Calemor

Avatar Art by @pepperstrawberry

[cardboard-crack]

[tpwrtrmnky]

The reactionary backlash to media analysis is a natural part of the wider "fascists hate anything intellectual" phenomenon, btw.

Wanting you to ignore the politics of Star Wars comes from the same exact place that wants you to substitute the germ theory of disease with the 'sickness comes from failure to be a good christian and most people who claim to be sick are just faking anyway' myth.

[ohnoitstbskyen]

To take a quote from Dan Olson:

They don't want these complexities to exist, and by talking about them, you make them exist. It's a form of magical thought. Talking about police brutality wills police brutality into existence. A disruption of the status quo is seen as a disruption of the natural order. The problem they see is that no-one has made those people shut up. That is what they want: someone to come in and make those people shut up and go away, to put things back "where they belong." [...] Their will is a hammer that they are using to beat reality itself into a shape of their choosing, a simple world where reality is exactly what it looks like through their eyes, devoid of complexity, devoid of change, where they are right and their enemies are silent. They are trying to build a flat earth.

[meshugenist]

i don't like calling things cognitohazardous, even when used semifacetiously it gives some amount of credence to the idea that one can be mentally corrupted by reading something. like even outright fascist propaganda is not a cognitohazard, one can read like mein kampf or smth and understand that it's bad just fine and not be like duped into hating da jews or whatever. reading stuff that is bigoted abt a group you are in can be painful and triggering but that isn't what is conveyed by the term cognitohazard

[bookwormally]

to no one's surprise woman who loves Pacific "the power of human connection and hope can save the world" Rim absolutely adored Project "connection and ingenuity and being brave for other people can save the universe" Hail Mary

[tredlocity]

[despazito]

I don't have time for tumblr discourse they're calling the very hungry caterpillar degenerate art over on twitter

[despazito]

good art is when something looks like real life, the more real it looks the more better the art. abstracted figures give my trad children nightmares, one time they were exposed to cubism and couldn't go outside for a week

[draculasstrawhat]

Huh fascinating, I wonder what the fash have against Eric Carle? I wonder what he might have said about his life, and influences, and early experiences that makes them say he’s part of an ‘insalubrious culture’?

Carle's 'Blue Horse' teaches kids to think outside the box

Franz Marc (1880-1916) was a German painter and printmaker, one of the key figures of the German Expressionist movement.

[cardboard-crack]

[dare-to-dm]

Types of players I really enjoy running games for

Players who write extensive backstories. Provided they're willing to work with me to make sure their story fits into the lore for my setting, I love hearing all about their OC's personal history. I live for the drama and the passion and enjoy finding ways to work it into my campaign.

Players who do voices. I love it when people get into character and try and bring some theatricality to the table. I admire their commitment and the courage it takes to perform.

Players who cleverly use the mechanics for teamwork. It's always satisfying when a player strives for system mastery, but it's particularly pleasing to me to see a player that is able to take advantage of the mechanics to produce strong synergy with the other players. I love rewarding this kind of play.

Players who fail graciously. I love it when a player sees a critical fumble as an opportunity for drama or comedy instead of something to be avoided at all costs. This is what it looks like to be a good sport.

Players who match my vibes. I really appreciate it when a player reads the room and plays their their character accordingly. Who is silly when I want to be silly and serious when I want to be serious and supports me in building and maintaining an engaging atmosphere.

Players who pay attention. I am so grateful when players let me finish my narration and take notes and connect the dots.

Inexperienced but enthusiastic players. It's so much fun running for people who are new to the game. I love being the one to introduce them to this hobby and show them how much fun it can be. Most of the time, their excitement more than makes up any awkwardness that comes with learning the game.

There are probably some things I'm forgetting, but this post is getting long enough as it is. You all are a delight and I love having you at my table.

[smbc-comics]

Really should've asked about the ship label before he got in.

Check out the bonus panel on the site.

