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Trans Huey Long

@transhueylong

Reddit Escapee (one/ones)
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prokopetz

Doesn't Hasbro have a strong incentive to make a "lite" version of D&D with a pared-down paperback rulebook and sell it as a casual-friendly overpriced starter kit with a bunch of dice, figures, treasure cards, etc.? It could be a strict subset of the normal 5E rules (I guess - not that knowledgeable about TTRPG design). That way they could sell you all the same books. Seems like a slam dunk

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Hasbro's present marketing strategy for Dungeons & Dragons is to try to position every D&D group as potential purchasers of every D&D product. Among other things, this is one of the main reasons that every campaign setting other than the Forgotten Realms is being repackaged as a series of tourist destinations for Forgotten Realms based campaigns to visit, and why there's been a strong move away from focused, topical sourcebooks and toward big, messy "book of everything"-style anthologies that consciously avoid focusing too much on any one type of character or campaign. It's also why the core books make a lot of noise about how wonderfully modular the rules are without actually providing any meaningful modularity in practice – if the game was designed to make it easy to pick and choose modular components, they'd risk fracturing the player base into distinct subsets with different preferred sets of modules.

All this in mind, it's fairly easy to see why there's currently no official "light" version of D&D. Under the paradigm of every single D&D group as a potential purchaser of every single D&D product, a version of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition that was actually, meaningfully simpler than the core product would function in practice as a competing game (what if people decide they like the simpler version better and just play that instead?), and the last thing you want is to compete with yourself. TSR learned that the hard way! With substantive simplification off the table, the only introductory version of Dungeons & Dragons Hasbro can offer is one with exactly the same rules which simply has less content, and tells people to buy the full version if they want more – which is exactly what they're selling in the various starter sets that are presently available.

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(This perspective also makes sense of a lot of the present text's more puzzling assertions. For example, why does the text repeatedly insist that theatre-of-the-mind combat is fully supported when every single bit of mechanical content which interacts with the combat system is clearly written under the assumption that you're playing with miniature figures on a grid? It's about avoiding splitting the player base again; if two distinct modes of combat were really supported, there'd be a risk that some published material would appeal only to some groups. Perversely, Hasbro's concrete financial incentive here is to have the game's text make the broadest possible set of claims about what modes of play are supported while at the same time doing its best to channel every group into playing exactly the same game!)

I mean... they're also selling the miniature figures, so they've definitely also got a financial incentive to make sure that its as difficult as possible to play without them (while pretending that it's not so they can try to sell books to people who don't want miniatures but they hope can be entrapped into doing so)

like, isn't "to sell more minatures" the entire reason tieflings are they way they are now, with uniform appearances?

Well, yes – miniature figures are an example of a supplementary product that would appeal only to some groups if they actually allowed themselves to split the player base.

Speaking as a DM, it would be virtually impossible for me to run combat in the theatre of the mind while making use of combat mechanics like range, vision and cover without myself using a detailed map! It's hard enough running meaningfully 3D combat on a 2D map when all the minis are chocolate bits or generic goon miniatures.

In my experience, a fair number of groups end up squaring the circle regarding what the text claims to support versus what it actually supports combat-wise by concluding that "theatre of the mind" means the DM is somehow keeping a detailed combat grid in their head.

(Then they turn around and start claiming that this putative ability to keep a detailed combat grid in your head is a basic skill that every DM, even complete novices, should be expected to perform on command, and hey, we're right back at the whole "D&D's present culture of play actively exacerbates its ongoing DM shortage by encouraging DMs to burn themselves out" thing I keep harping on about.)

