Without a sword a pen will do. @bendamocles - Tumblr Blog

One the one hand, I basically agree with a lot of the negative reviews that the Kickstarter campaign for Mina the Hollower was not as forthcoming as it could have been about exactly what kind of game they were making, and the end product does feel like a bit of a bait and switch.

On the other hand, as much as I was expecting a retro Zelda-like, the concept of a full-featured soulslike that adheres to the graphical and technical limitations of the Game Boy Color is objectively hilarious, so even if I'm not particular into soulslikes as a genre I feel like I have to give them a pass, because what the fuck.

aitchdeetee

I'm a Souls enjoyer so I may be biased but the combination of Zelda and Soulslikes is a more natural combination to me than most people care to admit. I'm thinking of games like Tunic and Unsighted that also leverage this overlap to great effect. To say nothing of the obvious Castlevania (both Classic and Metroid-) influence either.

In addition Mina has made some subtle but key changes (I think altered based on feedback from the demo?) to make things more forgiving, like allowing you to bank your currency and altering the death mechanic. It's not actually a Soulslike corpse run, but more of a safety system. You don't lose resources on death and need to recover, instead you run out of "lives" and the game signals to you, 'ok so that death was free but the NEXT time you die you'll lose everything so maybe go spend your money.' And if people are reacting to the emphasis on actiony combat and difficulty, I don't think we should let Soulslikes claim dominion over that either!

As a lifelong Zelda enjoyer, these games are the types of experiments that push Zeldalikes to evolve and I'm all for them. Even if I grumble about BotW/TotK's larger departures from Zelda tradition, even the main series has clearly moved on from being about low friction action and torch-lighting puzzles.

prokopetz

My biggest criticism thus far is that the Bloodborne-style combat-driven health recovery and punishing environmental damage mesh poorly with the GBC-Zelda-style platforming. Falling into pits and spikes takes a huge bite out of your health even in the late game, and by default there's no easy way to recover environmental damage during platforming sequences because you need to fight things to charge your vials, so the frequent die-and-retry platforming puzzles tend to involve a lot of lengthy runbacks. It effectively makes the "reduced spike damage" and "empty vials recover health" trinkets mandatory if you expect to see heavy platforming, and even fully upgraded that's a third of your trinket slots gone.

prokopetz

You seem to be well versed in heresies. Which one is "Jesus isn't special for agreeing to sacrifice himself for human sins, nobody else just got an offer"?

Christian theologies that deny the doctrine of the Virgin Birth and hold that Jesus was an ordinary man who was adopted as God's son during his life – often at his baptism, though some strands place the event elsewhere – are broadly grouped under the heading of "adoptionism". We'd need to get a lot more specific about the particular theological claims being made to narrow it down any more than that.

As is always the case with Christian heresies, it's tough to pin down exactly how commonly adoptionism has actually been practised, as most surviving descriptions of it come to us via its critics, and early Church authorities were notorious for making up guys to get mad at. However, in the case of adoptionism in particular, we have pretty solid evidence of widespread practice prior to the First Council of Nicaea, and the argument can be made that it was the majority view in at least some Christian communities as late as the 5th Century.

(Interestingly, some contemporary Mormons also hold adoptionist views, though their version is distinct from what you're describing, as it involves Jesus being adopted as God's son at birth, not later in life.)

prokopetz

If you'd asked me a decade ago which contemporary tabletop RPG was most likely to do the AD&D-versus-BD&D "two versions of the same game being published simultaneously, one of which is ostensibly a stripped down version of the other, but in practice they're really two separate forks of the same core system that fundamentally disagree with each other about what kind of game that system should be" thing, I definitely wouldn't have guessed "Exalted", but in retrospect it seems almost inevitable.

theningaraf

Ok, I have not been paying attention to new Exalted after 2.5 stopped - what in the world is happening over there?

prokopetz

In brief, there are currently two separate versions of Exalted in active publication: Exalted 3rd Edition, and Exalted: Essence. The latter's marketing kind of positions it as a lightweight or introductory version of the former, but in practice the two are just totally incompatible visions of what the game is supposed to be, and familiarity with one isn't necessarily transferable to the other. They even disagree with one another on the level of basic setting worldbuilding that has no implications for the game mechanics, which is actually kind of remarkable.

