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."
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.
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.
my dad (Maori) works on a ship with all Maori/Tongan/Samoan fisherman- and one Aussie guy called Jake.
And that wasn't done on purpose just sort of how it ended up, but Jake recently got an injury so they put him on a Different boat just for a little bit (a sit in the wheelhouse and scout type of boat, instead of the main fishing one) and he only got back to my dad's ship today and he was apparently like Shaking. He was Traumatised.
Dad said Jake kept pulling him aside and going "They were all yelling on there, but in a MEAN way" "They didn't clean... Like at ALL"
Jake experienced what a boat full of old school Aussie fisherman is like. That is the norm Jake. You just happened to be on the all Island boy boat on your first go out. "It was time for dinner and they had FROZEN nuggets" Jake that's what they have on ships that are out at sea for months at a time.
On my dad's boat they are eating fresh fish and coconut milk Ceviche. They're grilling steaks on an open bbq on the deck that probably is not regulation. All the guys have their own special knives to prepare sashimi every couple days. Everyone is happily doing their own work so they can clock out early and set up a movie on the deck. Jake did you genuinely believe that's what every boat was doing.
Local Australian man is fed fresh juices and smoked fish for first time- refuses to go back to beef jerky boat life
jake that first night when they served a freezer tray tv dinner and not an overflowing plate of fish that's probably going for conservatively like $40-$80 bucks a kilo but the guys decided Eh we'll catch more let's just fry it up:
I've seen so many mutuals saying they want to be clicker trained or want to clicker train their gfs, but I haven't seen any concise starter guides. So I'm writing my own! This is intended as an intro, and is mostly focused on what being clicker trained is like for me personally. It is primarily based from the perspective of the trainer, but should still be useful for any pets reading!
Adding links to my other clicker training posts here.
Rewards Tricks
Loading
Loading is the process of attaching pleasure to the clicker. It's a prerequisite to the training cycle, but it is easy to do and fun!
It's important to click first and then immediately do something pleasurable to the pet. Headpats, hugs work well. (Trainer's note: So does thrusting into a consenting pet)
You can spend a lot of time associating pleasure with the clicker, but generally you only need to do the process 3-4 times for it to start sticking.
Training Cycle
Cueing->Trick->Reward->Reset->Cueing->..
Cueing/Shaping
The process for cueing depends on the shaping style, and changes as the pet learns how to properly do their trick. The main difference between styles is how early you add the cue. Generally, the more work you make the pet do in learning the trick, before introducing a cue, the longer the conditioning will last before fading away.
Warm Shaping starts training with a cue that does not immediately make obvious what is expected, but provides a clue. This style is a good choice for responding to physical stimuli, rather than a verbal cue.
Two of the cues of tricks i learned with warm shaping, are a hand on the side of my face and a hand under my chin.
Hand on the side of my face means hold eye contract and pay attention.
Hand under my chin means tilt my head up and expose my neck.
Neither of these cues told me what to do but help lead to the correct behavior, which then gets reinforced.
(Trainer's note: If you're feeling mean and your puppy send you this post, consider training these cues to do something else. It'll be adorable.)
Cold Shaping starts with no cueing at all, and the pet needs to experiment and try different behaviors until they get close enough to the correct behavior and are rewarded. This style works well for tricks that you want to eventually verbally cue, and you would attach the cue once the pet has the correct behavior figured out.
Trick
This is where the pet responds to the cue, or tries to figure what the correct behavior is.
For the pet depending on the warmth of the shaping you'll have to do more or less experimentation. The first few cycles of a new cold shaped trick you'll likely get a reward for getting anywhere close to what's intended. But then you will have to get closer and closer to correct behavior to continue getting rewards.
For the trainer you need to focus on when exactly to give the reward. When just getting started with a new trick you should start very generous on what is considered correct enough for a reward, and gradually raise the bar until the pet is doing what you intend. For cold shaping depending on the trick this may take a decent number of cycles before you start getting anywhere.
If you are trying to raise the bar and the pet fails more than 3-4 times, go back to clicking for what was correct 3-4 times for positive reinforcement, before trying to raise again.
Reward <3
The reward almost exactly the same as the earlier loading phase. You might need to adjust the intensity or duration of the reward used in the loading phase to make it fit the pace of the training cycle. You still want to reward in training to continue reinforcing the clickers attachment to pleasure.
For me i get immediate praise (good boy(like a dog), good job, etc.) and head scratches/pets. You can get creative with the reward, but it should be pretty short from the trick -> click -> reward or it makes the conditioning harder.
