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horizonthetransient

hi loser

There's something deeply funny about the relationship between Zorian Kazinski and Zach Noveda.

I get why people ship them- they've been through hell together, they hang out all the time, they're so close, they literally have killed and died for each other- but I personally don't, because... well, they just don't have much chemistry, y'know? Their personalities are broadly incompatible with each other, but they still hang out because they went through The Horrors together and he's the only one who gets it.

They like each other, sure, but... More than anything, they're brothers.

And the reason that's hilarious is Zorian already has brothers, and he hates their fucking guts.

#mother of learning #mol #zorian kazinski #zach noveda

ot3

Hi I hope this isn't a dumb question but I saw ur post again about LOK and can I ask how does your typical mecha anime show "unpack the horrors of war" I don't really watch mecha anime

this is the opposite of a dumb question in that it's a question you would need like a graduate level paper to answer properly. im not a huge mecha person either so im not qualified to give you an in depth answer here but. i would say in extremely broad strokes a lot of the way mech anime deals with War Horrors is by exploring the way advanced technology makes war much more catastrophically violent while simultaneously distancing people from the violence they are committing

horizonthetransient

So, this is from the perspective of someone who's only really watched Mobile Suit Gundam (1979), but that's a seminal work in the genre of "Mecha Anime About The Horrors Of War," so I'm gonna say that's good enough.

Anyhow, in Gundam, people fucking die. A lot. First episode? Cold open on an evacuation of the space station our fifteen year old protagonist lives in. It gets invaded by enemy commandos in these huge, uncanny, monstrous man-shaped machines of war, and the sole reason this mess doesn't end with everyone including the protagonist dying is that the protagonist- again, fifteen years old- discovers a latent talent for using these man-shaped machines of war to kill people and break things. A talent that the military is quite eager to exploit.

From there, the fighting and the killing and the dying continues and it's hammered home again and again that this is wearing the protagonist down, that he hates this, he can barely sleep at night, he feels like he's only valuable because of his ability to use the Gundam to kill people, he sometimes freaks out and goes berserk, wailing on an enemy with the robot's fucking fists long after that enemy has already been turned into a pile of wreckage.

So... That's how OG Gundam explored The Horrors Of War: it replaced (most of the) fighter jets with humanoid robots and then stuck a child soldier in the cockpit, before turning on the camera to watch him gradually wear down and fall apart as the war raged on.

prokopetz

You've referenced disliking GNS theory on a number of occasions, and many of your posts about ttrpgs are in some way a response against it, particularly your posts about rules creating stories, but I haven't been able to find a post of yours directly voicing how and why you disagree with the theory. Do you have a post about that? And if not, would you mind explaining your critiques of GNS theory here? I'm very interested in hearing your thoughts on it.

Let me preface this by clarifying that the terms "gamist", "narrativist" and "simulationist" as most people use them today bear very little resemblance to how GNS theory uses them. Most people who talk about GNS theory in the year 2023 aren't actually familiar with how it defines those terms – they're just talking about what they taste like they ought to mean.

For example, someone might look at traditional RPGs and think "okay, so Dungeons & Dragons is gamist, and Vampire: The Masquerade is narrativist, and GURPS is simulationist, right?"; however, GNS theory classifies all three of those as simulationist.

As GNS theory defines its terms, "gamist" basically means board games with light roleplaying elements, like Betrayal at House on the Hill, while "narrativist" specifically means games whose mechanics are concerned principally – and, often, exclusively – with interrogating the interiority of the player characters: their identities, motivations, relationships, emotional states, etc. Its definition of "simulationist" weakly gestures toward some set of unifying features, but those features are so ill-defined that, in practice, it functions as a wastebin taxon which contains all remaining games that aren't classified as either "gamist" or "narrativist".

