Okay, posting a debrief thread that summarizes my experience and hopefully is not accusatory. Short version is that I felt some things but that doesn't mean that anyone was trying to trick me. Insinuating someone is doing that on a public platform is irresponsible. (1/11)

About two months ago, during one of the peak periods of "play stuff other than D&D" discourse on Twitter, someone suggested playing The Game instead of D&D, with some level of praise around it. I didn't comment so I am not sure exactly who.

I went to the itch page. I hadn't read the dicebreaker article or picked up on any of the humorous discourse around it. The itch page was a bit sparse and tongue-in-cheek but sometimes that's the case so I thought nothing of it.

I generally try to pay creators and in particular there were threads floating around, as there often are, about doing that. The game was PWYW and I tossed in $6.66, not wanting the Creator to give me something for free, and not waiting to pay because I might forget to come back.

I downloaded it. The game is sparse. About 9 pages of content highly spaced out, 1,000 words. It's d20 roll under with three stats and a few other other minimal mechanics. Straightforward, tongue-in-cheek tone. And here is where my expectations must have been out of whack.

I did not know if it had been playtested, or what the level of intentionality was in its design, or how much long term support in the form of expansions it would receive. I didn't know its history, and I am not highly familiar with what's good and bad in OSR spaces.

What it felt like was that The Game was a punchline, saying that you don't need a lot of mechanics to have fun and that you can make a fun game easily. It felt like WotC was being trolled but I wasn't part of the group doing the trolling so I had been trolled too.

That is how it felt to me. I was truly upset. Once again, I didn't know what had gone into The Game. I just felt like I wasn't cool enough or in on a joke. I remember feeling acutely disappointed and it raised my guard with respect to the types of games I would support monetarily

Fast forward to yesterday, and I was adjusting my contributions to creators, reviewing my downloads, etc., and seeing The Game on my http://itch.io  history revived the memory for me.

I had bad, manic energy, and I had let the memory of feeling disappointed grow into the idea that tricking me was intentional, or at least a side effect of some other intention. I posted some bad comments on here, wrecked a real person's day.

I should have reached out privately, and others have commented to that effect. Even with my comparative few followers, I have a responsibility not to assume the intentions of others without talking to them directly. (11/11)