Reset!
At the end of the cycle you need to cue the pet to know that we're starting over at cueing. This is important in helping the pet understand what the cue is and what the wrong behavior is. Doing a reset instead of a reward is a strong signal that the behavior is either wrong or that the pet needs to do more if their previous behavior no longer elicits a reward.
A good reset is walking away from the pet and having them come to you when they are ready to give it another try. Walking in a circle and coming back to the pet also works for situations that it's harder for the pet to follow. This is also helpful in reminding the pet that your training can happen in spaces other than the room you're in. If you can, try reinforcing in public!
Frequency.
Conditioning works best with short frequent sessions. My trainings are on the sparse side at 2x per week for 5-10 minutes. If I lived with my gf and we worked from home we would aim for closer to 2x daily 5 minutes sessions. Make do with the frequency that works for you.
Safety considerations
Negotiation
Discuss what kind of tricks are on the table to be conditioned. Stay away from cues that might occur in unintended, unsafe, or unwanted situations. Consider what are possible worst case situations and decide if that's a risk the pet is willing to accept.
RACK is Risk Aware & Accepting Consensual Kink.
Some risks cannot be fully mitigated.
Even if a cue can be ignored, doing so might come with a lot of discomfort and stress.
Control
The pet owning their clicker helps reinforce that the tricks the pet learns are their own and it is their decision who gets to use them. The trainer gets the joy of training them in but they have no right to use or access beyond what is given by the pet.
This can also help add more structure to training sessions, with a ritual of the pet handing their clicker over at the start and getting it back at the end. (This doesn't always have to be the case, and it is very fun to eventually branch into clicking in public.)
Aftercare!
Starting with a simple trick (like the staring one) allows you to end a session on a high note, even if you and the pet are unable to make much progress on a more complex trick. Then after, traditional aftercare rules apply, figure out what both of you need and make sure each other is cared for and appreciated.
Misc Notes
Food treats generally don't work as chewing takes too long and can form an association with eating instead of the clicker.
An additional form of cueing is hot shaping, where the cue is provided immediately. This is not one we use in my trainings.
(Trainer's note: This is not one it notices that we use in our training.)
Conditioning does fade with time but depends on the trick, how the pet feels about the trick, the particular trick, and other things that you can't account for.
With clicker training it is hard to modify a trick after it's been conditioned, and usually just ends up muddying the response.
(Trainer's note: Clicking, like practice, makes specific responses permanent. Activities that work best with lot of variation aren't good choices. Like getting head.)
This guide has been focused on the bare minimum to prevent being overwhelmed with information, or stressing the pet you train with. It does not need to be so structured as I setup, but it was very helpful for it to be that way for me (primarily for autism reasons).
Trainer's note: Here are some additional resources that helped get me started
https://sexnerdsandra.libsyn.com/pavlovian-sex-human-clicker-training-with-miss-holly
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/662336.Karen_Pryor_Getting_Started
And then the more serious text on brainwashing, which does add good depth to the psychology, but isn't specifically about clicker training:
https://sleepingirl.gumroad.com/l/QuncQ
Ok have fun be safe! Feel free to ask me follow up questions!
And as a serious note remember just like so many kink things, clicker training is a tool that is misused elsewhere. Consent is key.
Each November, some people try to write a novel. Others would prefer to do as little writing as possible. For those who wish to challenge their ability to not write, we offer this alternative: producing a complete, playable roleplaying game in two hundred words or fewer.
This is the submission thread for the 2025 event, running from November 1st, 2025 through November 30th, 2025. Submission guidelines can be found in this blog's pinned post, here.
At game start, elect a President, who chooses Issues and appoints Premiers. At end-of-round, anyone may impeach the President. If a majority vote to impeach, the impeacher becomes President. The President appoints a Premier, who proposes Legislation, for one round. Nobody can be reappointed until everyone save the President has been Premier. Everyone else are Backbenchers.
The President generates three random nouns, choosing one as the Issue. The Premier determines an Action (1d6) on the Issue, creating Legislation.
Actions:
Ban it.
Legalize it.
Make it mandatory.
Declare war on it.
Introduce a constitutional right to it.
Exile it to Antarctica.
The Premier makes a five-minute speech in favor of the Legislation. Anyone using second-person pronouns is Censured and cannot vote that round.
Each Backbencher asks a question to the Premier, who responds briefly.