That right there is a fairly significant problem: for a schema that purports to be a taxonomy of tabletop RPGs, lumping nearly all published tabletop RPGs – and certainly all traditional ones – into a wastebin taxon seriously limits its utility. Granted, it's not altogether clear that utility was ever the point; Ron Edwards, the guy who came up with GNS theory, famously argued that playing traditional (i.e., "simulationist") RPGs causes actual, physical brain damage, even going so far as to assert that introducing young players to traditional RPGs is morally equivalent to child sexual abuse. This attitude comes through quite strongly in much of GNS theory's writing.

And that's really the root of it. You can pick at the details of GNS theory, pointing out that it fails to justify its assumption that the activities of play are identical with the goals of play, or that it's difficult to account for why certain games are placed in certain categories, but ultimately it comes down to the fact that the entire edifice exists to prop up the claim that it's morally good to play games that Ron Edwards likes, and morally bad to play games that Ron Edwards doesn't like, and works backwards from that premise to construct its terms and definitions.

cnflnc

This is wild. I've been using the terms "gamism", "narrativism" and "simulationism" forever to describe different aspects of roleplaying which can be present in a particular game system, or campaign, or session, or person's play style. It's how I explain to someone who has no idea what roleplaying is that different people can get very different things out of it, and what some of those things are.

Gamism is "is this a fun puzzle?" or "is this a fair challenge?" (combat, literal dungeon traps, solving crimes, international diplomacy), narrativism is "what would make a good story?" or "what would make a meaningful character arc?" or "what would make a cool scene?" and the much maligned / ignored / misapplied simulationism is "what would happen next if this were real?" (whether this is randomly determined according to some probability distribution, or agreed upon by humans) or "how does this fit into the model?". (I love simulationism because it's where emergent behaviour comes from -- the spontaneous event caused by a random die roll that you would never have thought of because it's not an obvious story beat or tailored for your current task, but you run with it anyway and it's great.)

I don't think this breakdown fully encompasses all the options -- for example, acting or performance is definitely a tangible thing that some people enjoy in roleplaying games, and I would argue that it's in none of these categories (if you squint I guess you could shoehorn it into either narrativism or simulationism).

Anyway, I've always known that this usage is considered GNS heresy, but I clearly either never went far enough down the rabbithole to find out these specifics, or just scrubbed them from my memory.

prokopetz

That's not "GNS heresy" so much as it's simply completely unrelated to how GNS theory uses those words. The only one that's remotely close between your definitions and GNS theory's definitions is simulationism, and even that's not quite on the mark because GNS theory's definition of simulationism explicitly considers "rules which simulate a particular notional reality" and "rules which emulate a particular set of genre tropes" to be interchangeable (and the fact that it considers them to be interchangeable is one of the more frequent criticisms of GNS theory, albeit one that I didn't touch on here because of the... everything else).

iamthedukeofurl

So what I'm hearing is that GNS theory said "Here are three words that can be used to define games: Gamist, Narrativist, and Simulationist" And if you stop reading there, your mental autofill will create a theory based solely on those words alone that is far more useful and coherent than the actual GNS theory. Because the actual definitions are "There are Games that are Good (narrativist) games that are Bad (Simulationist) and games that don't really count for the purpose of this discussion (Gamist)"

waystatus

I mean, I kinda think that prokopetz is wrong here. Not that he's not correct about Ron Edwards, but that clearly GNS theory has almost no bearing on what Ron Edwards thought it was.

Ideas are bigger than their creators. Ron Edwards is not the god of what these words mean, and in actual practice they've meant the things everyone thinks they mean way longer than they ever meant Ron Edwards' weird RPG hangups.

In fact, they've meant those things for longer than they've meant what Edwards meant them as. GNS is not even really Edwards' idea. It's heavily derived from the Threefold Model, or GDS theory, which was very similar but strongly pro-simulationist.

The important thing to realize here is that all these models are products of a culture war on the Usenet RPG boards about styles of play, and all the attempts at formalizing definitions were in the context of people trying to prove their faction was "correct" about the one true way to design games.

