[gyrovagi]

still thinking about blackwall's gendered dialogue differences. the chivalry towards and idealization of f!inquisitor. the frankness about sex with m!inquisitor. sheryl chee can we talk...

^ this is sooooo crazy . when f!inquisitor asks, blackwall's mind goes to the ideal of family life, which of course he doesn't believe he deserves. but in response to m!inquisitor he's firmly oriented in reality where he could've fathered a bastard at some point, who knows, but no child would deserve a father like this. (a father who's killed children.) the romanticized ideal of a happy family as a kind of just reward, as opposed to reality where a child can be born of an unknown, disgraced father and the fact they deserve better doesn't change the facts. all they can do is try and avoid the truth. and of course the focus in both cases on being 'deserving' in either a positive or negative sense. (people only get rewards they deserve in fantasy!)

and like it is. so andrastian. blackwall isn't overtly faithful in the way of leliana or cassandra, but it is clear that the idea of the inquisitor as andraste's herald means something to him, and plays heavily into his idealization of f!inquisitor/an inquisitor romancing him especially. he is invested in the idea of women as purer and closer to divinity while men (like him) (especially him) are forever marked by betrayal and violence, because it's a familiar and comfortable framework to contextualize his own guilt. we've GOT to get a war table operation going for diy feminizing hrt

[roboco-san]

"none of you know what a maid/knight/mech pilot is" we're playing pretend. you can play too if you want. it's fun I promise

[ask-ghazghkull-da-waagh-prophet]

[etruski]

Krem, soldier of the Tevinter Imperium

[trainwreckgenerator]

[trainwreckgenerator]

since this is going round again i really want to state how much i truly do not need hair loss prevention advice. this comic is not about that. this comic is about learning to be okay with maybe getting bald. this comic is about how balding can be sexy. its okay. kim is here to help

[macrotiis]

I rly hate the Satanic Panic & the moral panic surrounding violence in video games in the 90s, coz it's now impossible to talk about the social implications of violent video games in a realistic sense.

No, violence in video games does not create serial killers in the way most people imagine it would.

However, it's very important to notice how after 9/11, a lot of violent video games pivoted their content from silly gratuitous cartoon gore to more realistic military shooters set in the Levant from a US American lens. It's also important to notice the connection of these games & their toxic online multi-player voice chats to Gamer Gate in 2014.

It's obviously not as black & white as it was presented in the 80s & 90s, I dont think everyone who played early Call of Duty games is a white supremacist who wants to join the military to kill people in the middle east, but I think it's dangerous to pretend like video games or any media can't have an impact on the way people think about violence.

I think what makes all the difference here is how that violence is portrayed, what the message behind it is, what the motives are behind the people who crafted that message, who the victims of that violence are, how they are portrayed & the greater cultural context that surrounds it.

[grimeclown]

Putting all tabletop players into a college level ethics class and forcing them to turn in a paper on moral philosophy before buying a new book

[grimeclown]

This is…. An interesting thing to say… on this post in particular….

[grimeclown]

I think a lot of people reblogging this from @probablybadrpgideas are interpreting this as “this would be such a funny wacky way to make the table soooo complicated” but I mean this as a complaint about the way that so many tabletop players seem to just. completely lack an understanding of ethics. what it actually means to behave ethically and treat others ethically. and i dont mean this as "why do people want to be mean and play as villains? :(" i mean "why are there so many tabletop players that sympathize with outright fascist factions to the point of wondering why theyre listed as 'Lawful Evil' in the book"

[grimeclown]

can you talk me through why this was a particularly bad or challenging thing for your party to have done

[wizard-of-soup]

Goblins were in fact, for me, a turning point on this concept. I had a player who wanted to be a goblin, and I forgot about this fact up to the point that the party got a quest to kill goblins. As soon as I was announcing the quest I realized it would be a problem, though I didn't have anything else ready so I went with it. And it was! The players immediately questioned why the mayor was paying mercenaries to kill goblins, and then further questioned his justifications, at which point I realized it would be a better story if the goblins were a scapegoat and not an actual villain. This turned into a terse interrogation where the mayor threatened to put them in jail once their questions got pointed enough that he would have to either field accusations or lie; they then went CSI on the situation and drilled through his political cabinet to get answers. I had to improv pretty much all of it and I don't remember the actual ending (I know they sided with the goblins and the mayor was guilty), but this helped me realize that the Gary Gygax writing style of "certain races are just BAD and that's why they hang out in dungeons" was very short-sighted.

D&D writing, by and large, encourages a lack of questions. The surface runs deep. "Go into a cave and chop up goblins." Why are we doing this? "Goblins are bad." All goblins? "Yes."

I think the question of "why are there players comfortable siding with fascist factions and wondering why they're called 'lawful evil'" is pretty easily answered with... because D&D itself is inherently kind of fascist. And it's the most insidious kind of fascist, too- its villains are fascists, so how could you point fingers at the book?

Fire Giants are dwarf slavers. Drow are a megalomaniacal theocracy who hate men. Orcs are violent tribes of marauding killers. Illithids want to destroy all life and keep an entire civilization to scrub their floors. But these narratives still push the idea that "evil" is a racial trait. The players are not only justified in their campaign to destroy these cultures, they're encouraged to do it.

They let the cat out of the bag by making these playable races; because now, they're not cut-and-dry villanous societies. They're people. There are Drow accountants whose lives are about balancing taxes, not worshipping Lolth. There are Yuan-Ti who don't sacrifice babies on altars, and much prefer playing the lute or sewing blankets. Yet we're still expected to read "Chaotic Evil" under the Monster Manual entry for a bugbear and take it seriously.

