Okay, so a thing about Tolkien's Middle-Earth is that, for elves and other beings of comparable metaphysical stature, the "distance" between an act of will and its tangible result is shorter than it is for mortals. The universe is just more inclined to play along with how they want it to work, which is why they're not lying when they claim not to know what magic is even though the products of their craftsmanship are by any reasonable standard supernatural – they just make stuff, and it works the way it does because that's how they intended it to.

This has a number of fun worldbuilding implications, like inventors having tangible authority over things crafted using their techniques, regardless of who does the actual crafting, because they literally willed the principles which allow those techniques to work into being, or the fact that when powerful beings die, sometimes stuff that depends on techniques they invented stops working. However, there's a bigger implication that that's generally gone unaddressed:

Elves can't do science.

Like, it's straight up impossible. A Tolkien elf cannot construct and carry out a meaningful experiment of any sort – it'll always works the way they expect it to, but only for that particular elf. Confirmation bias is an insurmountable barrier.

I want to read a story about the elf who figures this out and it bothers them terribly.

This would also apply to Awakened mages in Mage: the Awakening, although in that it seems like the idea is since any human can shape reality, an inventor who teaches enough Sleepers can die and it’s fine.

on disliking people

ive been working on a thought lately and it goes something like: creators of marginalized identities have it really rough because people end up treating them not as an invisible force behind the content they like, like majority-identified creators, but as a sort of totem to symbolize the fan’s support of that particular identity. so when the creator turns out to be a real, complex person, the fan perceives the sudden conflict between their moral signalling and the creator’s complex lived identity as a betrayal and responds with reflexive horror and outrage. they attack, because actually they’re defending their own hurt feelings, and their own jeopardized identity as a good person who supports good people.

this also happens on i think a micro level with trans people: allies want to support us, but we’re just people. a lot of us are obnoxious and most of us weird. transphobia is horrible and unjust: it’s good to be against it. it’s a good and valiant thing to want to oppose it. but again, real actual trans people are very often unpalatable because we are not meant for consumption. we aren’t pleasant because we’re not products. we’re just living our weird little lives, having gross sex, saying stupid things, looking kind of funky. that’s what real people do. that’s how real people are. 

so when people who passionately oppose transphobia bonk into the surprising fact that trans people can be unpleasant, they experience cognitive dissonance in a way that feels like a personal betrayal. and they lash out, they push back. and the trans person gets reclassified as Specifically Bad, because the person lashing out isn’t transphobic, can’t be transphobic, hates transphobia, so there must be some exception here that squares the circle of the fact that they don’t like this trans person (who, again, isn’t a movement, an ideal, a product, an experience). and the trans person in question has a really bad day, or week, or month, or they die, if the lashback gets big enough. and the cycle continues.

i think a really vital component of opposing bigotry is internalizing and accepting that normal people can be unpleasant and it’s not a moral failing for you to just casually dislike lots of people for no real reason. humans aren’t meant for consumption. it’s a feature, not a failing.

sticking up for people’s rights gets a lot less emotionally complicated when you know, fundamentally, that you don’t have to like those people. because they’re just people, and people deserve rights even if you dislike them, which a lot of the time, you will not.

it’s fine. it really, really needs to be fine.

This. The question of “should human rights apply to Those People” is, for all decent people, utterly unrelated to the question of do you LIKE any of those people.

TIL The only children to survive the Titanic without a parent were two brothers aged 2 and 4. Their father kidnapped them from his ex-wife and boarded the ship with a fake name. The father didn’t survive and for weeks the boys were known as the Titanic Orphans until their mother was found.

via beatlyzer.com

imagine being all hyped up to meet the Titanic Orphans and then it turns out they’re just regular-sized orphans

Life During Interesting Times

Why Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves Didn't Use D&D Combat Rules (And Why They Were Right Not To)

The D&D movie was really fun, and since at this point most of my friends play D&D (or at the very least other TTRPGs), almost everyone I talk to on a regular basis has also seen it and liked it. The consensus is that even though there's no "meta" that the characters are controlled by players sitting around a table, or jokes about the DM, the movie feels like D&D. The jokes feel like jokes people would make while playing. The constant pivoting from Plan A to Plan B to Plan C feels familiar to anyone who has spent an hour at a table deciding what to do, only to have a roll go sideways and screw things up. Before I get too far, I should say this post contains some mild spoilers for Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.

