Math, Manga, Magic the Gathering

This is the personal blog of a nerd who happens to be a PhD student. Other interests include the Cosmere, worldbuilding, conlanging, writing, game design, pen and paper, and procrastinating.

[theotherendcomics]

[prokopetz]

One of my favourite reading comprehension failures I bump into on this blog is when I criticise a game and I get folks coming to me like "well actually [thing] cannot possibly be true of [game] because [game] has one sentence in its introduction that says [other thing]". Like, y'all are aware that it's possible for a text to make claims about itself which are not true, right? Hell, if tabletop RPGs were people, claiming to possess features which they do not in fact possess would be one of their favourite pastimes!

[prokopetz]

More pertinently to recent discussion, the explicit claims a game's text makes about the roles of the players and the GM need not be in any way consistent with the understanding of those roles articulated by the structure of the mechanics – and I'd argue that inconsistency is more the rule than the exception there.

[prokopetz]

#writing “have fun!” as my tongue-in-cheek rule zero #then using that to say that anyone who didn't have fun was simply not following the rules properly (via @fjordojustice)

[epicsause-official]

"comparing apples and oranges" has always been funny to me as an expression because people's go to exampe of two things so radically different that they defy any useful comparison are apples. and oranges. like you would struggle to find a more comparable pair of objects than that. theyre literally sold right next to each other in most stores.

[epicsause-official]

wikipedia has a whole ass section dedicated to international variants of the idiom so let me quickly run through them

see this is even worse than oranges. pears and apples are like the most comparable things ever. france takes another L

ok so this is what i mean. these are measures of temperature and texture and are in fact not very comparable. молодцы ребята продолжаем в том же духе.

colombia wins most vivid image invoked hands down. would not want that to happen to me.

and i think we can all agree romania wins this hands down. everyone give a big round of applause to romania

[official-german-translationen]

[markrosewater]

I know Magic is your bread and butter (and has been for a while!), but are there/were there any other games you've designed that you're particularly proud of?

One’s coming out later this year.

[tpwrtrmnky]

Hi it's me, nightmare DM from the worst pits of ttrpg forums. So I'm running D&D 5E and I banned rolling a d20, because it seemed overpowered. I'm running an original campaign set in my own world, where the elemental firmament oscillates in a way determined by the motion of the outer planets, and my question is this: how do I prevent my fiancée from hitting on the other players in real life, purely through in-game methods?

[tpwrtrmnky]

Hi it's me, nightmare player from the above DM's campaign. since the DM has banned classes, just in general, do you have any advice on building a completely overpowered character who breaks the game? My backstory is that I am literally Batman. Not like a guy who's inspired by Batman, but the DC comics character Batman, who's decided to show up in the DM's setting. His fiancée is really into it.

[tpwrtrmnky]

Hi it's me. The fiancée. Since my useless partner still hasn't realized I'm angling for a threesome, I have some questions: There's a weird continuity issue where the lore of the Ancient Orzoks seems to be unclear on whether it happened a hundred years ago, or ten thousand. This makes it really hard to figure out if my character, who's an orc, should have been born yet. Also, any advice on building an orc when the DM has banned orcs?

[tpwrtrmnky]

Hi it's me. Pathfinder 2nd edition Remastered, personified. I'm currently having a severe mental health crisis because some of you keep suggesting that I fix these people and their horrible, horrible problems, in particular that none of them seem to have any interest in reading a single piece of rules text. The DM's lore has a bizarrely thorough and politically concerning exposition dump about the gnomes' secret influence on all major historical events, and I have to ask: Do you know about any good couples' therapists?

[brothermouse-skeleton]

Loid doesn't think Yor is odd because as far as he knows she supported herself and her brother by doing sex work at a young age of course she knows how to throw a punch and kick a man through a wall. That's why he never clocks her freaky strength or judges what he believes is her past. He knows that it's tough out there and that you gotta do what you gotta do to survive.

Yuri's weird possessive obsession with Yor makes sense when you realize that as far as he knows she supported them both as children by going off with creepy old men and coming home bruised and bloody. He thinks she was forced to become a sex worker because he wasn't strong enough to protect her. That's why he gets so weird whenever he thinks about her and Loid getting intimate and why in the beginning he feels like he needs to control her love life by setting her up with guys (that he's fully vetted and can easily blackmail if needed). To him, Loid is just the latest in a long line of creeps that he can't protect his sister from.

Meanwhile, Yor, bless her dumb jock heart, has no idea that people are making these assumptions about her and genuinely thinks that she is getting good grades in being a normal woman, a goal that is both possible to achieve and normal to want.

[dowereallyneedthis]

“I don’t do math because I’m gay” “the gays can’t do math” “If I explain math on tumblr I’ll lose my gay card” all of you apologize to Alan Turing right now 

[myfootyrthroat]

The “+” in LGBTQ+ is for math.