Which is to say, all these early attempts at formalism are bad, but just because the formalism is bad doesn't mean the factions they represent didn't really have preferences, or that those preferences were fake. I personally think that GNS/GDS/Threefold/whatever is a very elegant and useful theory, so long as you don't trust any of the original people who tried to write it down.

horizonthetransient

The issue with continuing to use it these days is that, because the original definitions are, shall we say, "use-impaired" (and also presented as an incredibly long and borderline-unreadable essay), there functionally are no agreed-upon definitions. Everyone defines the terms in their own head based on gut feelings, and when your "theory" consists of three terms that are not formally defined, what you have is not actually a theory, it's an argument generator that fires up when it turns out someone else's intuition of what "narrativism" should mean is different from your own.

The only part of GNS "Theory" that survives "the terms are undefined and therefore basically meaningless" is the idea that different different people want different things out of their games, which is the sort of incredibly-basic theory-of-mind lesson that we teach to children when explaining to them what an opinion is. I know RPG fans have a reputation for stunted social skills, but I don't think we need to elevate to the status of "essential theoretical model" a trichotomy that fails to adequately describe games or playstyles and is only useful in that it reminds us that other people like other things.

i have feelings for u are u single

wow, i wasnt expecting this. honestly? im shocked.

On Lightning Bolts And Science Fiction/Fantasy

Or, “Chainmail won’t protect you from a thunderstorm, but it will protect you from a Sith.”

So, in real life, there are these things called Tesla Coils. They’re these big electric machines that shoot off little bolts of high-voltage, low-current lightning. These days, everything practical they can do can be done better by something else, so they’re pretty much solely decorative, but damn if they aren’t still good at that. One thing that you might like to see are some dudes dancing with Tesla Coils while wearing chainmail suits. Go on, click the link. I’ll wait for you.

As you can see in the video, electricity follows the path of least resistance. Metal has way less electrical resistance than human flesh, and so if electricity can flow through metal instead of flesh, it will. These men, who are wearing chainmail suits, are pretty much impossible to hurt with tesla coils, because instead of the electricity going through their nerves and organs, it’ll always go through the far-more-conductive metal instead.

Now, if you’re anything like me, you may be thinking “hey, shouldn’t this mean that my D&D character who wears a suit of metal armor should be more defended against lightning, not less?” And I think you’re right! But alas, if you actually voice this opinion, you will likely be met with a common counterargument:

“A lightning bolt has like a zillion megawatts of power! Even with metal armor, it’d deafen you, blind you, and probably burn you by overheating your metal armor!”

And... to me, this is like arguing that kevlar can’t stop bullets, because high-explosive artillery can put six foot craters in the ground. Part of what you’ve said is true, but you’re grossly mischaracterizing the sort of weapons people can use in small-scale fights without killing everyone in the room, themselves included, based purely on sensationalist trivia.

Now, yes, a real lightning bolt from a thunderstorm won’t really care about what personal defenses you have, but that same lightning bolt will also seriously injure anyone within five paces, including the spellcaster who shot it from their fingertips. Considering that Sith and Wizards don’t typically go deaf immediately after shooting lightning at people, I feel safe in concluding that they’re not using that kind of power.

I think it’s also worth talking about what power means in the context of electricity, because as it turns out this is a formally defined term that is quite relevant to the question of “how bad will this kill you?” In electrical terms, power (measured in watts) is the product of voltage and current (measured in amps). And as any electrician can tell you, it’s the amps that kill you. Voltage, meanwhile, is what determines how wide of an air gap the lightning can cross; considering how unconductive thin air is, you need a lot of voltage if you want to shoot lightning at people from any distance whatsoever, and that means you need more power, unless you cut down on the amps.

Fortunately, you totally can cut down on the amps and still have a viable weapon! It only takes six or seven milliamps through the heart to kill someone, and a tenth of an amp if you don’t feel like having super precise aiming. And in all honesty, this maps to lightning attacks in most speculative fiction pretty well- where it always hurts like a bitch, but isn’t always horrendously lethal.

