspeople, and then clearly they weren’t the real villains. It was evil Lyle Blackwood who was trying to steal the Blackwood fortune,” he recounts, reveling in the world he created.
screenshot of my previous post with various resistance lib hashtags for words and politicians like "democrat", "dnc", "Tim Walz", "Pete Buttigieg", and "Amy Klobuchar".
A calico cat sleeps on a red blanket with one paw covering her face
Text reads: (ACHIEVED) 2,025 - We bring on Ranged Touch’s Cameron Kunzelman to write a monthly column. (Prior to the pledge drive, Cameron agreed to forgo pay so we can hire a second columnist. Are you a BIPOC writer? Want to throw your hat in the ring? Reach out: info@rascal.news.) (ACHIEVED) 2,075 - All Rascals get a $100 raise! 2,100 - We convince Lin to take time off from Hollywood and write for us more regularly! 2,150 - All Rascals get another $100 raise! 2,200 - We send part of the team to Essen Spiel in Germany, establishing our European invasion.
BuzzFeed says the platform is “designed as an oasis from algorithm-driven doomscrolling” and will “introduce quirky, weird, and joyful experiences to make the internet fun again.”
Text reads: There were also a lot more successful campaigns in 2024. Kickstarter claims 5,314 successful tabletop campaigns, or an 8% increase from 2023. However, the amount earned by each tabletop campaign continues to fall. In 2019, successful tabletop campaigns earned $67,350 on average. In 2023, that number appears to have fallen to $45,982. Last year, Kickstarter says it dropped to just $41,400. Remove the biggest campaign from the equation — Brandon Sanderson and Brotherwise Games’ $15.1 million campaign for tabletop role-playing games based on the author’s work — and it’s just $38,566 on average for successful tabletop creators.
Samir: Cyberpunk can mean a lot of things. But the one thing I've insisted we need to keep is that the people of Egypt are built different. We're running different software, and we're never going to change. A lot of depictions of cultures in cyberpunk media says brain chips and cybernetic arms are the way the world works, now. Egypt is not like that. You go to Egypt and say we're doing brain chips, most people are gonna be like no the fuck we're not. Bassili: Egypt is very culturally traditional, so we don't have the tropy aspects of cyberpunk: we don't rely on having body modification, and we don't rely on cybernetic implants. Our world is built on finding solutions around that. There are organizations that represent the opposite. For example, Binary Ra, which is kind of the counter cultural movement, are people who are very heavily invested into body modification. They represent a minority perspective on cyberpunk. It's not all rainbows, sunshine, and unicorns. There is tension. Cyberpunk worlds are not clean, they're dystopian in nature. There's the opposite of the dominant culture that is also trying really hard to change.
text reads: An Ennie Awards spokesperson told Polygon that the award committee was working on a full response to public concerns. They also noted that this is the second year the policy has been in effect, and that the committee had received “no feedback from the 900+ submissions that were required to check the box last year.” With more attention given to the subject of AI-generated content in the wake of its use by Hasbro, members of the industry are perhaps more aware of the technology now than in previous years. The spokesperson went on to state that only 0.05% of submissions disclosed using AI content, with the majority of those submissions being for “Online Content/Digital Media.”
Text reads: Rascal established a very direct model of responsibility when we decided to fund ourselves through subscriptions. Our readers, our paying audience, represent our stakeholders. Their money pays for industry reporting and critical impressions of its production. We maintain editorial discretion and try our best to make their subscription worth it. Our job—and this is a job—is not to spotlight smaller creators’ games or to uplift voices without a platform. We are not paid to balance the scales between Wizards of the Coast and your favorite lyric game writer on itch.io. We all love when an article triples the sales of a game produced by someone working two jobs and dreaming of a full-time design career, but that is not why we exist.
original post reads: the whole point of a zine is that it's cheap to produce, amateur and homemade. If you're being asked to apply to participate ina print project, it is not a zine. If the final product is being printed and bound professionally, it is not a zine. If you are being asked to enter into any kind of licensing agreement more complex than "my work can be reproduced as part of this publication" it is not a zine. nine times put [sic] of ten if the final product costs more that $5 you have left zine country. im so serious about this. quoter adds: no shade to anyone in particular, but I think the #ttrpg space needs to be more comfortable using the words collection or anthology instead of zine for their project. Like this person on tumblr sums up a lot of my thoughts on it.
A private lane over a cattleguard, covered in slushy snow and ice. Edged by an old wooden fence
A shed, tires, chicken wire and other trash all covered in snow.
Red home with a fenced backyard, a utility pole in the right foreground. Everything is blue-tinned and covered in snow.
Field covered in snow. Right: red utilities shed with a metal "C" on it
A man in a gray beanie, sunglasses, and light jacket flipping the bird to the camera. The Sierra Mountains at sunset form the background.