This is one of those posts that is correct in a lot of ways about all of the details that is describing - but we should be honest that nothing about the mechanics of D&D versus other tabletop games is why the D&D movie didn't use combat mechanics. It didn't use them because they would have been an awful fit for the movie they were trying to tell. It would have required 'teaching the audience' - which is a mainstream audience the film is presuming knows nothing about D&D - those mechanics and how they work, which is something the movie was uninterested in doing.

And by 'uninterested' in that we mean it absolutely did do a bunch of that! It taught you how Time Stop works, and how Counterspell works, how Wild Shape works, how its big necro ritual works, etc. It taught you so much - just you know, organically, in way that fits how people actually living in a world would do things. Stacking anything approximating a dice roll or a skill tree onto that would be pointless, tonally contradictory, and a bridge too far for the audience that is already having a bunch asked of it.

The writers of the D&D movie did not evaluate the merits of D&D's combat system - they evaluated the merit of having any system at all on screen and threw it out. It was probably a very easy decision.

I haven’t seen the movie, but the OP is less about the movie and more about preaching the Story Games way of doing things, and I think that discussion is worth following.

(As far as that goes - stories where roleplaying game mechanics apply diegetically are usually extremely nerdy comedies such as The Order of the Stick, because it’s inherently quite a silly concept. Even in OotS, the rules apply only when it makes for a good joke, and it will play loose with the rules at other times. As Ash says, that is less to do with the specific flaws of D&D as a game. A story written to conform to the rules of Apocalypse World would also feel quite awkward, I suspect.)

I love Apocalypse World, which was one of the most ingenious and coherent games to come out in the last decade. I like many of its spinoffs and offshoots. However, having returned to playing D&D after a long time playing exclusively story games of the PbtA-and-friends lineages, I think it’s worth discussing what D&D does offer, which those games broadly do not - to identify the design tradeoffs that were made, and try and figure out what else lies in the possibility space...

There are also some design considerations here that are kind of glossed over.

To reach back to OP briefly:

Hard Disagree.

The takeaway is that descriptions don't matter in other games.

If your character is described as a second-story cat burglar who runs across rooftops every night, and my character is described as a bluff thuggish man of violence, but the rules say that you're no better at railing running than I am, and in fact I get a bonus when I do a cool stunt off the rails? Those character descriptions were lying to us.

"D&D doesn't reward description" is a take that is neither hot nor cold, and if I found it in my mouth, I would spit it out. D&D rewards descriptions that matter. If you say you "take cover behind a pillar" your defenses are increased, by a lot, it might be the difference between your life and death, describing how you try to defend yourself is incredibly important in so far as it engages with the actual world that exists.

Keeping with the railing from the tweet: Why am I running across the railing?

In either case, the description is more, not less, important than in a game that gives arbitrary bonuses for "trying cool shit."

If your game gives bonuses for trying cool shit, there's two main possibilities here:

In this world, our characters are not "Skilled second-story cat burglar" and "Brutalized thug" they are "Generic action hero with a thief motif" and "Generic action hero with a thug motif."

Which is fine if you're trying to play a generic action game. D&D is not a generic action game, it allows you to be bad at physical action and good at other things instead.

And so:

What Are You Talking About, D&D is signigicantly more narratively satisfying because the narrative is actually relevant, unlike most story games where the point is to just tell a story and the points don't matter.