However, that kind of low current is bad news for the “chainmail would just cook you in your armor!” gang, because resistive heating, the phenomenon that makes electricity heat things up, only cares about resistance and current. High voltage isn’t going to do jack shit for resistive heating, and steel wire of the thickness you’d want for making chainmail is plenty capable of handling a measly tenth of an amp. It’s typically about as thick as the wires in your walls, and those can safely handle fifteen or twenty amps before they start to get uncomfortably warm. Sure, that’s copper and chainmail is steel, but chainmail is also a lot of steel, and the fact that there’s literal thousands of rings in a chainmail suit does in fact significantly increase the amount of current that can safely be handled.

So, in conclusion? Unless your fantasy lightning wand produces lightning so powerful that it should seriously injure the user (in which case nobody would want to use it), conductive metal armor 100% would protect the wearer from lightning attacks. This isn’t to say that lightning weapons should logically be useless in speculative fiction- there are plenty of contexts in which people would not be wearing metal armor, where lightning remains a perfectly serviceable way of killing people horrifically. But this is to say that I’m sick of people acting like wearing metal armor is useless at best and suicidal at worst when the other guy has a lightning spell. Knock that shit off.

prokopetz

More inadvisable D&D adventure premises, princess rescuing edition:

A seemingly conventional quest to rescue a young princess from the dragon who rules the mountain reaches to the north of the kingdom takes a sudden turn when it transpires that a. the princess is a latent sorcerer of considerable power, and b. there is definitely something the Queen neglected to tell the party about the princess’ true parentage.

The party is hired to act as wedding crashers and disrupt an arranged marriage between a princess and a foreign noble. The party will easily learn that the arrangement was the princess’ idea, and that the ”rescue” is a ploy to secure more favourable terms in an attendant trade deal. What they may not learn so easily is that princess intends to deny knowledge of the party’s involvement and have them all executed.

The princess is an aspiring wizard possessed of more ambition than good sense, and has managed to banish herself to gods-know-where thanks to a badly mistargeted summoning spell. The royal advisor has a short list of places she might have ended up, and the party isn’t going to like any of them! For extra fun, the spell might linger and continue to go off at inconvenient moments as the party is escorting her back.

An ancient curse upon the land’s royal blood has been awakened. What it’s supposed to do is send the princess into an enchanted sleep and bring ruin upon her domains; however, as the monarchy was abolished generations ago and there are hundreds of descendants with plausible claims to the former throne, the curse is erratically hopping from person to person, bringing ruin on whatever it thinks each victim’s “domain” is.

Owing to a series of misunderstandings that will probably seem hilarious in retrospect, a princess who ran away from home to become a masked vigilante has been hired to find and rescue herself. She can’t refuse a royal commission without having her masked identity branded a rebel against the crown, and she really doesn’t want to have to overthrow her parents, but she wants to go home even less. Maybe these passing adventurers can help resolve her dilemma?

qwertystop

On contract from a local antiquarian society, find a way to prevent the demolition (by decree of the scion of the local royal family) of a historically-significant castle. That is, rescue a tower from a princess.

(from https://archiveofourown.org/works/29438943/chapters/73608474, which I remember pretty much exclusively for this line)

prokopetz

Funnily enough, I’m almost 100% certain that bit was directly inspired by one of my own posts.

horizonthetransient

As the person who wrote the linked fic... yeah, that’s exactly what happened. Thanks for sharing your cutting room floor with us, by the by.

systlin

I just read that you use cold iron and salt in warding, but what do you consider "cold iron" to be? I keep getting mixed info from the internet, which says it's either ANY iron, iron that's been "cold forged," or meteoric iron!

It’s just iron. It’s a poetic way of saying it, same as you might hear ‘cold steel’ referring to a sword.