───── ◆ ───── ◆ ───── ◆ ─────

SMBC ◆ PATREON ◆ INSTAGRAM ◆ BLUESKY ◆ STORE

Buy this comic as a print.

[tredlocity]

[shencomix]

[tatooineknights]

Academy Award winner Marcia Lucas has died. While winning major awards for her work as an editor for Star Wars (alongside a team of editors, including Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew; some of her contributions outside of her work with George Lucas include Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Taxi Driver, and New York, New York), she mostly disappeared from the public eye following her divorce and essentially retired.

While Marcia dispelled the belief that she singlehandedly saved Star Wars in the edit (and very passionately defended George's craftmanship and ideas, which she felt were undercredited, as well as the work of their team in general), there was a lot of work she specifically did and I thought it would be good to highlight just how much she did and give her credit where it is due. There is a lot that came from her that most don't know about. Most of those examples are from Howard Kazanjian's biography, A Producer's Life, published in 2021.

On some of the uncredited dialogue and story revisions for Star Wars:

On some of her work in Star Wars:

On having the iconic trench run on the Death Star as her biggest work while working on Star Wars:

On her uncredited work in The Empire Strikes Back:

On how her input changed the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark:

On her joining the Return of the Jedi crew, an emphasis in finding the right cut for actors, cutting together footage of Luke in ROTJ after she and George disagreed with the characterization the director had given to Mark Hamill and unable to reshoot footage:

On editing the climactic ending in the Throne Room in ROTJ:

[prokopetz]

Why weren't TTRPGs popularized centuries before video games? Large scale printing for complex rulebooks needed the printing press, but even then, it wouldn't justify taking off as late as the second half of the 20th century

A lot of it boils down to dumb luck. Hobbies resembling modern tabletop RPGs have come and gone before, but none of the ones that came before Dungeons & Dragons ever managed to blow up into a broader cultural phenomenon.

For example, tabletop American baseball simulators that use rules tech very similar to that of modern indie tabletop RPGs – complete with d66 rolls and Big Stupid Tables full of increasingly improbable random events – have been around since the 1880s, and by the mid 20th Century, dedicated players were using them to simulate entire virtual leagues in a way that would be instantly recognisable to modern indie RPG fans as a form of solo journalling RPG. Robert Coover's 1968 novel, The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop., dramatises the hobby in a way that strikingly pre-figures the later Satanic Panic's fearmongering about D&D players becoming so immersed in the game that they lose touch with reality – pre-dating D&D itself by over five years.

It never went anywhere from there. Such games still exist, but the hobby remains insular to this day; it just never stumbled into the right combination of time and place to grow beyond its roots. And it's not even the first time a niche hobby had approached something like modern tabletop RPGs and just never taken that final step. We can speculate about the whys and wherefores, but ultimately, a lot of it – ironically, given the subject matter – boils down to a cosmic roll of the dice.

(One of my favourite counterfactuals is speculating what the modern tabletop roleplaying hobby would look like in a world where it kicked off half a century early by growing out of tabletop American baseball simulators in the 1920s rather than historical wargames in the 1970s. Imagine!)

[believerindaydreams]

as an aficionado of the US Naval War College, their version is that they encouraged the 1970s version out of spite when their support apparatus in Rhode Island was shut down for, ironically, military minmaxing efficiency. Handing the general public technology that let you predict nation state developments had previously been kept under wraps

they will, obviously, deny it if you actually go to Newport and ask them, but this is old news to the town itself

[prokopetz]

I'm not saying I find any of this in any way credible, but "tabletop roleplaying games became a wider cultural phenomenon at the time and in the place that they did because the global military-industrial complex had been deliberately suppressing tabletop RPG 'technology', until the US Navy let the cat out of the bag in the 1970s due to an inter-departmental pissing contest" is a fascinating conspiracy theory.