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visenyaism

john carpenter’s the thing is a movie about how the hyperindividualism and lack of emotional intimacy between men (specifically men in the united states military) immediately crystallizes into distrust and alienation in crisis. how kurt russel with an absurd callsign name and the goofiest hugest cowboy hat imaginable is the Man, running the whole show and managing the crisis until he fails because when faced with having to truly understand and connect with his last remaining ally he can’t, because all he knows how to do is sit in the snow and die next to him. It is a movie about losing control over your own body in the most horrific way possible. It is a movie about cold war paranoia and fear of bloodborne pathogens. It is a movie about how dread is an incredible force and even so sometimes what you CAN see is worse than what you can imagine. It is a movie about how the scariest thing men can conceive of is something that looks exactly like a man and acts exactly like a man but yet on some fundamental level…isn’t. It is a movie, as one of my eleventh graders pointed out this week, about “playing among us in real life.” but most importantly, john carpenter’s the thing is a movie about a dogy who is my friend and wants to become me :)

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prokopetz

One of the funniest running gags from Disco Elysium that I never see anyone talk about is the recurring low-key acknowledgement that Harry’s ability to do basic RPG protagonist shit isn’t just a gameplay conceit, and some NPCs – including Kim in particular – are actually a little bit spooked by it. There’s more than one occasion where Kim remarks on the fact that Harry can exhaustively explore a conversation tree and get the complete life story out of someone he’s just met like it’s some kind of super power.

Kim also remarks as soon as you care to bring it up that Harry pioneered a way of walking in his precinct based on erratically moving around a scene checking containers

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reblogged

[stuck in the arctic] god this sucks so bad i should [remembers suicide jokes lower morale] put on the best Carnival these two boats have ever seen

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Just talked my cousin who has a stronger claim to the throne than me into undergoing the ceremony which will initiate him into manhood several years early so that when I have him assassinated I won't be labeled a child killer in the barbaric but rigid customs of my Norse-tinged civilization

you fool! he has taken your bosom-friend and milk-brother to be his blood-sponsor during the ordeal of the blade. their deaths are now irrevocably linked and you are doomed to lose the most dear portion of yourself when your plot hatches!

Gotta be honest that's on my friend for not reading the room well enough

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reblogged

“Why are we seeing so many Evil Wizards these days?!” two reasons:

  1. Most wizards used to die in horrible accidents during their apprenticeship, but since the so called ‘apprenticeship rights’ laws went into effect more wizards survive to go in to grad school, thus becoming evil
  2. Evil Wizard has figured out cloning
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evilwizard

you are spreading valuable trade secrets

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Cleaning up a thread I posted over on bluesky earlier where I talked a little bit about some thoughts on downtime and time in general, in Forged in the Dark games.

So, whenever I end up playing different fitd games one thing that basically always happens, is the emergence of a "mission session" and "downtime session", really just a doubling down on the separate phases. Which I like! (also, as a GM, a downtime session can be a nice break since the players take charge with what actions they want to use).

Downtime sessions extend from shorter checklists about recovering and working on plans to places where the pace can change, characters have more room to grow, and time can pass at different intervals ( @temporalhiccup's Twilight Throne in particular has a lot of fun with downtime actions for example).

In general, the "spending time" part is something I'm interested in, and something I want to tinker with.

Right now, I'm playing with the idea of removing the typical mission -> downtime -> mission etc, structure, and having downtime be specifically about time passing in larger chunks.

This means you could go mission -> mission -> mission, for as long as you think you can risk it, but once you decide to start downtime any time-sensitive Things you wanted to accomplish are now impacted (and maybe no longer accessible!).

I'm interested in seeing what the effects are when time becomes more of an important resource you have to juggle along with everything else. For example, instead of having a relatively guaranteed chance of recovery after each mission, what happens when you have are faced with pushing yourself to accomplish a time sensitive goal when you're already way up on stress, or missing out on the time sensitive goal and choosing to take a rest during downtime?

Also, having downtime be more explicitly be about larger chunks of time passing seems like it would feed nicely into the "GM Turn" that is the faction/heat/fallout/troubles style of mechanics in most FitD games.

This will probably be yet another Thing i tinker with in "Unnamed Furry Crime Game", along with my quest to rework harm into something more dynamic.

(2025 will be the year i actually come up with a name for this game too)