Next, all MPs, save the President or anyone Censured, vote. A majority in favor enacts the Legislation; otherwise, it fails. The President breaks ties. Handle impeachment, then pick Issues and Premier for the next round.
MPs win by passing Legislation thrice. If everyone has been Premier five times with no winner, the President wins.
AUTHORS NOTE: Do as you will with this, including archiving off-site. Consider it public domain, or the equivalent in your local jurisdiction.
what do you mean elon musk did a nazi salute on live tv at the united states presidential inauguration twice and is now erasing the evidence off the internet by replacing the footage with the crowd cheering instead?
would be a shame if people reblogged this, wouldn’t it?
Modern D&D relies very heavily on a character's classes and levels being the main expression of who they are and what they are. In old-school D&D terms Eric of Melbourne (the guy with the cool black sword) is basically just a Fighting-Guy and a Magic-Using Guy (at the same time!!!) with a cool black sword he picked up from somewhere and that sword actually is a source of most of his narrative identity. However, magic items aren't quite as character-defining in modern D&D and the focus is more on the build.
As such, the archetype of "the angsty guy who is a fighting type of guy and a magic type of guy with a cool dark sword" needs to be expressed within the framework of classes and levels. But in the name of game balance, you also can't give a level 1 character a cool named sword called Blackrazor so you end up writing flavor text about some mysterious force that keeps giving out sentient magic weapons made out of shadow to all the angsty fighting magic types of guy.
Like obviously the Hexblade as an archetype isn't based only on Eric of Melatonin (the Stormguy) but he is pretty much the source of the archetype. But making his specific narrative replicable through classes and levels could be argued to go against the narrative and cheapen it? Idk, there's also the fact that Eric was already a powerful sorcerer and warrior before he got his cool sword so.
Anyway the point is that because D&D is very much a different type of game these days the idea that a character would draw a large part of their character identity from a magic item they just found somewhat goes against its structure. There's also the dreaded specter of game balance. Now, truthfully, old-school D&D isn't necessarily the best engine for emulating these types of characters either because it's not a story engine but primarily a challenge-focused game. Odds are that El Rick dies to a giant killer bee sting before he even finds Swordguy. But trying to express that character archetype through a class? Imagine if there was a Rogue archetype focused on having found a specific type of ring (attached to some nebulous mysterious evil power that keeps mass-producing these rings) that lets them turn invisible. Or Elothar Warrior of Bladereach.
I think an easy solution to this would be to read the prequel novel Elric of Melniboné. For most of that novel, Elric does not in fact have the sword Stormbringer. He goes on various adventures, conflicts with his cousin Yyrkroon, and acquires the sword as part of the final confrontations of the book in which he duels Yyrkroon with both wielding similar runeblades.
There's always going to be a point before the hero acquired the great artefact or weapon. Stormbringer is a quest reward.
Yep exactly. The issue is that in part Elric became crystallized in pop culture as "the guy with the cool evil sword" and to express that trope D&D has gone the direction that the cool evil sword has to be an intrinsic part of his character. There has to be an Elric class which gives him Stormbringer: Stormbringer can't just be a cool sword that Elric the Fighter/Magic-User found.
I think part of the reason for that is because of who has agency. If it's a class, then it's a player's decision to be that guy exactly. If it's a quest reward, or a bit of treasure, or something like that, then it's either something the GM placed or that was added by a random table. Wizards D&D is very heavily on the side of letting character-defining decisions be made by the players without input from the campaign; it never really got away from the thing where 3e characters would have planned 1-20 builds before the game even started.
Which means they make a level one knockoff versions of character concepts that are very clearly more experienced than that
As much as I like 3.5 and Pathfinder and a couple of 5e builds, WotC D&D is in an awkward middle ground.
On one hand, you can't play your cool character concept until you've accumulated several levels over the first months of play, unless your concept "comes online" relatively early and you start in the mid-levels. So D&D isn't a good game for playing those character concepts.
But on the other hand, you also can't start with a basic character and develop it organically over the course of a campaign. Basically all the important aspects of your character are entirely under your control; you don't evolve by adapting to environmental circumstances, you follow a predefined path unaffected by your journey. So D&D also isn't a good game for making a little guy who changes over the course of their adventure.
A fair number of games let you play your cool character concept right away. (In my experience, superhero games tend to be good at this.) And some games are built around letting your little guy develop organically over the course of their adventure. But D&D isn't.
