Go Into the Wild Pale Yonder. Go now.

30s /Lesbian / She/her / Happy to chat and let me know if something needs to be tagged. These days I mostly post about nonsense, podcasts and games. Occasional birds. My art https://hipolink.me/arianwells

[arianwells]

I'm open for commissions!

Examples of what I can do:

100 USD: 1 character, fully painted background. Fanart, original characters, anthro. No nsfw stuff.

I'm best at natural backgrounds and not quite as good at interiors and buildings, but I'll do my best regardless.

60 USD: 1 character, stylized as a tarot card or something similar with a simple background.

Deadline - 3-4 weeks.

I'll provide a sketch first, any changes are possible, then I'll send a cropped version of the final painting and a link to the payment system. A full painting will be sent to you via email after I receive the payment (or the proof of the payment).

Payment is via Hipolink (cards) / Lavatop (paypal, cards)

[g3sztenye]

my face, but my mother's reflection

[julesdap]

after gerard donelan

There was so much more to Tain Hu. So much left to be discovered. An inner sky, constellations barely hinted at, waiting to be mapped.

[mousey-toy]

[pitbolshevik]

my super sustainable bmw

[pitbolshevik]

[al-norton]

No one else in sight

[commission]

[messygoku]

for all of you:

[moldavite]

good news. the things that used to upset me no longer upset me. bad news. i'm creating an army of bugs to hurt innocent bystanders

[blackpyrefly]

I heard another video game is coming out soon

this has to stop

[orcboxer]

tumblr won't let me post this for some reason. must be a glitch or something

[valtsv]

you are all just jealous of my severed head

[grimae]

darkmoon

[prokopetz]

what would a ttrpg that prioritizes roleplay and actually functions as such look like? i've played a few that claim to be "rp forward" and every time the mechanics meant to facilitate roleplay ended up impeding it - and meanwhile i've had perfectly rewarding rp experiences in crunchier systems with no mechanical social encounter support at all. is there really a way to build rp into a system that works, or is it just a unicorn idea?

"Proiritising roleplaying" doesn't mean anything – it's a piece of vacuous marketing text targeted at people who've constructed their identity politics upon arguing about the correct way to pretend to be an elf.

The basic problem is that the term "roleplaying" is, itself, not well defined; in practice, it means whatever the person trying to sell you something wants it to mean. Here, for example, by invoking the presence or absence of "mechanical social encounter support" as the distinguishing feature of self-styled "RP forward" systems, you seem to be implicitly defining "roleplaying" to mean "set-piece encounters in which a player character attempts to persuade an NPC to do something for them without resorting to violence". Is this justified? Is playing out the process of hitting each other with sticks not "roleplaying"? Why not?

What most people mean when they toss the term "roleplaying" around in the context of tabletop games is something in the vicinity of "roleplaying is when we do things I'm interested in doing, and not-roleplaying is when we do things I'm not interested in doing". As all game rules are unavoidably opinionated about what player characters ought to spend their time doing – indeed, arguably this is the only thing that rules can meaningfully express opinions about! – the question of "does this system 'prioritise roleplaying'?" is typically reducible to "does this system agree with me about what kind of game I'm playing?". Games are then sorted into "priorities roleplaying" and "does not prioritise roleplaying" based on which side of the answer to that question they fall on for the person doing the sorting.

This is the ultimate root of a lot of this "the best sessions I ever had never touched the rules at all" stuff. For a variety of reasons, many people have genuinely never experienced playing a tabletop RPG whose rules agree with them about what sort of experience of play they ought to be having, and in some cases they can't even imagine what that would look like. If you and the system you're using disagree so badly about what kind of game you're playing that "engaging with the rules" and "engaging with my desired experience of play" are mutually exclusive activities, it's not surprising that ignoring the rules entirely would be your best play.

In this light, your question of "what would a system that really prioritises roleplaying look like?" translates to "what would a system that actually agrees with me about what kind of game I'm playing look like?", and that's not a question I can answer unless you're willing and able to get a lot more rigorous about what you mean when you say "roleplaying".

[churchyardgrim]

Here, for example, by invoking the presence or absence of "mechanical social encounter support" as the distinguishing feature of self-styled "RP forward" systems, you seem to be implicitly defining "roleplaying" to mean "set-piece encounters in which a player character attempts to persuade an NPC to do something for them without resorting to violence".

well, no, i was actually thinking about scenarios like navigating a ball/gala type event and exploring the plot through verbal conversation, but i suppose i didn't say that, so fine, egg on my face

i ask this because i've been thinking a lot about why i keep bouncing off games like Blades in the Dark and Monster of the Week, both of which like to bill themselves as "rp forward". there's a lot of tools and toys to play with in terms of social encounters for both of those games, to be applied in heist and monster mystery situations, respectively, so i think we can safely say that we're aware of what the rules want to be doing in this instance, and are broadly in agreement with them.

but in practice, i often forget that i even have those tools, or the conversation regularly grinds to a halt while people review their abilities lists, and it's just.... weirdly exhausting. and i keep thinking that surely there must be a better way, but i'm not a game designer, so fuck me if i know what that better way might look like. hence, asking an expert.

i suppose we do need more precise terminology, because yeah "roleplaying" is technically applicable to any aspect of game engagement you can think of. "navigating social situations" is slightly narrower, but maybe just "having a conversation" is what we're after. and maybe part of the problem is that most people are already halfway proficient at having a conversation? in ways that we're not proficient at the aforementioned hitting each other with sticks. so we can just Do It without needing to abstract parts of the process into dice rolls and hit points, because we can just observe what the other guy says and then decide how our character feels about it and how they want to respond.

so is the answer to this just "roleplay is a fake category, and none of it matters"? surely that can't be it. surely someone must know what they're doing here, and can come up with a framework to gamify Having A Conversation in a functional and satisfying way.

[prokopetz]

There are a couple of big issues here:

You've settled on defining "roleplaying [mechanics]" as "gamifying having a conversation". What does it mean to gamify having a conversation? In what way, and to what purpose? My previously proposed summary of "[having rules for] set-piece encounters in which a player character attempts to persuade an NPC to do something for them without resorting to violence" is one way of gamifying having a conversation, but you've said that's not what you mean by that; so, what do you mean?

If you're having trouble remembering what the rules for a particular thing are – or even that those rules exist – that's often a good sign that engaging with those rules isn't fostering your desired experience of play; however, it doesn't tell us anything about what that desired experience of play is, other than "not that". (Also, it's worth examining whether this is actually a domain-specific issue; many groups find it necessary to frequently stop and review the rules in many contexts, but this tends to be seen as more tolerable in turn-based frameworks like combat than in contexts that lack such a framework.)

[sashimi55]

Human bodies are so weird like the upper half consists of every single vital organ and the lower half is legs

[dambiex]

[powerbottombrucespringsteen]

Born without the gene that makes you want to listen to other people’s DnD campaigns

[bambicest]

some people really do need to start reminding themselves that the answer to "why didn't the character just do [something entirely different]" is often simply "because then there wouldn't be a story"

[morayofsunshine]

interview with the masquerade

[morayofsunshine]

vampire: the vampire