The Damned Things Overlap

DNI: Neutrinos, Dark Matter

[binghsien]

art is morally neutral. the art you consume does not dictate, or even indicate, your morality.

that said i look askance at fans of art whose primary message is "liking this art makes you a Good Person." in my experience, that doesn't go well.

[binghsien]

hate is hate

[tenleaguesbeneath]

If you aren't playing Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist, then you have no legitimate need for the rules of Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist (WTF 45)

But character generation is done before one begins play (WTF 62)

And the character generation procedures for an RPG are commonly understood as part of the game rules [citation needed]

These three premises add up to a contradiction, where the only two escapes are by asserting that WTF's character creation procedures are not, in fact, rules of WTF but instead something else, perhaps setting elements or norms of play culture, or by coming to the conclusion that it is not possible to legitimately create a WTF character.

[jennamoran]

a more pressing question is whether you were playing WTF when you wrote this post and if not what the heck you thought you were doing using its rules

[tenleaguesbeneath]

That's unknowable without a Wisher involved.

Also making this post was not needful. So legitimate or not, I didn't have need of the WTF rules because I didn't need to make the post.

I'm also not entirely convinced that examining the structure of something qualifies as using it.

[jennamoran]

I'm also not entirely convinced that examining the structure of something qualifies as using it.

More seriously, to address the original claim, legitimacy does not derive from the text of a roleplaying game but rather from the will of the people. It cannot derive from text because nobody can know what a text actually says.

[binghsien]

Are you intending to imply that "the will of the people" is itself legible? If so, how? To whom? Via what method?

[binghsien]

It is a fairly normal view that God is both male and female because of the verse in Genesis translated into English as

"And God created humankind in the divine image, creating it in the image of God—creating them male and female."

I'm just mentioning this because there's an attempt to make a furor out of James Talarico saying "God is non-binary." This is a pretty normal thing to believe and it has a pretty strong textual basis in Genesis.

"God is non-binary" is not how I would choose to put this. For various pedantic reasons, I prefer "God has every human gender." But it is fairly inarguable that, textually, God is at the very least both male and female, however you choose to describe that.

I'm just posting this because I don't think that the theology is being treated with particular seriousness by the news media (big surprise). Rather, they are defaulting to patriarchal norms of "God is only and inarguable male" and describing Talarico as some sort of weird departure from that.

But this is not true. So I wanted to say something.

[binghsien]

it is very funny when you have a highly technical opinion of a contentious political issue.

[tetrafelino]

non-usians rb this and recommend me music (artist/album/song/etc) from your country

usians rb this and recommend me music that's NOT from your country

extra points either way for music that's not in english

[binghsien]

collage! go to drop a link to their latest album on youtube just to be helpful.

Deus Ex Machina

[some-triangles]

[binghsien]

in hindsight my biggest design flaw with xxxxtreme street luge was not giving the option to pivot into being a politics influencer.

[iamnotswarley]

that's still one of the funniest fucking things ever to happen on tumblr

[binghsien]

friendly reminder! pick up eggs at the grocery store this afternoon.

[yesterdaysprint]

The Coffeyville Daily Journal, Kansas, April 30, 1896

[t3acupz]

before neil banging out the tunes there was czar scraping the strings

[binghsien]

happy czar scraping the strings day.

[mephistopheles]

yall i swear to god if a bitch says her pronouns are she/her then her pronouns are she/her

[mephistopheles]

my close friend from uni was a cis girl who had the audacity to wear pants and cut her hair short and like nobody at this school, a place OBSESSED with ‘respecting everyone’s gender identities,’ would call her ‘she.’ after MONTHS of this she started wearing a fucking pronoun pin to work and i dont even think that fixed it. me, im sorta androgynous; i have shaggy self-cut hair and go by a neutral name, but i always say my pronouns are she/her, and people ive worked with for months and have introduced myself in front of fifty times will STILL reflexively say ‘they’ for me. i respect the progressive circles i run in, but this IS evidence of misogyny. people’s definition of “woman” or “girl” is so narrow and high-maintenance that even the tiniest deviation from the norm gets you forcibly defeminized. but it’s a compliment, right? like who would wanna be a girl anyway?

[mephistopheles]

replacing an inescapable gender binary with an equally-inescapable gender trinary is stupid 🩷

[junkworldusa]

[jasper-rolls]

its past midnight in england which means its 4/13/2016

4/13/2016 is a very special day because

its the 10 year anniversary of neil banging out the tunes

thank you neil for banging out the tunes

[jasper-rolls]

12 years of neil banging out the tunes!

[jasper-rolls]

16 YEARS OF NEIL BANGING OUT THE TUNES!!

[jasper-rolls]

20 YEARS OF NEIL BANGING OUT THE TUNES

[ineffag-swag]

VÉGE VAN KICSI!!!!!