An implication of universes where "badass descriptions give a bonus" is that fighting in the most mundanely straight-forward way possible should be a mark of the most elite and arrogant combatants: they're confident enough in their skills that they don't need the badass bonus.

hey since i’m occasionally giving out adult advice. anyone wanna know my very adult and very boring and very sensible suggestion for grief gifts for friends and family when someone close to them dies

alright. this is shamelessly stolen from my godparents when they did this when my grandma passed about ten years ago, and since then i’ve been on both sides of this and it’s surprisingly thoughtful and useful. this is particularly important when people are like, in charge of funeral prep, but anyone who just heard someone close to them just died is gonna be in a certain headspace, so it probably works regardless. people are gonna be sending cards and flowers and other very nice, but ultimately useless gifts.

don’t do that. go to the grocery store and order one of those deli party platters. the ones with like, four different kinds each of meats and cheeses, maybe some sides, and veggies, and bread, and condiments. get the vegetarian version if you know they’re vegetarians. whatever. you know better than i how many people are gonna be eating it, but guess maybe, like, four day’s worth of food.

because, here’s the thing. cards and flowers are very nice, and remind you that you’re in people’s thoughts. but you know what you just. don’t even want to think about when someone dies? making dinner. going to the grocery store. ordering takeout. whatever. you don’t want to have to think about food. you just want to eat in between planning a funeral and working through your grief.

without getting too into it, when my grandma died, we were thrown for a loop. and we ate nothing but what was on that goddamned deli platter for days. because it was quick and easy and fresh and tasted good and we didn’t have to think about food. and ten years later, i don’t remember those cards or flowers, but i sure as hell remember the deli platter.

so next time someone’s going through something, when a family member or close friend just passed. go to your nearest grocery store, and if you can, walk a deli platter over to their place. as soon as you can after you hear. they may look at you weird when you hand it to them, but trust me, in the long run they’re gonna thank you.

It is the way of my people to bring casseroles and deli plates to mourners.

It's the difference between "showing you care" and actually providing care.

There's a reason why the old etiquette was to bring casseroles to the bereaved, new mothers, etc. (There's even a recipe called "funeral potatoes"), and I'm glad it's being reintroduced, but why was it lost?

Or was it a class thing originally or something?

One of the best thing that people did for my wife and I when we were grieving was to bring us meals *after the crisis period was over*. We were well-stocked with all kinds of food for the two weeks immediately following the [REDACTED], but some people took care to bring us at least one meal per week for the next several months. They were a godsend.

The Twitter algorithm disclosure makes perfect sense if you understand what their actual goal is. As far as I can tell, what they're trying to do is foster a platform consisting of a tiny core of mega-popular content creators in which exactly one creator entirely dominates any given sphere of interest (i.e., thereby ensuring that they're not competing with each other for clicks), surrounded by passive consumers who only engage in order to promote the content of the creator(s) they follow. Basically, they're creating to re-create the audience dynamics of network television.

(This should not come as a surprise; ever since major corporate players got involved in online media, their all-but-explicit goal has been to turn back the clock and transform the Internet into cable TV.)

wild hypothesis: the lottery is popular with the poor only because it is illegal for the poor to invest in wildly risky investments. The rich can access high-risk high-return investment instruments with possibly positive expected values while the poor are forced to buy lottery tickets with guaranteed negative expected values.

This is probably true but most of the people buying lottery tickets would be losing all their money to conmen anyway, often with even worse odds. Instead of relaxing financial regulations I'd rather see the lottery money targeted to the poorest municipalities in a state/country, so at least it's redistributing money from poor people who are bad at risk assessment to other poor people instead of from the former group to con men.

Evil Undead, revisited

As a veteran GM, I feel that kids these days complain more about the brute fact or moral law of Evil Undead in D&D or similar games, and I get questions from people wanting to use necromancy for good purposes like having tireless skeletons plow a field. Shouldn't that make up for the [Evil] tag on spells like Animate Dead? Why is that tag there, anyway?

With a caveat that "Undead" in fantasy is a kinda vague category which can reasonably have some special cases and cosmological exceptions like repentant ghosts, here's an attempt at describing how "core" undead like skeletons and vampires still count as evil and can be smote with Smite Evil, and making them is evil even if the necromancer has good intent in contemporary terms. This is mostly written with reference to D&D 3.5, which I like for its SRD, but the principles can be used elsewhere.

TL;DR: Making undead is like a faustian bargain but with Death instead of Mephisto, and every hand you lend to Death in the world is a corrupting influence even if you get something good from it.

