Oh, to be alive in such an age, when miracles are everywhere, and every inch of common air throbs a tremendous prophecy, of greater marvels yet to be.
Walt Whitman (via raggedyoptimist)
hazardsoflove-archive-deactivat
that wilfred owen poem about everyone kissing the crucifix but he kisses the hands of the boy whos holding it hits HARD not sure why but damn
hungerandthirst
found it….
Nothing is funnier than when Boomers make political cartoons that end up being accidentally hysterical. Case in point
More dumb cross-fandom nerdery: D&D warforged with Culture ship names.
(Bonus nerdery: assign D&D classes to existing Culture ship names.)
My best effort for each:
Barbarian: So Much for Subtlety / Pure Big Mad Boat Man
Bard: Anticipation of a New Lover’s Arrival, The / Unfortunate Conflict of Evidence
Cleric: Prosthetic Conscience / God Told Me To Do It
Druid: You Naughty Monsters / Limiting Factor
Fighter: What Are The Civilian Applications? / Frank Exchange of Views
Monk: Prime Mover / Death and Gravity
Paladin: Ethics Gradient / Congenital Optimist
Ranger: Eight Rounds Rapid / No Fixed Abode
Rogue: Cargo Cult / Honest Mistake / Unacceptable Behavior
Sorcerer: I Blame My Mother / I Blame Your Mother
Warlock: Youthful Indiscretion / Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
Wizard: Just Read The Instructions / Appeal to Reason
“Build a mirror out of waterfowl” is not an art project. It’s something an evil wizard from a Russian fairy tale does three scenes before the nine-year-old-girl protagonist cuts his heart out with a hairbrush.
The present tabletop RPG resurgence is great, but I can’t help but feel that a lot of the received wisdom that’s developing about how to run tabletop games is leading new GMs to make things harder for themselves than they needs to be.
Stuff like “I ignore 80% of the rulebook and constantly fudge dice rolls, that means I’m a strong independent GM with a clear vision for my game” – like, yes, that may well be true, but that you’re having to do all that is a pretty clear sign that you’re using a wildly inappropriate system for the kind of game you want to run.
Basically, game rules are not unopinionated. Any game that claims to be universal is lying to you; yes, it’s true that a given set of rules can be reasonably setting neutral, but even the simplest rules bake in a huge number of very specific assumptions about how the game ought to be played. They have to, because that’s what rules do.
Of course, whenever the rules and the GM disagree about how the game ought to be played, the GM is going to win, but that’s not necessarily an argument you need to be having. To draw a parallel, it’s totally possible to start with the rules of soccer and gradually rewrite and pare away bits and pieces of it until you have miniature golf, but you’d have saved yourself a lot of headaches if you’d just started with miniature golf in the first place!
And the thing is, I don’t think most novice GMs are getting themselves into this position on purpose. A lot of folks seem to be getting misled – sometimes by overzealous advocates of this or that popular system, and sometimes just by their own inexperience – that there’s basically only one kind of tabletop RPG, and if the the game they want to play is anything other than that very specific game, it’s on them to figure it out from first principles.
Which just plain ain’t the case. Tabletop RPGs are a hugely diverse hobby, and whatever your perfect game is, there’s probably something very close to it out there already, no matter what it is you’re dissatisfied with. There are tabletop RPGs without dice, tabletop RPGs without GMs, and even tabletop RPGs without player characters – and all of those are totally separate considerations from how complex the rules are. If your ideal game is a highly structured three-hundred-page tome about Regency era comedies of manners in the mode of Bronte and Austen? That game actually exists – as do countless others.
(Plus, even if you prefer to hack your own systems, you can benefit from expanding your horizons and seeing how other people have approached the subjects you want to take on. As a game author myself, I’ve frequently found myself in the position of having spent weeks or months bashing my head against a particular piece of game design, only later to discover that some game I didn’t know existed had solved that problem thirty years ago!)
And just so nobody can say I’m being a grump without offering any constructive alternatives, there’s an annotated rec list of forty-odd free or pay-what-you-want tabletop RPGs under the cut. If you want to take my advice but have no budget for expanding your library, check any of these out!
To broadly address some of the comments without putting anyone on the spot, yes, this is totally where a lot of that “I want a game that focuses on stories” stuff comes from. When folks talk about tabletop RPGs, you tend to see claims to the effect that this or that RPG is more “story-focused” than some popular alternative, and the fact of the matter is that there’s no such animal – at least, not in the abstract.
Tabletop RPGs’ baked-in assumptions about how the game ought to be played include assumptions about what kinds of stories you ought to be telling. For any given game, there will be stories that the framework of play encourages and facilitates; stories that are neither helped nor hindered because the framework of play simply has nothing to say about them; and stories where the framework of play actively gets in the way. What stories go in which buckets is different for every game.