[binghsien]

i was talking with a friend a bit ago and they were expressing some pride in that something that they'd organized had helped several people realize that they were trans.

anyway i guess that's a thing i can be proud of. never thought of it that way before.

[prokopetz]

I don't disagree with the observation that a lot of folks in tabletop roleplaying spaces don't believe that game design is real (i.e., in the sense that they believe any GM should be able to achieve any experience of play using any system, and refuse to recognise that rules are opinionated about what sort of games they want to produce), but I feel like putting that at the forefront is confusing the symptom for the disease. A lot of folks in tabletop roleplaying spaces don't believe game design is real because they don't believe that games are real.

I've talked in the past about how Hasbro's efforts to deceptively market Dungeons & Dragons as universal entry-level game have fostered a culture of play in which any appearance that D&D isn't a universal entry-level game is regarded as evidence that you have a "bad GM", and how, in order to avoid being a "bad GM", it's necessary to treat it as a normal part of the GM's responsibilities to constantly monitor the outputs of the rules and quickly paper over any gaps between the game the rules want to produce and the game the group wants to play, like a cartoon train conductor frantically constructing the very tracks along which the train they're conducting is riding.

The trouble is that most players aren't stupid, and readily see through the act. They (correctly!) observe that the particulars of the rules don't actually seem to matter all that much, because most of the desired experience of play is the product of the GM's constant interventions, rather than the product of interpreting the outputs of the rules – but instead of identifying this as a problem, they conclude (again, quite reasonably, as they've probably never seen it done differently) that this is what tabletop roleplaying is. The GM merely pretends to be moderating a game; in truth, they're a pantomime-leader whose job is to maintain the illusion that we're playing a game with rules, when in fact what we're really doing is guided improv theatre.

And of course there's nothing wrong with guided improv theatre – it's a fine pastime, and one I've enjoyed myself on many occasions. However, it does put folks who really do want to play a game in a bind, because now there's this insurmountable communication barrier. You can say "I want to play a game, and these are the rules of that game", and receive what seems to be enthusiastic agreement with that premise; however, a significant portion of the people expressing that agreement think they're participating in a bit of kayfabe, like very dedicated professional wrestlers who stay in character even outside the ring.

Critically, nobody is necessarily acting in bad faith in this equation. The folks who don't bother to learn the rules because they think games aren't real mostly aren't fucking with you on purpose; they honestly thought they were yes-anding your improv prompt by pretending to care about the mechanics of play, and when they discover that you really do expect them to do all that fiddly dice math, from their perspective it genuinely looks like you were the one misleading them. It's just a fucked up culture of play garbling all the signals in both directions.

(Note that, while I've identified Hasbro's deceptive marketing as the ultimate source of this culture of play, indie RPGs are hardly innocent of perpetuating it. You only need cast a critical eye on the "Rule Zero" sections of many popular indie games to notice that their authors are all in on the idea that games aren't real!)

[prokopetz]

#ohhhh this is really good analysis #also i think large scale super professional actual play podcasts n shit are a big part of this #cuz imo that was a Lot of peoples main engagement with ttrpgs back in the day (about a decade ago) #and a lot of people thats still their Main TTRPG Experience #and like. those tend to be even less Game Like than the average dnd campaign #like a lot of that shit is in fact. scripted. and made to be more cinematic for the audience etc (via @st4rshiptr00per)

Yeah, big name "actual play" podcasts that pretend they're not scripted and workshopped to hell are a big contributing factor, though I wouldn't classify them as distinct from Hasbro's marketing apparatus so much as one of the most visible arms of that apparatus. The fact that Hasbro isn't paying them directly doesn't mean they aren't serving the brand.

(The weird part is that I get the impression that some of them don't even know it. Sometimes it seems like Brennan Lee Mulligan genuinely doesn't realise that best practices for running a game of Dungeons & Dragons as a kind of performance art for a paying audience are very different from best practices for running a game of Dungeons & Dragons for your three buddies in the GM's dining room.)

[prokopetz]

@hayeseveryone replied:

Maaaaaan. So I'm DMing two DnD 5e games at the moment. One of them is a high level combat focused megadungeon with very experienced players, while the other is more open and has more RP with a mix of experienced and new players. I always feel way more drained after a session running the latter game than the former. And I think you really helped me see why. I'm DEFINITELY having to do a ton of track-laying while running that game, because it's such an unfocused game. I feel way more like I have to be an entertainer who's always the one responsible for my players' fun, rather than expecting them to make their own fun using the rules of the game, like the players in my other group do.

Quite so – that's the central paradox of the rules-heavy-versus-rules-light debate: provided that the game the rules want to produce agrees with the game the group wants to play, a rules-heavy game may actually be less demanding to run than a rules-light one. A rigorous framework of play can be a very effective means of distributing the workload of making the game happen; if you play your cards right, the players won't even notice they're taking a load off the GM's shoulders by making their own rulings, because to them it just feels like drawing the obvious conclusions.