stephenleasheppard

In theory, Exalted: Essence sort of positions itself as "Exalted, but friendlier." So, lighter rules, all the Exalt types are (in theory) mechanically balanced instead of Solars having a huge power advantage over everyone else (this is supposed to be a non-diegetic concession to play experience), but also the Essence setting has kind of... had a bunch of its edges sanded off. You are far less likely to encounter something that makes it clear that plagues happen in an Essence book, or that gender-based bigotry is normative in Creation even though it takes different form than it does on Earth. And this is confusing because it is ostensibly the same setting to the point where most of the setting books are written for Exalted 3rd Edition and Essence points you at the 3rd Edition books for more setting info.

prokopetz

I wouldn't even necessarily agree that Essence has lighter rules. Some of its individual subsystems are lighter than their 3E counterparts, yes, but other subsystems are substantially elaborated upon where Essence's authors seem to have felt 3E's are lacking – and some of those subsystems which have received greater elaboration are sitting right in the middle of core components, like action declaration timing.

stephenleasheppard

You're right, but also, no, because Exalted: Essence lets you do full charm sets for every Exalt type out of one book. Next to cutting out six or seven extra hardcovers' worth of custom charm systems (several of which are at this point still hypothetical, I believe), more fiddly action declaration is not, on balance, more rules-heavy.

prokopetz

I've never found the argument from page count terribly persuasive. It feels like arguing that playing a wizard in Dungeons & Dragons is more complicated than playing a wizard in Ars Magica because if you include every published supplement, the D&D wizard has a longer spell list. Certainly, having a Charm list with less needless verbosity and more willingness to collapse obvious redundancies makes character creation much quicker, but I'm not convinced its impact on active play is sufficient to overwhelm every other factor put together.

prokopetz

Did you play AD&D? I can't remember how old you are, so hopefully that's not too offensive. If so, was a typical game really as hostile as people say it was?

That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".

A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!

In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.

The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.

A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.

In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).

It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide or was furnished with a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.

Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?

The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!

These kids purchased the repackaged survival modules along with all their other D&D books; having no frame of reference, they assumed that these represented what a "standard" D&D adventure was supposed to look like – and since they weren't experienced players with whole binders full of pre-generated backup characters at their fingertips, the result was a lot of seemingly unfair total party kills, and a lot of kids concluding that the previous generation's GMs must have been objectively insane.

stephenleasheppard

There is an additional amusing point of order here, which is the answer to the following two questions. I once had a discussion with someone in Gary Gygax's gaming group, who was involved in early TSR work a bit. Allow me to paraphrase my questions and his answers.

Why publish survival modules as your primary format of published adventure?

"Because that's what we had -- they were already laid out for publication. Why not publish them and make some money off it?"

Did it ever occur to you at the time that publishing adventures like these would shape the larger D&D culture's expectations of what play was supposed to look like?

"No, why would it?"

sabotflask

One of my favorite anecdotes about early D&D, from Blog of Holding:

"It’s hard to get that context just from reading the original Dungeons and Dragons books. If nine groups learned D&D from the books, they’d end up playing nine different games.

"Mornard told us about an early D&D tournament game – possibly in the first Gen Con in Parkside in 1978? Gary Gygax was DMing nine tournament teams successively through the same module, and whoever got the furthest in the dungeon would win. You’d expect this to take all day, and so Mike was surprised to see Gary, looking shaken, wandering through the hallways at about 2 PM. Mike bought Gary a beer and asked him what had happened – wasn’t he supposed to be DMing right now?

“It’s over!” replied a stunned Gary Gygax.

"Gary described how the first group had fared. Walking down the first staircase into the dungeon, the first rank of fighters suddenly disappeared through a black wall. There was a quiet whoosh, and a quiet thud. The players conferred, and then they sent the second rank forward, who disappeared too. The rest of the players followed.

"The same thing happened to the next tournament team, and the next. Players filed into the unknown, one after another. And they were all killed. The wall was an illusion, and behind it was a pit. Eight out of the nine groups had thrown themselves like lemmings over a cliff; only one group had thought to tap around with a ten foot pole. That group passed the first obstacle, so they won the tournament.