The TLDR is inaccurate because the implicit contract is with the negative energy plane instead of a demon or avatar. Now for the long version:

foood in the haunted refrigerator stays cold but rota anyway

food in the field plowed by undead refuses to sprout

I think "lots of undead together generate turn resistance" is much less interesting than "lots of undead together generate more undead"

"Necromancers are idiots their plans fail for obvious reasons" is boring though. Haunted Refrigerator stays exactly as cold as advertised, and more people freeze to death in winter. Plowed field grows as normal, but more starve as the grain is less nourishing than expected.

The thing I actually do in my games is steal a page from Exalted. Locations with too much death become shadow lands, bridges between the real and the world of the dead. It's a bad time all around.

I really like this, although with this interpretation it seems like Deathless from Book of Exalted Deeds should work exactly as advertised- they contain a tiny portal to the Positive Energy Plane that runs a magic “Turbine” as positive energy leaks into the world- and you’d be able to have an equal number of undead nearby to cancel out any negative effects of too much positive energy.

But you could make it so deathless and undead don’t get along, either they literally just attack even other even if controlled by the same person or their portals interfere causing bad effects. So you need field rotation! Undead work a field for a couple years until it starts to turn barren, then move to a far-away field and Deathless work the same field until too much life means it’s bursting with weeds, pests and diseases.

"Do you ever dream of land?" The whale asks the tuna.

"No." Says the tuna, "Do you?"

"I have never seen it." Says the whale, "but deep in my body, I remember it."

"Why do you care," says the tuna, "if you will never see it."

"There are bones in my body built to walk through the forests and the mountains." Says the whale.

"They will disappear." Says the tuna, "one day, your body will forget the forests and the mountains."

"Maybe I don't want to forget," Says the whale, "The forests were once my home."

"I have seen the forests." Whispers the salmon, almost to itself.

"Tell me what you have seen," says the whale.

"The forests spawned me." Says the salmon. "They sent me to the ocean to grow. When I am fat with the bounty of the ocean, I will bring it home."

"Why would the forests seek the bounty of the oceans?" Asks the whale. "They have bounty of their own."

"You forget," says the salmon, "That the oceans were once their home."

Im sick with flu so naturally I picked up my newly bought copy of Howl's Moving Castle which includes DWJ interviews in the back.

And im in love with the way she tells these stories feels like a part of her books.

And my favorite:

The magic in the mundane :)

she roasts us howl girlies for loving his loser ass, and she based him on her husband and son smh

She also says she based his appearance on 90s Andre Aggassi though, which always cracks me up entirely

*googles 90s Andre Aggassi*

Yeah OK.

“Crosses repel vampires if you have faith” concedes a point to the Lutherans. What about “crosses repel vampires if you have good works”?

(A third option I’ve seen a few times: “crosses repel vampires if the vampires had faith.”)

This is an opinion that pleases no one, but I strongly believe that both of the following are true:

And it seems to me that we are paying the price for these evils—not just the first, but also the second—to this very day.

I’ve been thinking about this on and off lately and feeling uncomfortable that the part of neo-Shermanism where people say “it was based to beat the Confederacy and end slavery” I 100% agree with, but some people get into “It’s based to suppress local independence movements”.

I actually think it was 100% justified to stop the Confederacy from seceding over this, especially when it wasn’t just an excuse used by the Union but essentially their only reason for seceding. I just don’t have a principled Rule Utilitarian idea for when it is or isn’t acceptable to violently stop secession, to draw a line between this and other cases.

OK, what's up with this "all myths are true except Christianity" thing in fantasy stories? Like in American Gods, or Gunnerkrigg Court, or Pact, surely the Christian god is a big deal for the same reason that any gods at all appear in the setting?

As several people have noted in the replies, the fact that Christianity is true implies most of the kitchen sink myths are false. To expand on that:

I figure you're familiar with the broad strokes of how the Book of Genesis starts off the Bible: "In the beginning God created..." and a list of created things from the sun to birds.

One implication of this is that those things aren't gods - unless you define down the word "gods" to relatively petty creatures. The Lord has made the sea, why would you then worship the sea (or the sea god) rather than the Lord?

