brooding but kinda pathetic about it @crabnarok - Tumblr Blog

the weird thing about being a leftist is the government calling you a radical extremist and your family believing that youre a radical extremist and the whole times your main political beliefs are shit like "we live in a world where we could very easily end world hunger, homelessness, most disease, poverty, ect. and the people in power are choosing not to, and thats evil and should change" and that bigotry is bad

Feeling weirdly anxious. I am going to be camping for work all of next week and I really don't want to, I guess.

beemovieerotica

dystopia

loumner

???

swagophile

i will never understand not liking an entire medium of art. like a genre? i get it. a specifc author? totally. but you just. don't like.. reading? you don't like tv? animation? movies? music? no offense but. how do you exist ? maybe the number one thing that gives my life meaning is my ability to engage with art and if there was a full medium of art that i could nit engage with i would be really upset. like even if i didnt like it i think id make a concerted effort to explore that until i found something within it i did. like. art is everything. is it not?

swagophile

and yes this extends to "lesser mediums" like video games and anime and especially Porn as well. art is everywhere and can exist in any form. appreciating it is what makes life so fun and interesting, art is a lens that allows us to view life in different ways, art is meaning, art is Fun, art is heartbreak and regret and anger and all of that is Worth It. art is, above all else, Worth It

thydungeongal

Speaking of "D&D doesn't actually have a medieval paradigm," I think one of the most fun things done to D&D on various OSR-adjacent blogs has been making an effort to introduce more actual medievalism into D&D, because as said in actual old-school D&D the medieval elements are more of a thin coat of paint. Like, sure, sometimes it's fun to play the medieval fantasy theme park dungeon game, but actually introducing medieval politics and social dynamics into the game? That's fun.

It doesn't even need to alter the gameplay focus of the game: the party will still be largely a group of morally dubious violent problem-solvers who largely engage in killing things who live in holes in the ground and looting riches, but there is now an extra layer of having to think of fiefdoms and shit. The example that stuck with me was a blog post that was like "the dungeon is within land contested between two lords and the player characters are hired to loot its riches by the other lord so as to give them plausible deniability."

thydungeongal

One "issue" is that the actual medieval period and the philosophies that were prevalent at that time were very heavily informed by Christianity to the point where my friend @sirobvious has said (paraphrasing, and do correct me if I am misremembering or overtly simplifying your point) that you can't really have a meaningfully "medieval" game without Christianity. I say that this is an issue in quotations because you can just set your game in medieval Europe but now there's elves there. And like original D&D literally just had crosses on the equipment list, they weren't even called holy symbols.

greatwyrmgold

The fun thing about the medieval period is that its polities were extremely fragmented. Large kingdoms like France had power split between the king and various powerful vassals, many regions didn't have a large unifying kingdom, and I'm not sure which category to put the Church(es) or the Holy Roman Empire into. Individuals held a lot of power, but power was split between a lot of individuals.

(These qualities aren't unique to the medieval period, of course. But they contrast with the prior and subsequent periods of European history—Rome's exceptional-for-the-West territorial conquest and state capacity, and the early modern period's increasingly centralized proto-nation-states.)

Add in magic, and in particular the ability for adventurers to exponentially increase their power by looting ancient ruins and beating up weird monsters. Now it's realistic (or at least verisimilitudinous) for a gaggle of mercenaries/tomb robbers/thugs to amass enough power to compete with the local lords.

Alternatively, the king might nip that problem in the bud by offering the adventurers their own fiefs, integrating their power into his military system. Which means the adventurers would be competing and feuding with the other vassals.

A large kingdom might be able to muster enough power to crush the adventurers, but that power isn't united; if the king tries to force matters, they can ally with one or two of his big vassals and turn it into a fair fight.

And with how medieval warfare works—the relatively small armies (compared to their Roman or early-modern-European or Chinese counterparts), the reliance on "foraging" (raiding) to feed those armies, the unsophisticated siegecraft—it should be possible for a D&D-ish game to shift between its equivalent of "dungeon crawling" and its warfare without needing to dramatically alter the gameplay focus.

If I were making this game, I'd mix in a bit of mythic flavor. Specifically, those myths where a lost sphinx can pull a sword out of a stone or kill a sphinx or whatever and be crowned king. Though that might work better in a setting inspired by the even more fragmented poleis of Classical Greece...?

Either way, I think this is a more natural escalation than most D&D-adjacent games have. Instead of going from "fighting spiders in a cave" to "fighting demon spiders in a hellcave," or from "fighting cultists in a crypt" to "fighting cultists to Save The World," you go from clearing out local hazards to fighting legendary monsters to founding a kingdom.

I think there's something there, but I don't think any D&D-adjacent games have quite figured it out. There's always a divide between the individual-combat dungeon-delving side of the game and the realm-management side; two separate games with two separate kinds of mechanics. I feel like there's a way to unify them better, by making the "dungeons" more mass-combat-ish and focusing more on the violence needed to maintain a kingdom.

famouspainterwombat

itsbenedict

#france in shambles. automation truly comes for us all.

bannertanks

sentimentalslut

what people dont get about divorces is the Whole Thing About Dogs

sentimentalslut

i have written custody plans for labrador retrievers more complex than i have for children. i went to four years of undergrad, three years of law school, and sat for the bar exam to write up custody exchange provisions for dogs with hyphonated last names

sentimentalslut

my clients are paying $295 an hour for me to go to court and litigate who makes veterinary decisions for Chuckles the Goldfish and theres literally nothing i can do to stop them

sentimentalslut