The upshot is that there’s no such thing as a tabletop RPG that’s “story-focused” in principle. A particular game may be set up in a way that encourages – or at least fails to obstruct – the kinds of stories you want to tell, yet presents a huge gnarly obstacle to some other group’s stories. Rules that “just get out of the way” for me may be getting all up in your business in ways that would never even cross my radar, because the places where they’re tripping you up are places my games never go!
(In its most extreme form, this misunderstanding is a big part of where the “role-playing versus roll-playing” fallacy comes from. Folks find that the story they’re trying to tell grinds to a halt every time they pick up the dice, and come to the conclusion – quite reasonably, from where they’re standing! – that engaging with the rules and engaging with the story are mutually exclusive activities.The fallacy arises when you inappropriately generalise that experience to the notion that all possible rules are incompatible with all possible stories.)
I have no idea why my Friends at the Table memes aren’t doing well on twitter because they’re TRUE
chefpyro
i’m having a stroke
can somebody caption this for me
magearna
I wish my father was here! *LA CUCARACHA!* *SCrrEEEEEECH* *COWBOY MUSIC* HELLOOoO Soss! Timmy Turner, my name is Dougsdale Dimmadale Dimmadimmsdomedoodiddomedimedimmsdimmadimmadome owner of the Dougsdimmsdimmadaledimmadimsdomedodimmadimmsdaledimmadimmsdaledimmadome! Thank you for locating my long-lost son Dale Dimmadimmsdomedoodiddomedimedimmsdimmadimmadome, heir to the Dougsdimmsdimmadaledimmadimsdomedoodimmadimmsdaledimmadimmsdougsdaledimmadome fortune! If there’s anything I can ever do to repay you for your kindness, all you need to do is ask!!! Doug Dimmadome? The owner of the Dimmsdale Dimmadome? Not right. Not right? That’s right. Doug Dougmadomedimmadimmadomedimmsdaledomedaledimmsdodimmdougdodimmadomedimmadomedimmadomedimmadome owner of the Dougsdimmsdimmadaledimmadimsdomedoodimmadimmsdaledimmadimmadimmadimmadimmsdaledimmadome. The same Doug Dimmadome, owner of the Dimmsdale Dimmadome, where they’re showing Crash Nebula? On ice? Yeah! Not right. Not right?! That’s right. Timmy Turner, my name is Timmy Dimmadoodimmadome owner of the *SOUND OF COMPUTER DYING* Then you can get me three tickets to s– Not right! !O L L E H *hcEeeeEERrrCS* *!AHCARACUC AL LA CUCARACHA!* *LIMO REPEATEDLY PULLS UP AND PULLS AWAY* I wish my father was here! *Freezeframe, grayscale* CRAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWLINGGG INNNNNNNNNN MY SKIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN THESE WOUUUUNNDS THEY WIIIIILL…………….
just so you know this transscript is in fact actually 100% accurate
fawnbroinactive-deactivated2021
some idiot on reddit made a bot that replies to every comment that uses the word penis with ‘lol penis’ and didn’t realise it would also pick up on its own comments
How God made our world
latin professor tried to explain the difference between ille/illa/illud and iste/ista/istud by saying “If you say ‘illum’ you mean ‘that man’, but if you say ‘istum’ you mean that motherfucker’ before gasping, covering his mouth, and whispering “I forgot I can’t say that that until I get tenure”
Tumblr, where you learn how to say “that motherfucker” in latin.
Garden - Jan de Vliegher , 2018
Belgian, b.1964-
Oil on canvas, 200 x 200 cm.
You wouldn’t think that flamingoes are extremophiles just from looking at them. It’s like somebody tried to build the vertebrate equivalent of that fungus that lives inside nuclear reactors, and ended up with a gangly pink dinosaur with a spoon for a face.
here are some lessons i’ve learned working in an octopus cognition lab.
[image description:
Portrait of general and statesman Mikhail Ivanovich Dragomirov, 1889, Ilya Repin
Medium: oil,canvas
return-of-the-french
Same energy
not-greyshades
Dungeons & Dragons memes: Bards are ineffectual dandies who try to fuck everything that moves.
D&D players: That’s a gross and annoying stereotype that maligns a useful character class and encourages bad behaviour at the table.
D&D memes: Wizards are gleefully amoral meddlers in forces they don’t understand and a greater danger to their friends than the monsters they fight.
D&D players: No, that one’s accurate.
That’s not true at all.
Wizards have morals, they consist of being extra as fuck.
Wizards think having an aesthetic is the same thing as having standards.