I once spoke to a historian of religion who told me that this used to be a lot more controversial issue long ago. The start of Genesis also functions as an anti-confession, denying various polytheisms and pagan pantheons: 'we reject your sun god, we reject your moon god, we reject your sky god, we reject your star god, we reject your earth god, we reject your forest god, we reject your river god, we reject your sea god, we reject your fish god, we reject your cow god, we reject your bird god...'

In an online discussion (that actually took place last year), I just saw someone bring up elections in South Korea and how a lot of the political rhetoric was openly sexist and expressing astonishment at women being given rights. And someone else responded, "Are you sure you're not talking about the US?"

To me, this is exactly the now very predictable type of offhand comment that conveys a certain attitude from the progressive Left indicative of one of the main object-level issues I have with that subculture: the determination to make all criticism about social injustice apply to the US and try to divert from recognizing how much more severe social oppression is in many other countries, particularly non-Western countries (for the obvious reason that any criticism of their social values is branded racist).

Disclaimer: I don't actually know the first thing about the political issues of last year's South Korean elections, although I think it's not unreasonable to guess that there's a good part of the population there that's more conservative with regard to women's rights than the vast majority of the US.

I can be charitable and more or less sympathize with why the second person chose to comment, "Are you sure you're not talking about the US?" I can understand motivations for these comments in individual instances when they occur. But I find the fact that someone pipes up with something like this so predictably right at the start of discourse criticizing a non-Western country to be indicative of a very real and deliberate blind spot on the Left.

it's like people think nobody else can suffer except for americans, because only americans are capable of evil. that is the inevitable conclusion when people think that only white people, only rich people, and only men--but not foreigners, but not women, but not poor people--can do bad things. american is then the only place is the world where you have rich, white, nonforeigners in power. american exceptionalism, inverted: nobody but america suffers, nobody but america does wrong.

i believe this used to be called benevolent racism, after benevolent sexism which is what was in place before women had rights. it's infantilizing, people are basically saying everyone else is too stupid to be capable of evil.

"Benevolent racism" is a phenomenal term although this is more nationalism than racism. And it's barely even inverted; it blends over into regular conservative American self-centricism with no line dividing them at all- the same people who don't care about sexism in any country other than the US also don't care that a million people are going to die of Tuberculosis this year in countries other than the US, and don't care about wars or famines unless the US is involved somehow.

This is officially the best response and a big ass mood right there

At all the people in the notes saying: “Unless it’s this” and “Certain types of shippers need to die” this is fucking targeted at you.

Like it's very true that there are people in lefty spaces who are abusers: they hit their girlfriends, they DARVO when confronted, they gaslight and intimidate people they don't like while remaining charismatic to those they do like or benefit from. There are instances in which these accusations are taken seriously and the victim in question is given the care and resources they need to heal and the abuser is given the opportunity to make amends/leave the community/change their ways. Sometimes the response and accountability processes actually work, but more often than not, I think this is by coincidence and not because these processes actually work.

With more frequency than I think people are willing to admit, instances of miscommunication, legitimate mistakes, bad-faith interpretations, or simple pettiness lead to witch hunts in leftist spaces, especially online. Like, how often have you heard that such and such user is a pedophile, an abuser, a predator. And when you ask what happened, it turns out the person....likes a children's cartoon, is just a gross roommate, or got romantically rejected by someone and sulked on their blog for a bit? Or in real life, I've been in instances where a friend was accused of being a misogynist when in reality they're just a trans woman who disagreed with someone who turned out to be a radfem lol.

It's stupid dumb easy to create a whisper network about someone being a Bad Person in leftist spaces and get everyone to shut up and fall in line because questioning the accuser is seen as harming a victim. There's such a low, almost nonexistent threshold to fact find, to have people state explicitly what happened and provide what evidence they have. This makes it soooooo fucking easy to break apart communities and have everyone at each other's throats at all times, let alone actually organize.

This is a bit of a heavy read, but I think an important one. Pulling any short quote would do violence to the writing, but please give it a read (content warning for frank discussion of abuse and mental illness.

That was a phenomenal post with a point I’d never seen before; thank you so much for linking it.