You can’t really forge iron when it’s cold, after all. I’ve got some bog iron hagstones that @blackbearmagic sent me, which are an old classic in the warding armory, but any iron will do. Iron nails, horseshoes…which is where they got a reputation for being lucky, tbh…any iron.

horizonthetransient

According to one interpretation I’ve heard, cold iron repelling the fae is representative of human industry triumphing over the natural world, which was a much more comforting narrative in a time when the natural world was considered very hostile and wanted you dead, whereas human industry put a roof over your head and a fire in your hearth. these days, though, our opinions on such subjects has... shall we say, shifted.

anyhow, the upshot of this interpretation is that its the fact of being mass-produced that makes iron repel the fae, and so literally any mass-produced iron or steel object will work to repel them. a box of cheap steel nails from the hardware store will work just fine, if thats what you wanna try.

prokopetz

D&D adventure concept: a low-level party is prevailed upon by the Princess of a small and impoverished kingdom they happen to be passing through with a highly unusual mission. You see, her father, the King, has just been killed in a hunting accident, but owing to his penchant for wandering off on his own, nobody knows about it yet except her. To complicate matters, it’s the eve of a week-long diplomatic summit with an aggressively expansionist neighbour that would almost certainly take news of the King’s death as a sign of weakness and immediately invade. By some coincidence, the only cleric for hundreds of miles in any direction who’s capable of casting raise dead will take a week to arrive. The party must by any means necessary prevent the visiting dignitaries from realising that the King is dead – ideally without causing any international incidents in the process!

prokopetz

@knockknockitsnickels replied:

Weekend at Bernies

That’s one of several possible approaches the party could take, yes. Other options include:

choosing one of their own as a royal impersonator (gambling that none of the visiting dignitaries know exactly what the King looks like);

inventing some pretext for why the King can only be seen by private appointment (then keeping everyone sufficiently distracted that nobody individually pieces together the fact that none of them have actually gotten to see the King yet);

fabricating some rather less final royal indisposition (and ensuring that none of the visitors’ spies manage to ascertain that the King is more seriously indisposed than they’ve been led to believe); or

simply finding a way to delay the summit until the itinerant cleric arrives (hopefully without annoying anyone involved badly enough that they decide to start a war anyway!)

believerindaydreams

…alternatively move the summit to whatever plane the king happens to be at when dead.

Disguising it might be more or less difficult depending on how extreme the king was…

prokopetz

The main trouble there is that any party that’s high-level enough to indulge in planar shenanigans is also high-level enough to cast raise dead themselves.

Though I suppose the King’s castle could just happen to have a free-standing portal to Hell in the basement, or whatnot. Which would raise a number of very serious questions about what sort of kingdom we’re dealing with!

horizonthetransient

The fact that the king apparently went to Hell when he died would also raise a few questions; while one could certainly argue that monarchy is inherently evil, I doubt D&D’s cosmological moral compass would agree with such a notion. Just what was the king getting up to, presumably while he was wandering off on his own?

prokopetz

You got any RPGs well-suited for, say, playing as sad lesbians dating and talking about their trauma, which happens to go well with a generic 90s-era superhero milieu that, presumably, the lesbians are active participants in, off-screen?

That’s an awfully specific brief – is there a particular source you’re trying to emulate here?

In any event, if by “generic 90s era” you mean “grimdark”, you might have a look at Rose Bailey’s Die For You. Its really more of a “Friends meets Vampire: The Masquerade“ deal, but grimdark 90s supers isn’t really all that far off from V:tM’s idiom – adapting it wouldn’t take much work.

horizonthetransient

The source in question is Worm, but the person I’m looking to run the game with(by the way, does Die For You work well for one-on-one play?) has no interest in the hallmarks of most superhero media and would instead prefer the superhero stuff to just be background flavor for two traumatized runaways watching a movie on a couch together, in between therapy-adjacent conversations.

s-leary

An astonishingly useful thread on progressive vs. conservative thought by Jennifer Dziura (text version via ThreadReader):

lectorel

Wow, that is legitimately horrifying.

I intended to help someone, but it turns out the thing I did kills people. The only moral option is … Doubling down and killing more people.

thornshrike

It all boils down to the different moral foundations people use. For progressives, care, equality and “freedom to” are the main building blocks for deciding whether something is just and moral.

- Does it harm people? - Does it result in inequality? - Does it prevent people from engaging in society?