[taacck]

picnic time

[herssian]

you deserve to draw, by the way. even badly. even horribly

[the-haiku-bot]

you deserve to draw,

by the way. even badly.

even horribly

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[cardboard-crack]

[anim-ttrpgs]

I don’t know what’s more detrimental to the health of TTRPGs as a medium, D&D5e players who think that TTRPGs are “collaborative storytelling” and that D&D5e does this great if you just ignore all the rules that make it not do that, or non-D&D players who realize that no edition of D&D5e is good for “collaborative storytelling” but still think that the primary purpose of all TTRPGs is to be “collaborative storytelling” and that not being good for “collaborative storytelling” a satisfying narrative is what makes D&D bad. D&D5e is bad for other reasons but you’re complaining that a cheap toothbrush doesn’t keep you warm at night.

An expectation is being placed on all pieces in this artform to do something that the majority of them were never meant to do in the first place.

[ace-disgrace-on-the-case]

Ok. Genuinely, though. What would you say the purpose of D&D5e is? What are the majority of TTRPGs made for?

Because like, a dungeon crawl is a story. So is a complex political negotiation. So is a heist. So is playing out a battle tactically. All of these things are stories, and insofar as each player contributes the actions of their characters and (in a good group) an equal stake in the enjoyment of everyone in the group, it is collaborative.

I don’t see how it isn’t for “collaborative storytelling”, and I don’t even play D&D5e. The relationship between the GM and the players isn’t adversarial. All of them are players trying to have fun, and crucially in a healthy group that doesn’t come at the cost of someone else’s fun.

Collaboratively telling a story, in some form playing make believe with rules to simulate and constrain the ways we are playing, that’s. Just what a TTRPG is. Like. Categorically.

[simpleimple]

I think the rub here with the term "collaborative storytelling" is that it's coming across at odd angles. Like you said, almost everything can lead to a story. And there are multiple people there inputting into the machine and so clearly it's collaboration. But the same can be said of nearly anything, let alone just games.

What a TTRPG is for is, as what amounts to an analog computer, to take a series of inputs and give you an output combined with imaginative interpretations and creative narrative decisions in order to create the emergent property that is roleplay. In much the same that you can roleplay someone specific in a video game, games with immersive sim properties are much better at it because they give you the tools by which to more deeply express the internal agency you're applying to the game world. And even then you will be constrained by the game and its intents if what you are attempting to roleplay is not supported by the game. Deus Ex is much more conducive to roleplay than, say, DOOM. But even then Deus Ex still expects you to be Some Guy Caught Up In Conspiracy Nonsense. Meanwhile horizontal growth games like Ultima Online allow you to express a wide variety of permutations, the only game where my favorite class fantasy can be "real estate scammer" and the game and the way both the world and other players interact with it supports this. The important part about the commentary on ANIM's discussion of collaborative storytelling, which describes a specific attitude about how those stories are produced and not about their presence, is thus:

In a game where the primary analog input-output is the emergent property of semi-randomized mechanical interactions, it is very difficult to even attempt to generate the storybeats of, say, Lord of the Rings naturalistically. So you come expecting that every game produces A Fantasy Novel sort of storytelling and not something more in line with the often chaotic, often hamfisted, and meandering storytelling of, say, a weekly print comic that might have a roadmap or be partially planned but often just kind of jams in whatever needs to happen to keep things moving and ramp the drama. And even that isn't an adequate equivalent to this, as a comic can still successfully have internal rules like "The MC and his crush are not allowed to die", a thing which a ttrpg which has a mechanic about death can only do by rewriting the rules, one of the principal complaints in the entire essay. In order to create the kind of fantasy novel-esque story structure, an enormous amount of effort must go into bending, warping, and changing the rules so much that what you get at the end is at best a facsimile of the thing you went in to create, and if the efforts prove fruitless this is not the fault of either the game or of the expectations put on it to demand those efforts, but of the GM who failed to produce a game design degree via first principles.