[quantumcartography]

Reblogging again to add a quick take: as a DM introducing ethics makes your game so much better.

I had an intro to my campaign that involved a mad scientist kidnapping someone and turning them into a wererat. I didn't think much of it and I spent way more time fleshing out the other NPCs, I just wanted to use that wererat as a boss fight.

Once the party encountered him though they immediately saw what I totally missed: the guy who became the wererat was absolutely the victim of this story. I did my best at thinking on my feet and made the wererat this defeated guy who only followed the mad scientist because he felt like his life was ruined. So they, through good rolls, convinced him to help them fight the mad scientist and it made for such a better story.

The moral I'm trying to convey is that you need to treat every NPC in your game as a world within themselves. And I mean EVERY NPC. Why are the wolves attacking people? Are they desperately hungry? Mind controlled? Territorial due to poachers? Why are the goblins working for the wizard? Extortion? Promise of riches? If the bandits see that everyone is in armor, why wouldn't they just let the party pass and wait for easier prey? If one of the bandits die, why wouldn't the rest of them run for the hills?

[dunmertitty]

here’s a couple of articles on the history of racism + xenophobia in tolkien & how that influenced dnd

Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built for Racial Terror — James Mendez Hodes

This is the first installment of a two-article series about the racist origins, nature, and ramifications of orcs, a malevolent humanoid spe

Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part II: They're Not Human — James Mendez Hodes

This is the complement to my previous article , “Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built for Racial Terror.” In t

anyone interested in the subject should definitely also check out the whole Three Black Halflings podcast, which talks about being black in nerdy spaces. a lot of times they’ll have on guests talking about their intersections and experiences in nerdy spaces. they have an episode with the author of the articles above.

they’ve also played a ttrpg based on african mythologies rather than mostly european ones like most mainstream fantasy.

highly recommend!!

[liothediabolus]

[Image descriptions:

A Tumblr comment from "smudge-goblin" that reads: "Why not a political theory class. I wanna war crime accurately".

2. Tumblr tags from "grad-school-fool" that read: "do you know how hard it is to DM a party with MORALS"; "their first dungeon they unionized the goblins"; "because thats what happens when you treat sentient species as sentient". /End ID]

[cykelops]

more comic characters should haunt their writers like how everyone who’s written John Constantine keeps meeting him in dark alleys

[rootbeerrex]

What The Actual Fuck

[theheartmold]

joining the war on homophobia in fictional settings on the side of homophobia

[kirkwallguy]

it's definitely uncomfortable that dav's only nonbinary character is portrayed in a way that leans into negative stereotypes about young trans people. like imagine if there was a game where the only gay man was a sassy princess and the only bisexual man's romance was focused on bdsm and the only lesbian was written by a misogynist and the only trans man is voiced by a cis woman. that would suck right. luckily there are no games like that.

[clownboybebop]

sometimes when my mom gets drunk she goes into Liberated Women Mode, and one time she was real tipsy and while talking about her friend’s divorce, she very earnestly told me and my sister (both adults) that regardless of preference or relationship, she hoped we would both reach a point in our lives where we were having really good sex with really good people. and my sister said, “i do that now except the good people part” and i said, “sex is real?” and my mom didn’t love either of those answers

[four-predatory-lesbians]

ur mom sounds hot is she single

[clownboybebop]

my mom is in fact single, and if you are so determined then it’s not my fault when you find out why

[milfcastro-deactivated20251208]

Actually Tumblr users are a bit too caught up in the entirety of high school. Being a "gifted" kid, being a nerd, going to parties, not going to parties... Idk at some point you have to let it go, whether the experience was negative or positive. You're an adult pushing thirty surely you've done something else with your life in the past decade that is more formative and interesting than who you were (or weren't) at 15

[liarsblade]

"doesn't care for vampires or elves" is possibly one of the funnier ways that god nerfed me. I do have to hand it to him there.

[platinum-panda]

Obsessed with Ciaphis Cain and I think it’s outrageously there’s not more equally outrageous art of him! Hero of the Imperium pinup based on the Burt Reynolds’s The Cosmopolitan Man shoot.

[full---ofstarlight]

i remember seeing a post floating around about how anders is the type of guy who rants about social justice but doesnt do the dishes. but i think we're all forgetting that he runs a clinic for FREE and leaves milk out for cats so he is putting in the work my dudes, he's just being an absolute cunt about it. so my counter is, he does the dishes but he bitches the entire time about how inefficient your kitchen set up is and how you really need to be getting a more eco friendly dishwasher and also the cookware you're using is absolutely full of microplastics. also he can cook two things so he really can't talk.

[recreationaldivorce]

a true male feminist will be bisexual. attracted to women in case there's a woman who wants you and attracted to men in case there's a fujoshi who wants to watch you have gay sex.

[deepseasmetro]

yknow im sick of acting like there isnt actual structural violence in place against polyam people. any person who has to keep their romantic life completely secret out of fear of employment loss, housing discrimination, harrassment, social alienation, etc is like. materially speaking facing structural violence. polyamorous couples dont get access to the same legal protections (marriage being the big one), theres no laws in place prohibiting any kind of discrimination against somebody based on having multiple partners, its more than socially acceptable to call us ugly, fat, undesirable, all secretly sex pests or freaks or abusers, etc.... like can we be real here lmao