As long as the proposed idea (behaviour, policy) clears those two hurdles, it’s good to go for progressives.This type of thinking is super compatible with consequentialism. For conservatives, there are more foundations to consider - authority, loyalty, fairness, purity and “liberty from”.

- Does it violate established social hierarchy? (in this approach, hierarchy is good and beneficial). - Does it damage in-group bonds? (again, strong in-group loyalties are considered to be good). - Does it fail to reward contributors and punish wrong-doers? (this is a big one - fairness is about just desserts and consequences for actions, not equality). - Does it breach the sanctity of the body? (this is a complex one, rooted in cultural notions of disgust and body as a temple). - Does it force people to engage in actions they disagree with? (this is the freedom from taxation, PC, and so on).

Libertarians pretty much care only about Liberty from things, usually the government.

This complex set of values means that the same idea or policy will get different moral evaluations. Let’s take a few examples:

Legalising weed: all fine in terms of the progressive foundations. But it breaches purity (the body is a temple) and to an extent interacts with conservative version of fairness by removing a punishment on what they consider to be morally wrong behaviour.

Universal healthcare: again, all clear in progressive values. This policy will help. But in the conservative value set, the policy fails at fairness by ‘rewarding’ non-contributing behaviour (poverty and illness). Let’s not get into a debate over how this is even classified as behaviour rather than a condition. It also breaches freedom from for people who are mostly focused on being free from government, rather than private insurers. The interesting caveat is that purity should favour healthcare - if the body is sacred, we should as a society value accessible ways to keep it healthy and clean. However, because many health conditions have contributing behavioural factors, it can be considered unjust to help people out of the consequences of their actions - even at a net loss to society.

If anyone is interested, Jonathan Haidt writes a lot about the moral foundations, and while he’s often annoyingly centrist in how he presents the ideas, the research is pretty solid.

92bricks

I’ma miss y’alls titties

liquidstar

whyd we let 17776 die

horizonthetransient

cause it came to a satisfying conclusion and answered nearly every important question it raised, leaving little room for theorycrafting and speculation.

basard

bich

#lisawilbourn

ileolai

This is about Vid.me vs Youtube specifically, but I couldn’t help thinking of it when I saw that ‘’help us pls we’re just a smol baby website’’ Pillowfort post pop up on my dash that pretty much said the exact same things this guy describes as the death knell of Vid.me.

Points of note:

‘’I’m deeply suspicious of the ‘we’re just pals, help the site grow!’ mentality. We’re just pals… until we’re not. Any platform that doesn’t codify it’s relationship to content creators, that positions itself as ‘just pals’ and ‘we’re all on the same team’ without any structural commitment to that relationship… is ultimately lying.’’

‘‘Failing to codify this relationship ensures that the site will inevitably go through the change in incentives which will in turn lead to the decision making that overwhelmingly favors advertisers [or stakeholders, shareholders, etc] at the direct expense of content creators.’‘

Not saying that Pillowfort is setting out with the *intention* to manipulate their potential audience, I’m sure they have good intentions, but knowing this, it’s setting my red flags off. Tumblr started off as a smol bby website with idealistic intentions and look where we are now?

Compare to something like Ao3, which relies on volunteer support, donations, and a loyal fanbase to keep running as a non-profit website, but which has a clearly codified, structural, and legally defined relationship to its users, and resistance to commercial exploitation built-in to the very foundations of it. Does Pillowfort have any of that, aside from promises? I haven’t seen an inkling of it in any of the evangelistic posts assuring me that Pillowfort is the next Promised Land, so what’s to stop me from assuming that it’s good intentions won’t eventually be consumed in the corporate machine ala Tumblr?

prokopetz

Okay, has anybody managed to get @staff’s promised “back up your blog” feature to work? Mine’s just been sitting at “processing” for 48 hours, and everybody I’ve asked is the same.

horizonthetransient

It’d probably just be faster to write up a web-scraper to do that, and as an added benefit you get to make sure it includes all the details and minutiae you want.

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