[dowereallyneedthis]

It’s literally been years since anyone added something slightly clever or original to this post, so I would like to congratulate you and maybe even bestow some kind of award. I don’t have anything to give you though

[moran-with-a-g]

It was simple addition, really.

[ragsy]

"Adopt don't shop" and "that's a 10 year commitment" style PSAs except instead of being aimed at would-be irresponsible pet owners it's for people who want to start yet another long-term ttrpg campaign

[ragsy]

now I'm thinking about a petfinder type service where would-be GMs browse through lists of abandoned or surrendered campaigns with hopes of finding a loving but skittish party of adventurers and their bbeg to adopt

"Where did you come up with this convoluted plot?"

"It's a rescue 🥰"

[tanadrin]

would be fun if language acquisition echoed language evolution a la recapitulation theory. kids going through an indo european phase.

[jadagul]

https://xkcd.com/2567/

[tanadrin]

fuuuuuck there really is an xkcd for everything

[bigscaryd]

Quick put an animal book in front of him and ask him what this guy is

[nordenflycht]

there's an xkcd for that also

[retroactivebakeries]

hybrid beastgirls escaped from top secret catgirl government labs on the run, immortal, twelve feet tall, armor-plated, many-armed, venom-glanded, jacked and stacked, pedipalpiferous, bioelectric, bigger, louder, better, telekinetic, and absolutely down for it. eat people’s organs too

[saul-tortellini]

[brothermouse-skeleton]

True, flowery prose isn't Sanderson's strong point, but also, have you considered how long his books would be if he waxed poetic?

The man's already trying to explain fabriels in a way people understand, and you want him to truck in similes and metaphors to explain them in high prose? We'd be at this all day if he did that. Wait, no, I forgot, some of his audiobooks are more than 24 hours long so wE'RE ALREADY AT THIS ALL DAY WE CAN'T DO FANCY WORDS 👏 WE 👏GOT👏 PLACES👏 TO👏 BE👏

[uuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh]

He's right tho

[noelements-setempty]

Cows are great for making a vector space because they're usually over a field.

[marigold-22]

Someone needs to make a game that seems like an optimization/puzzle game about shipping little blob guys which can combine with each other but actually secretly teaches you homological algebra. You could start off having several “nests” of blob guys corresponding to different species of blob guys, the blob guys in a nest could stick together into blob guy balls and these blob guy balls would be subject to different relations depending on the species. Then you would have to ship blob guys between nests in such a way that preserves blob balls. There would be various puzzles and such around this which would secretly introduce basic concepts about abelian groups. Then you could also introduce rings by allowing some species of blob guys to “breed” (note that this would make the fact that multiplication distributes over addition simple because it would amount to saying that breeding two blob guy balls amounts to breeding each blob guy in the first ball with each blob guy in the second) I feel like you could get to the point where your dealing with chain complexes tans homology and all that jazz articulated purely in terms of blob guys. It’d be awesome. But unfortunately the only coding knowledge I have is like a small amount of html so I can’t make it :(

[apricops]

The worst part about writing fantasy is being keenly aware that you’re writing fantasy, which means that you always have to straddle a thin three-way line between anachronism, cliche, and clunk.

Take money, for example. You can’t just have people in a fictional fantasy world walk around using Euros. You consider something generic, like ‘silver coins,’ but before you know it your world starts sounding like a shitty ren faire.

So you think about the world you’ve built and its needs and its history to come up with some unique and relevant terms. But if your terms are too unique and relevant you wind up writing “yarr, you’ll be ransomed for a hundred Trade League Silver Gyrblonks” and realize your worldbuilding is now getting in the way of basic readability.

[shieldfoss]

“They’re using golden valley coins!”

…didst thou mean dollars?

“Nevermind. They’re using some basic silver coin and then enough gold to be worth ten silver coins is called a ten-piece”

…Si, si, el Peso!

Trying over, they’re minted by the king so they’re called crown coins, or, these days, abbreviated, they’re just Crowns

Naturligvis, vi skifter Daler ud med Kroner!

—

The Lesson Of The Day is that all the names are already claimed by IRL, and all the almost-good-names that you could invent to get around that were used by some SFF author in the seventies e.g. I bet you can’t do Suns and Moons for your gold/silver coins, I bet some author did that already.

[garmbreak1]

My fantasy nation uses solid gold coins marked by the dental impressions of the reigning king, as a sign of their purity and authenticity.

They’re called Bitcoins.

[brazenautomaton]

oh you can go the fuck to jail that’s what you can do, where you’ll be shackled to a chain gang hitting the blockchain with a pickaxe

[theadhdgoblin]

[mcnostril]

Eizouken but it’s D&D. Every quest is easy breezy.