"Gary and his players couldn’t believe that the tournament players had been so incautious. But, to be fair, none of those tournament groups had played in Gary Gygax’s game. They had learned the rules of D&D, but they had no experience of the milieu in which the book was written. Of those nine groups that had learned D&D from a book, only one played sufficiently like Gary’s group to survive thirty seconds in his dungeon."

prokopetz

#ngl survival module sounds fun as fuck. maybe i gotta torture my current group a bit (via @nadaismus)

It's worth bearing in mind that tournament-style survival mode developed in the context of a version of D&D where you can create a new character and hit the ground knowing everything you need to know to effectively play them in just a couple of minutes. 5E isn't structurally terribly well-suited for the binder-full-of-backup-PCs approach, and it's definitely a recipe for disaster in 3E or Pathfinder unless your entire group consists of a very particular flavour of high-effort masochists.

countzeroor

It also bears mentioning that the current culture of RPGs encourages a separation of player knowledge and character knowledge. I, as a player, know that the big cat with tentacles out the back is a displacer beast, but my character doesn't, and the character that replaced the one the displacer beast killed. That separation, particularly with Survival Modules, was not the case back in the day. Characters had full knowledge shared between them, so if Dave the fighter got disintegrated by a beholder, Dave's identical twin brother now knew beholders have disintegration attacks. This is part of the reason why it was considered bad form for players to read monster books.

prokopetz

It's broadly untrue that the idea of separating player knowledge from character knowledge is a modern development. The practice descends to tabletop RPGs from the historical wargames they splintered off from; tabletop wargames which focus on accurately re-creating historical battles often operate on a gentleperson's agreement to refrain from acting on strategic information that your side's commanders couldn't reasonably have been aware of, or employing tactical doctrines which had not yet been developed when the re-created battle took place, and many early tabletop RPGs adopted similar conventions, to greater or lesser degrees. Heck, games like Paranoia were parodying those conventions as early as the mid 1980s! It's come in and out of fashion in mainstream RPGs over the past half-century, but it's not a recent thing.

It is, however, correct that there typically was no expectation of observing these conventions when playing survival modules in particular.

kbkarma

Oh, so that's where Munchkin got the idea of your identical twin turning up when you die in game.

prokopetz

Yeah, having your previous PC's identical cousin randomly come rocking up five minutes after you died is totally a thing that happened, largely as a response to the awkward transitional period where survival play was still in fashion, but the game's rules had become too fiddly for rolling up a new PC on the spot to be a pain-free process, so folks would just recycle their existing character sheet instead. You saw a lot of it in the 2E era!

prokopetz

Survival-themed cyberpunk RPG where instead of weapons having durability, you need to purchase subscriptions for each of your weapons, which deplete based on how much damage you inflict. Hit points exist in-universe as a value calculated by your weapons' built-in biometric scanners to meter subscription usage. You can top up a weapon's subscription credits at conveniently located kiosks, or "bank" extra credits beyond a given weapon's rated capacity by carrying gift cards.

prokopetz

If you hurt someone by hitting them with a rock or some other non-networked object, this is a serious felony – not because of the violence, but because due to a series of obscure legal precedents, using an object with no associated weapon subscription to cause measurable harm counts as circumventing copy protection.

flying-butter

What about beating someone to death with a firearm? Is that considered jailbreaking?

prokopetz

Assuming the gun has a linked weapon subscription, it just deducts from your credits in the usual fashion. Remember, you're being charged per hit point of damage inflicted, not per shot fired; the biometric monitors don't care how you inflicted them, as long as it was done using a weapon with an up-to-date subscription.

(Of course, the trick is, if you're firing the gun, it can helpfully prevent you from going over your credit limit by refusing to chamber the next round. If you're just pistol-whipping people senseless, you need to keep an eye on the readout manually!)

