Thoughts emerging from a clown

he/him, eternal ashildrs apologist, running about like a feral puppy

[prokopetz]

The real problem with D&D's contemporary culture of play is that it's basically a worse version of what Paranoia was doing forty years ago. It's a faux pas for players to display knowledge of the mechanics and the GM is expected to maintain an elaborate kayfabe where they merely pretend to be moderating a game with rules while actually doing something completely different, and they're not even allowed to kill players with orbital laser strikes for talking back.

[prokopetz]

Like, I'm not keen on any framing of play where the GM is expected to do literally 100% of the work of making the game happen, but it seems to me that if you're going to do that anyway, the GM being both allowed and encouraged to kill you with lasers whenever they want is only fair compensation.

[crionic-dubs]

Some tweets by @tredlocity from August that I still think about

[crionic-dubs]

[aurpiment]

I wish insomnia at least gave you more usable hours in the day instead of just more hours where you are stupid

[bayesic-bitch]

Obviously Red Pill and related movements were mostly full of shit but I do think it's useful to break down exactly where they go off the rails. For instance, the idea of a sexual marketplace. The idea that large numbers of repeated consensual interactions converge to something like a market is imo not unreasonable. But then they start applying ideas that are either only true in idealized, perfectly competitive markets, or are not true of any market at all. Thinking for just two seconds should reveal that the actual sexual market place is full of assymetric information, high transaction costs, and non-fungible products. But the most egregious oversight of this line of thinking is the implicit assumption that there is low market concentration and no market power, something that is immediately recognizable as false when we realize that a solid 42% of US domestic sucking and fucking was provided by your mom.

[motherlicker]

To be clear, it's inaccurate to describe your mom as holding a monopoly position in the sexual marketplace. What she's achieved is not dominance through exclusionary practices, but rather an exceptionally competitive cost structure and historically low barriers to entry.

[json-derulo]

i'm sorry i didn't respond to your DM for 23 days. the number on the notification icon got really big and i began having irrational anxious thoughts such as "what if people are in there trying to contact me"

[exitwound]

this is making me hyperventilate

[somethingunlikeanythingelse]

I have no sense of sense is too funny not to highlight

[galileosballs]

Let's say I really wanted to reduce the number of children who die in car accidents. Car accidents are really bad, right? Nobody disagrees about that. And it would be much better for both the environment and the kids' health if they spent more time walking, or taking the bus. Perfectly reasonable. More cars off the road, safer roads, fewer kids getting hurt, healthier kids. A win-win!

Therefore, let's ban children from traveling by car and require all cars to have a scanner on the door that scans the government ID of everyone who gets in the car to make sure no kids are in there. After all, kids get hurt in car accidents all the time! We need to ban this right away!

[patricia-taxxon]

i love explaining the etymology of the word "rickroll" because the story starts with "ok, so at one point 4chan applied a filter to everyone's posts that changed the word egg to duck"

[maple-cloak]

[wrenanigans]

[croaksac]

grandfather....

[metamatar-deactivated20250401]

hello mutual before you gossip or vaguepost please send me a 2 page dossier in the dms. thanks. much appreciated.

[visenyaism]

I ❤️gossip I ❤️eavesdropping I ❤️asking nosy questions I❤️ looking for and acquiring information. On account of my curious and inquisitive nature #mynature

[miseria-fortes-viros]

i understand why people like the queue and i do respect you guys for using it but that is just not how i roll. if i think these 37 posts are funny you’re seeing them right fucking now

[luxiomahariel]

[purplepingupenguins]

insp.

[di--es---can-ic-ul-ar--es]

ME AND WHO

[shieldfoss]

#why do they call it the little death if not to remind you to do a post mortem.

lmao

[closertotheheartofthesunrise]

no no @nogoodhorsethief, you have something here

[phantomrose96]

When you meet Edward Elric he gives off the impression that he's the short-tempered hot-headed "violence is the answer to all life's questions" kind of protagonist, and it's in fact incredible character craft that he's actually the character who ends the series with a negative-3 kill count.

[phantomrose96]

people killed: 0

direct orders of "you really really need to kill this guy" ignored: 1

ongoing murders being committed by Ed's own friends/colleagues that Ed got in the way of to specifically stop that murder from happening: 2

[phantomrose96]

God's worst soldier Edward Elric. Showed up as the youngest member of the Amestrian army, took millions of dollars from them, never followed a single order, helped dismantle their fascist regime, left with a lower kill count than he arrived with, then fucked off to go be a house-husband. Character of all time.

[cuntylestat]

I've been a third all my life. Not saying that to fight, just saying that it's true. I feel like I get to pick one thing for myself, and it's her. A weird white lady I met by happenstance.

[prokopetz]

One of my personal game design white whales is an OSR game that takes the modern roguelike "core advancement schema is constrained to single runs, plus some sort of auxiliary metaprogression based on rewards for completing runs" and cross-breeds it with the "dungeons are mythic underworlds/fragments of other worlds/living creatures parasitising our reality" conceit that some contemporary OSR games go for to produce a game where the core rules furnish robust character creation procedures but simply have no concept of advancement, incremental or otherwise, and then each individual adventure module has its own context-specific advancement schema which is only effective inside that particular dungeon, and goes away outside of it.

e.g., one dungeon might allow characters to advance by progressively enbodying mythic archetypes to produce something resembling a conventional class-and-level system, save that the "character classes" are specific to that dungeon, and a different dungeon which nominally has the same advancement schema would have a totally different set of playbooks; another might have fully randomised advancement in which player characters acquire weird body-horror mutations that grant mildly game-breaking super powers with no ability to influence which ones they get; and a third might have wholly extrinsic advancement based on acquiring golf-bags full of magic items with oddly specific functions. In each case, progression through the relevant advancement schema would be extremely rapid, such that exploring its full gamut in the span of a single adventure module is feasible, and player characters would "reset to level 1" once that module is complete.

However – and this is the keystone of the entire exercise – we're explicitly not obliging GMs to basically design a whole new game every time they want to roll their own adventure module, because 90% of the text would consist of a long list of modular pieces of advancement schemas which can be plugged together like Lego bricks to produce whatever the dungeon at hand uses, tied together with some sort of monstrous set of Big Stupid Tables which enable advancement schemas to be randomly generated, with the GM's only obligatory responsibility being to invent an aesthetic for the dungeon which justifies these particular elements coming together in this particular configuration.