Joesky Wants To Tax Me But This Is Boston And It's 1773

28 Aug, 2026

The Joesky tax pisses me off more than it should.

But it only pisses me off more than it should. It should piss me off, and it should piss you off, too.

Source: Cornischong at lb.wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I find the original post a bit obnoxious to read. Not a lot, but a bit. Don't throw blah-blah-blahs in all-caps houses, is my thinking. Maybe you like it, though. Maybe you think it's funny. That's fine. It doesn't really matter because that's not the real problem. The real problem is how absolutely backwards it gets everything.

I have maybe once found a "useful" thing in a blog post that was actually useful. Maybe. In fact, I can't recall ever using a spell or a monster I found in a blog post, because they never seem to fit in the kinds of games I run. Context is king – of a small kingdom, much unlike its neighbours in all but size. None of them use the same weights and measures, and all their rail gauges are different.

Do you know what I find useful? Abstract discussion of games. I don't need you to give me a cute little tool for scheduling games; just tell me how you schedule your games. I don't need you to give me a stat block, or to tell me how to make a stat block; tell me how you make stat blocks, and why you make them like that, and where you learned to do it, and how you judge the finished product. Maybe tell me who you think is making stat blocks wrong. Maybe tell me how you interpret stat blocks, mechanically or as fiction. Maybe even tell me what Robert's rules of order or cognitive linguistics or the Great Chain of Being or whatever else you like has to do with stat blocks. I might not read it right away but there's a decent chance I'll come back to it if the hook seems promising.

I'm a big boy. I can draw conclusions from your stories and from your grand unifying theories. I can apply general lessons to my own specifics.

You're a grown-up too. You can do the same. Don't tell me you can't.

Look: there's theory-posting and there's theory-posting and there's theory-posting. The first is useless, I agree. The second is only useful to certain people doing a certain thing – though it very much can be useful to those people doing that thing, which is nothing to sneeze at. The third, though, is how you move from tools to skills, and from hobby to craft.

Maybe you're thinking, "Actually, I find the Joesky tax payments more useful than the rest of it." OK. Maybe so! All the more power to you. That's why I'm not proposing an anti-Joesky tax, where you must proclaim a grand unifying theory any time you share stats for a cool raygun. I'm just saying people can theory-post and that's actually a good thing, and tacking a spell or whatever on the end of it doesn't make it better. Suggesting otherwise, as the Joesky tax does, teaches us to devalue things that are actually valuable.

Here are some great posts that wouldn't have been improved by the Joesky tax:

• "D&D Doesn't Understand What Monsters Are," Throne of Salt¹
• "The Default Dungeon is Colonial," In Lowercase
• "I Pre-Roll My Random Encounters," Nick Hendriks
• "I'm Tired of Touchstones," Murkdice
• "The Importance of Being Earnest," 1999 A.D.
• "The Invisible Rulebooks," Rolltop Indigo
• "Play is Canon," Prismatic Wasteland
• "The RPG City Trilemma," Borough Bound Blog
• "Sam's Three-Question Taxonomy," Sam Sorensen
• "Skill as My Balls," Magnolia Keep

You might think it's silly to argue with a post written 16 years ago. That's where you're wrong: I saw, with my own two eyeballs, a person paying the Joesky tax as recently as last week, in the year of our Lord 2026. Its opposite-day values still haunt us.

The Joesky tax is retrograde and anti-intellectual. It's exactly backwards. You'll never catch me paying it.

Here's the measured version.

Maybe you're going to tell me that Joesky wrote his post in a context, and in that context a lot of people were arguing in circles about ttrpgs. Theory posting was, more often than not, the airing of grievances new and grievances stale. Maybe you're going to tell me I wasn't reading the posts in 2010, so I don't know what it was like. Maybe you're going to tell me an intervention needed to be made. And I get it. I do get it. Kinda. I've skimmed enough arguments about zilch play and whether or not system matters to see what you'd be talking about. An intervention needed to be made. About that, Joesky wasn't wrong.

And, well, there's still discourse today, too, including a lot of misguided discourse.

The problem is that the antidote to blah-blah-blah theory is not pinning a stat-block tail on the end of the blah-blah-blah donkey. The actual solution is just better theory: better thinking and better writing. The actual solution is avoiding too much recursive squabbling and making sure what you're talking about has contact with experiences at the table and is governed by reason and charity, not by status jockeying. The Joesky tax is simply not a solution to the problem. It's at best a compensation. We can do better than compensations.

Even if the Joesky tax was a solution in principle, the way people actually pay it is usually much less useful to the hobby than it's intended to be. A magic item at the end of a post isn't doing much, and neither is a table of things a goblin might be doing. First of all, context is king of a little kingdom, like I said. But second, I've found a hundred magic items on Tumblr and Reddit and Pinterest, and I've actually used some of those; I don't need you to do it on your blog. But the thing blogs, specifically, are good for is better understanding what we're doing in this hobby. They're good for hashing out procedures and seeing if they work, or where they need work. They're good for telling anecdotes and for musing about what the anecdotes might mean, if only for your own table. They're good for figuring stuff out where other people can benefit from watching the process. More importantly, very little else is good for that. If you want to put out some magic items, you can do it on Drivethru RPG.² Don't just write things because you like the sound of your own voice, of course, and I agree there can be diminishing returns for writing-about-writing-about-writing-about-ttrpgs (or at least, most of us aren't often up to the task of doing it well). Blogs, though, are exactly the place for sharing your observations and working out what you think is going on in games. Please don't think that's any less valuable than a neat little monster, no matter how cute and gross and growly the little monster is.

Actually, scratch that part where I say, "Don't write things because you like the sound of your own voice." It's your blog. You can be self-indulgent. It's neither allowed nor disallowed because nothing's allowed nor disallowed. It's your blog. I'm not your boss any more than Joesky is.³ Now, they're going to tell you that nobody has to like what you write if it's all just self-indulgence, and that's true. (There's no guarantee anyone will like it whatever you do, but I guess there are ways you can increase or decrease the odds.) Do you care? Is that why you're writing? For popularity? I don't think that's why I'm writing this blog, most days.⁴ The obnoxious thing about the Joesky tax, really, is that it presumes to know why you're writing, and that it can therefore tell you what kind of writing meets your goals. In truth, only you get to decide why you're writing. It's your blog.

See also: "Against 'Gameable Content'," Magnolia Keep

#blogging-about-blogging