And so the way that DnD is treated is often more like modding Deus Ex so that there is either no way to fail or die regardless of which path you take or else to mod it so that there is only one preconceived path which the game must take. When it became an increasing norm of the culture of play to demand that the GM ask permission for characters to be killed (a mechanic which the game has specific rules for for which there are not alternatives) rather than accepting that death is something both mechanically implemented and a story beat which will be generated by the semi-random output of the machine, enormous pressure came down to completely rework the machine from the ground up rather than exit the walled garden and engage with a machine which does not produce outputs which the players do not desire. The purpose of a machine is what it does, and what this machine does in its design does not produce conventional satisfying, novel-like stories. It creates a lot of emergent situations which must be handled, for good or ill, by semi-random, dice based mechanics. Unfortunately, people believe that that is not the purpose of the machine in spite of all evidence from the text due to their folkloric understanding of it and so view it as broken and anyone not able to fix it as having failed.

[herr-paulmann]

I think my biggest problem with the arguments A.N.I.M & simpleimple brought up here is how they are simultaneously too specific and too general.

You're talking about really broad stuff like people's expectations of games, wider trends in the TTRPG culture of play while arguing that those are mostly happening because people miunderstand the rules?

You seperate the text of the game from the folkloric understanding of the game.

The text is not the game.

What is happening during play is the game, which is heavily influenced by the folklore.

People can play this game very differently depending on experience and preferences with TTRPGs or games IN GENERAL.

Can you Imagine walking up to a group of people having fun and going "Pals, you are doing this all wrong, you could be having so much MORE fun" is madness to me ... MADNESS.

Im sorry but I feel like these arguments are really a gross misunderstanding on what playing TTRPGs is about for most people.

If you wanna try out different TTRPGs on the regular you need people in your group that find that exciting!

I dont wanna be antagonistic, I just feel these arguments are going nowhere really.

NOW if you wanna talk about how capitalism is turning TTRPGs into a commodity to own instead of play I am ALL EARS and sopping wet with guilt!

[thydungeongal]

The folkloric understanding of what TTRPGs are and what they are supposed to do has, especially in the specific context of D&D and other very traditional challenge-focused RPGs, largely emerged from a culture of play that treats the text of these games as incidental. These games do exist as texts as well and when the culture of play around these games exists largely as divorced from these texts and it is effortless to also demonstrate that playing these games while adhering to the text does not result in gameplay that is inherently undesirable, it is in fact good to remind people that these texts should not be treated as incidental.

In fact, to your capitalism point, the ones who have the most to gain from an understanding of tabletop RPGs as just a set of folklore and vibes where the text doesn't matter are, in fact, the folks at Wizards of the Coast. Arguably a very large part of the marketing (not just from WotC but also from the industry that has sprung up around D&D) of D&D the game relies on the notion that D&D is good for collaborative storytelling (something it, as a text, doesn't actually primarily support) and that the rules ultimately don't matter. And when the rules of a game can be reduced to nothing but a set of vibes that are completely divorced from the game as a text this in fact mostly benefits the game that has already captured a large part of the hobby and industry.

And I don't think this should be taken to some extreme like "by actually taking RPG rules as texts worth engaging with instead of just sets of vibes that may or may not result in good gameplay you are actually doing an epic anti-capitalism," but tabletop RPGs do exist as books with rules not as an accident.

And to quote a much more eloquent person than I, the designer of Cairn: "Playing rules-as-written isn't obedience. It's literacy."

Turning the Dial

Nerds love taxonomy; it gives order to the world, and provides a meaningful sense of control. Of course, it's all an illusion. At best taxon

This also applies to analyzing games and the cultures of play surrounding them. For a culture of play that treats the text as secondary or incidental to gameplay and where the desired gameplay is actually orthogonal to the text, saying that the culture of play would actually benefit from engaging with the text as is or engaging with a different game altogether is the most charitable interpretation of what is going on.

[anim-ttrpgs]

I'm definitely going to be borrowing "Playing games rules-as-written isn't obedience, it's literacy." in the future