that one guy.

you know the one. (pfp from "smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-06-06").

[7h470n39uy]

despite all my splendor i'm just a rat in a blender.

[prokopetz]

Sometimes I have days where the name of my most recent follower keeps changing but my overall follower count stays the same, and I know I've been exceptionally successful at pissing people off that day.

[zaprowsdower27]

You actually just have one guy who follows you, unfollows you, changes his username, then follows you again

[prokopetz]

Predictions for Dungeons & Dragons under Hasbro's management in the coming years:

Uma Musume style horsegirls introduced to the Forgotten Realms; setting's lore revised so that they've always been there.

Advancement rules now stipulate per-session XP bonus based on lifetime D&D Beyond purchase history.

Compendium of exclusive feat trees for specific gender and sexual identities. Bisexuality receives no feats of its own, being mechanically implemented as "half gay"; the resulting synergies are disgusting.

Editorial error in revised Dungeon Master's Guide accidentally refers to Dungeon Masters as Hasbro's employees.

"Noble savage" coding of barbarian class walked back, refocused on European folkloric touchstones such as the Ulster Cycle; all barbarian characters become Irish stereotypes.

AI-based DM service trained exclusively on work of Ed Greenwood launched; withdrawn a week later citing "guiderail issues".

Expanded discussion of navigating player expectations frames "not showing up at all" as a valid playstyle.

Dragon-blooded sorcerer subclass revised to state that one of the character's ancestors was "very good friends" with a dragon.

[drunkenlemur]

Didn't that last one actually get implemented into canon?

[prokopetz]

Hasbro has indeed spent the last several years pushing back against dragonfucking jokes so hard that they've gone as far as to revise some of the setting lore to imply that dragons don't even fuck each other, but they haven't yet had the guts to pull the trigger on taking the option of literal dragon ancestry off the table for sorcerers.

(The 5.5E writeup for dragon-blooded sorcerers does list "making a bargain" with a dragon above the actual-ancestry option, though, which is funny as hell. Yeah, I'll bet it was a mutually beneficial exchange!)

[drunkenlemur]

Another day being an Elder Red Dragon. Adventurers keep asking if they can fuck me. Buddy, they won't even let me fuck a dragon.

[prokopetz]

Forthcoming animated feature to contain Disney's last gay character.

[alexanderwales]

I was reading through the U.S. Copyright Office's "What Does Copyright Protect?" page, mostly to make sure that I wasn't being wrong on the internet, but I absolutely love that this is part of their FAQ:

How do I protect my sighting of Elvis? Copyright law does not protect sightings. [,,,]

There are only 12 questions on the FAQ, and this is one of them.

[prokopetz]

The whole "Elvis sighting" thing is hilarious because, like, the first documented career Elvis impersonators began working over twenty years before the guy even died. I wonder why a public figure who has a whole industry of people who look and sound like him would generate an unusual number of posthumous sightings? It Is A Mystery.

[bluestockingbaby]

[owlwriter]

I miss seeing the Elvis impersonator at our local Tex-Mex place after it changed ownership. Norteño Elvis was awesome

[prokopetz]

Slow-burn bleak comedy web series about a middle-aged man whose life is gradually destroyed by a personal conflict with the corrupt manager of a local pizza parlour, which at the end of an award-winning multi-season run is abruptly revealed to be the secret origin of the Noid.

[prokopetz]

Soulslike boss fight that riffs on the Black Knight sketch from Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail where every time you hit a new phase you hack off a limb, and somehow it just keeps getting harder. Most guides recommend cheesing burst DPS to skip the hopping-on-one-leg phase because it's just plain unfair.

[prokopetz]

Inadvisable Dungeons & Dragons adventure premise #137: Diplomatic mission to a kobold warren culminating in a personal audience with what appears to be a shitty cardboard puppet made up to resemble a dragon, but is in fact a real dragon that just looks like that.

[beleester]

A cardboard dragon's breath weapon deals bludgeoning damage as it hits you over the head with a cardboard cutout of flames.

[prokopetz]

Given that a lot of folks in kink spaces are bent for the forbidden precisely because it is forbidden, I sometimes wonder how many people there are out there who unironically get horny for workplace and laboratory safety violations. Like, I know for a fact that number isn't zero, but how far above zero is it?

[prokopetz]

Show me the person who gets hard when they knowingly commit copyright infringement. Logically this person must exist. Let me see them.

[prokopetz]

I haven't read as many TTRPG system books as you, so I wanted to ask: What is the most absurd or exaggerated things you ever read in a system book? for example, there is this brazilian system called 3D&T and in the page giving examples of "what each level on each stat can do" they go from the usual 5 max starter points to over to over a 1000 points in one stat saying "you can destroy a star in one attack with this value"

The basic problem with this question is that the high end of what player characters can do in high-powered tabletop RPGs very rapidly becomes too big to powerscale. If you push things far enough, shit goes all conceptual in a way that defies direct comparison.