Yeah, even the older editions of D&D are not great at this (they are good as challenge games but I feel WotC D&D improved greatly with regards to "expressing character through mechanics"). On one hand, yeah, you don't have to worry about a build that your character has to develop towards, but on the other hand there's very little room for development for your character besides a strictly linear path (and a few mechanical choices, but even those are often heavily dependent on a decision you made for your character at level 1, i.e. their class).
In this sense magic items actually are the one organic bit of character development characters in pre-WotC editions have. Besides their ability scores (which are largely static after they have been rolled) there is very little to distinguish two human Fighters from each other. But the one who picked up the magical sword that is intelligent and drains lives and wants to kill all Clerics is going to play differently from the one who simply picked up a Girdle of Hill Giant Strength. And even that I don't think is a great amount of character development in response to one's circumstances.
I think it would be interesting to see a D&D-esque advancement system that happens during play time instead of between sessions.
A character mastering a new ability at a critical moment is a storied and resonant trope that doesn't get to happen in this kind of game, and it would create tension between locking in a strong ability now and keeping your options open in case of emergency. Character builds would have stories attached to them about obstacles they overcame as well as stuff they found.
This is pretty firmly venturing into speculating about an entirely different game, but I'd be curious to see how it works out for balancing player choice with game influence in character builds
Levelling up during a session (or even mid-fight) is absolutely possible, so it can be done - indeed, as far as I can recall there’s nothing explicitly encouraging the DM to level up between sessions, so in theory that is in fact the intended (or at least implied) mechanic, at least to the best of my knowledge.
You know what's a form of roleplaying that's kinda fallen out fo favour a bit, or at least doesn't appear as part of the discourse in my corner of the hobby space? The Campaign.
A lot of games are designed for one shots or at most episodic adventures, and many of these are not a good fit for running the Campaign, and even the ones that are seem to rarely be used for it.
"Hang on," chimes in the D&D player, "we just finished a three-year campaign and are starting a new one next week!"
Yeah, okay. Why did you finish your campaign? Because you finished the plot? Well that's not the Campaign, then. The Campaign doesn't have a story, at least not how you understand it. And it certainly has no plot.
No, the essence of the Campaign is not a story, but a persistent world. It has a beginning, which is the time when the first players gather to play it, but it has no ending other than the last players just kind of… stopping. And it can still be picked up after that end. And why do I call it the Campaign? Because it's what the group primarily plays, at least using a specific system. You don't go "hey how about we start a new campaign where we do X?" No, you do X in the Campaign. It's a space where you do stuff, and a good one will accomodate quite a lot.
It's late and I'm rambling. But maybe give the Campaign a try. I'll expand on this if anyone has any questions.
I wonder how "dead" it actually is. A lot of the TTRPG-playing world is "dark" to the broader community. This, I suspect, is a large part of the reason we think of the D&D community as so catastrophically bad at understanding its own game - most of the playerbase is in private groups enjoying their private games, and not talking to the outside world about them very much at all, so only the worst people, unable to be sorted into the private games, stick around at the "surface" level. Needless to say, John DungeonMaster running his weekly game with his friends is likely not in the TTRPG Discourse Mines rolling his WIS saving throw to resist the effect of Hot Takes.
For a lot of groups, I suspect there is a substantially contiguous world, though not a set of characters, because TTRPG progression, for the most part, ends - there is no level 21, and so, at a certain point, there's a desire to start fresh with a new character. Even for the groups running WOTC or Paizo's box-set adventures, I would bet if you asked, "Do your previous characters exist in the world right now?" the answer from most parties/GMs would be "obviously" - you may be in a different part of the world, but it's the same world. Indeed, from anecdotes, "one of the characters from a previous story arc is in this town for some reason" is a very common small addition for a GM to make to a module. Inasmuch as this world is typically the one that comes in the box with the system, this may be obscured by the fact that the GM isn't (usually) building the world on the fly, but it is still there, to some degree.
To be fair, the second map relies on official statistics, which we understand are fairly reliable in the US/EU/Australia but are not hard to manipulate (there's some evidence China underreported its deaths at various stages) and experts think North Korea is just lying out of its ass about COVID; there seems to have been a substantial outbreak of some kind there. Moreover, a lot of those African countries are also likely to have substantial undercounts for various reasons, particularly underdeveloped health infrastructure (can't get diagnosed) and vital records (government doesn't know you're dead). So "US best prepared country for an epidemic" is... an idea, but saying that North Korea and the Central African Republic had the lowest COVID death rates in the world is, frankly, nonsense.
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