Holy fuck you illegally downloaded a cardigan

rederiswrites

@inkthusiasm

fforsythiaaa

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.

demilypyro

This is just what medical transition is like

demilypyro

Yeah exactly

parkchanwoohoo

butt-berry

Does anyone remember that pokemon episode where an unexplained giant Magikarp almost lands on and kills Ash, only for a swole and tanned Nurse Joy to show up, force feed it a whole bottle of opiates, and then effortlessly overhead-press the one-ton fish before throwing it into the ocean, all in the space of about 30 seconds

butt-berry

pokemonheritageposts

Pokemon Heritage Post

dajo42

it’s been ten years

geniusoflove

its been 12 years

shivshivshivvyyy

13 years

pinkthinkspalistineshouldbefree

14 years

momperlman-deactivated20251022

15 years

dammmithardison

16 years

thswrtchdthng

Loss is a dancing queen, young and sweet, only 17

logicoso

18. it’s now legally allowed to vote, drive and buy hard liquors in a lot of countries

dorothylarouge

My edo period samurai roommate keeps telling me how i’ll bring shame and dishonor to our apartment if I keep forgetting to wash the dishes. Like whatever dude, I’m not the one carrying on a passionate yet illicit affair with the daimyo’s daughter whose hand has already been promised to another.

lagtrainzzz

もう大名に「真に申し訳ございませんでした」と言いましたよ！と、お前は、我の浮気を公衆に明かさないと言いました！！

dorothylarouge

Bullshit dude last night I saw you texting O-Sumire haikus comparing her to the flower which gives her her name

brightlotusmoon

Semantic knowledge is our cognitive toolbox, doubling innovation when combined with social learning.

What is it that makes humans so good at creating new ideas and technologies? According to this latest study, a vital role in the process is played by an often overlooked cognitive ability: our semantic knowledge or, more prosaically, our understanding of connections between things and how to apply it.

This present study invited over 1,200 people to play a computer game in which the aim was to create new “innovations” by combining various items. Some participants worked with familiar objects such as rocks and branches, while others had to perform an identical task using abstract symbols lacking any semantic significance.

The results were clear. When the participants were able to use their semantic knowledge, they were much better at findings serviceable combinations. Without such knowledge, on the other hand, they performed no better than random bots, a finding that still held when they had access to social learning – i.e. the chance to see what others in the group had managed to do.

ot3

anyway i think pride month is a good time to think about how lesbophobia and biphobia faced by women are not actually different types of bigotry in any concrete way, it's all just slightly different manifestations of the overlap between misogyny and homophobia that causes people to treat women like they are not a reliable authority on their own sexuality. its not that one type of queer sexuality is meaningfully more accepted its that asserting your own sexual identity as a woman is pretty much just seen as a threat to general society and will receive whatever pushback is easiest to reach for. unfortunately sometimes as a reaction to this we have a tendency to place the blame on each other for this treatment instead of realizing we're all crabs in the same bucket.

there are essentially zero experiences that a bi woman has had that a lesbian hasn't also, and vice versa. we don't gain anything from acting like we're two distinct groups with any real power imbalance or competing interests between them.

oneheadtoanother

idk anything about this but I love it

lynati

If any competition needed to be on Tumblr, it's this one.

theonion

Carrying tools and a handful of two-by-fours as he silently emerged from the North Portico, deputy chief of staff and homeland security advisor Stephen Miller reportedly constructed a windowless, soundproof shed on the White House grounds Thursday. According to sources, the senior administration official provided no word of explanation as he unfurled a hand-drawn blueprint in a corner of the North Lawn, put on a pair of work gloves, and spent hours digging a series of deep holes over which he soon laid a floor equipped with a locking trapdoor.

Full Story

brightlotusmoon

"Witnesses confirmed that as the structure took shape, Miller often ran at full speed and slammed his shoulder into the walls to test their sturdiness, and at several points he went inside, closed the door, and screamed as loudly as he could to ensure no sound could escape. When the building was complete, the 39-year-old is said to have reentered the White House and hauled out a number of burlap sacks, each of which appeared to hold something alive and writhing. Miller was then seen tossing the bags in the shed, fastening the door with multiple padlocks, and returning to the West Wing for the remainder of the day."

lgbt-tiktoks

Description: [A video of a woman riding a galloping horse bareback while holding a large rainbow flag.]

nattousan

i felt like these tags really added to the experience, thanks @cynderxdustypaws for your knowledge

naamahdarling

This is one of the most powerful images I have ever seen, and I will reblog it every single time because every single time it brings tears to my eyes.

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Without a sword a pen will do.