For example, a starting player character in Jenna Moran's Nobilis can work transformative miracles upon their domain which affect the entire observable universe; how do you powerscale the ability to shatter planets with your bare hands against the ability to transform truths into lies or become immanently embodied in every instance of the colour blue? Sarah Newton's Mindjammer uses a fractal character creation system which allows entities to be given stats at nearly any scale, with lower-scale entities able to "borrow" the stats of higher-scale entities within specific domains; how do you powerscale the ability to fly faster than light against the ability to act "as" an entire galaxy-spanning civilisation? What does that measuring stick look like?

[rlyehtaxidermist]

the most absurd or exaggerated thing I have ever read in a system book is the phrase "Generic Universal Role Playing System"

[prokopetz]

Honestly, I can't really blame recurring action movie villains for the impractical murder methods – if I'd tried and failed to kill the same guy like eight separate times using tried and true methods like "gun", I'd probably start resorting to Looney Tunes bullshit, too.

[inigollorentemartija]

Imagine if you:

Cage a guy in a flooding basement

Skewer him through the gut

Throw him in quicksand

Poison him

Leave him half unconcious in a collapsing underground ruin

And he just comes back alive every time.

At that point, convoluted stuff like "suck out all of his moisture and mummyfy him" feels reasonable. Not that it works.

[prokopetz]

It's a shame that porn games and sim games don't have a lot of present overlap, because I feel like "horny mechsplo game where you have to actually win the fights to get to the sexy bits and it's one of those hyper-detailed 1990s era mech piloting sims that uses every single key on the keyboard" would do numbers with a very particular audience.

[historiaetal]

it would need two hands to play, thought, limiting its efficacy

[prokopetz]

Buttplug.io Intimate Hardware Control Library | buttplug.io

Homepage and Documentation for the Buttplug.io Intimate Hardware Control Library

[kitsunestudios]

The mental image of trying to dump the overheating auxillary core and accidentally deploying the Mech’s penis in the process.

Or setting off an Itani Circus of mini-missiles in the midst of foreplay.

And the dispassionate female voice narrating every command.

“Balls deployed”

“Erection initiated.”

“Penis ejected”

[shinosarna]

are you under impression that mechsploitation involves having sex *with the robots* while actively fighting

[prokopetz]

I'm not, but @kitsunestudios evidently is; while that's of course a completely different thing from what I'm describing, I'm not gonna lie, a sex simulator that controls like MechWarrior 2 is a fascinating prospect.

[prokopetz]

I feel like folks who are only familiar with Christian Baby from the baseball meme are missing out on account of being unaware that there are a whole bunch of these hypothetical scenarios in which it's established that Christian Baby can talk and puts itself in these situations on purpose.

[prokopetz]

There's a lot to criticise about the increasing use of LLMs in porn, but "it's giving people really specific kinks" isn't one of them. Before LLMs, we just developed unhinged interpretive lenses which allowed us to construe vanilla smut as secretly catering to our excruciatingly specific kinks.

[prokopetz]

(If anything, I suspect that easy access to personalised LLM porn is probably going to push people toward more vanilla fare, as having infinite access to the exact slightly odd thing that gets you off tends to de-incentivise getting more than slightly weird with it.)

[prokopetz]

Remember when folks were predicting that Chapter 5 might possibly contain some subtle Touhou references?

[prokopetz]

More seriously, though (major spoilers under the cut):

Chapter 5's constant references to "dreams" and "fantasy" initially come off as playing up the Touhou references, but this chapter actually makes explicit something that was pretty strongly hinted at all the way back in Chapter 1: the game's fourth-wall-breaking elements are fourth-wall-breaking from an in universe perspective. This whole business of stats and levels and equipment upgrades is a child's game of let's-pretend that the Dark Worlds are playing with themselves, and at least some Darkners are aware of that fact and playing along voluntarily. The Knight can lose a fight, then defeat you in a cutscene anyway because it was just humouring you by participating in the fight at all – it doesn't have to respect the outcome if it doesn't want to.

(As an aside, there's a fun thematic parallel between this revelation and a common thread of debate among the Touhou fandom re: to what extent spell card battles are "real" duels and to what extent the participants are just fucking around, which I can't imagine is unintentional.)

So here's the million-dollar question: we now know as a matter of explicit text that Ralsei is one of those Darkners who knows the combat and puzzles and such are all a game of let's-pretend and is just playing along, even though the consequences of doing so appear to horrify them. What are they so afraid would happen if they didn't?

[prokopetz]

It occurs to me that, given what happens in the Weird Route version of Chapter 5, in a full game run of Deltarune the Weird Route will almost certainly be any% optimal – and given that a lot of the stuff you need to do to stay on the Weird Route is consciously evoking common speedrun strats, I can't imagine that's an accident!

[helloijustreadyourpost]

You literally get kicked out if you don't mash dialog options fast enough.