Of Kaiju and Men

2?/M/American. Interests all over the place, from videos to music to tarot to swords. Check the menu for more details.

[pinkmisspiggy]

sasuke: what genjutsu is this??????

king rock lee putting them 100% organic free range grass fed Hands on him:

[funny-tik-toks]

[danannie521]

Wow! You are so talented, good hunter

[moonberry-maple]

My love letter to Curse of Strahd. Song inspiration for this artwork. I had it on loop haha: Jim Yosef - Full Moon (feat. Scarlett)

[aowna]

A bottomless curse, a bottomless sea...

[foryoupeko]

Takemaru should've been part of the chinese punk collab!!! It really would've completed Hiruko's chinese triad vibe.

[hoohti]

I redrew my very first Maria fanart... (reupload bc I had to fix some stuff)

[artofchinara]

"Good Hunter... May you always remember: Even during the most violent, manic nights, one may find beauty all the same."

Been missing the nights of Yharnam lately...

[digitalkaijustudios]

Gorilla Whale Ep. 46 is out now!

It’s a certified banger y’all!!

It's the start of a globetrotting adventure through the Monsterverse! Join Kevin and Kayla as they discuss Monarch: Legacy of Monsters - Episodes 1-2 (2023).

SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/episode/58Rad6dwCJxpqSBKNGUxfG?si=4a16660f41204dde

YOUTUBE: https://youtu.be/XrxS0Bx46lQ

KO-FI: https://ko-fi.com/digitalkaijustudios

This is a clip from episode 46 of Gorilla Whale: A Godzilla Watch-Along, Podcast by Digital Kaiju Studios. This podcast is hosted and produced by Kevin Carpenter and Kayla Knutson. Art by Ashlee Hart. New episodes every other Friday! 

[quantummoonjune]

me when i explain a board game to my friends but i haven't played it in like a year

[darrenpillowscriss]

"I don't know this game super well"

"You don't have stats for missile?"

"Just roll as many dice as you can fit in two hands"

[lumisabel]

another emily axford all-timer from ccod finale

[deadpowol]

[tahthetrickster]

[gremlininho]

then & now ♡

[txttletale]

wrote an essay about encoding, decoding, 'you missed the point by idolizing them' and anton chigurh—but most of all about designing tabletop roleplaying games

THE COIN DON’T HAVE NO SAY

“It’s just you.” Encoding and decoding in tabletop roleplaying games.

[what-even-is-thiss]

I still find it pretty funny that in fallout 3 you can get your karma down by just opening Moriarty’s terminal over and over again.

The slavers at paradise falls have heard of me. I’m the guy that opens people’s computers over and over again without asking first.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Butch won’t be my companion. He’s like you’re too intense. You must’ve turned on that computer like 50 times in a row last time.

[what-even-is-thiss]

My forbidden computer touching ways have caught up with me.

[what-even-is-thiss]

The reason I’m doing this in the first place is that a lot of evil karma options in fallout 3 are just inconvenient. Like I could go out of my way to blow up a city or I could not blow up a city and get a much more convenient free house and keep access to their merchants.

So in order to keep getting the full evil karma experience, every time I do something convenient or utilitarian that raises my karma I go back to Moriarty’s Saloon and just open his terminal over and over again.

Thus, my good boy points are eliminated through repeated computer touching and the regulators here are hunting me down for looking at Moriarty’s personal data a hundred times in a row.

[what-even-is-thiss]

What’s really funny about lowering your karma this way is that after you do a major good Karma action and listen to the radio, the radio DJ Three Dog will be like this horrible fucker from vault 101 we all hate him so much you know that guy? He did another fucking thing. He saved a thousand orphans.

[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.

[prokopetz]

@danwhat replied:

The number of people willing to accept players who won't read the rules even though they come back week after week is bizarre - you wouldn't accept it for any other game, and RPGs are just a kind of game! If the rules of one game are 'too complex' just switch to a different game! If they claim they 'don't have time' - cancel one session. That 3 hour block is now dedicated game-learning time, and 3 hours is plenty. Easy.

See, "RPGs are [...] a kind of game" is where the disconnect lies. There's a large chunk of the present D&D fandom who don't think of tabletop RPGs as games; they think of them as performances being put on by the GM for the audience of the players, who – like any audience – are obliged only to be physically present. In this understanding, the "game-ness" of the activity is part of the performance – i.e., the GM is merely pretending to moderate a game with rules as an act of kayfabe; there's no point learning the rules because there aren't "really" rules to learn.

(Partly this is a product of folks coming to the hobby whose sole prior experience is with high-production-value podcasts, where the GM actually is an entertainer putting on a show for an audience, and often a professional actor to boot; partly it's a product of Hasbro attempting to market D&D as a zero-entry-barrier hobby by framing the GM not as a fellow player with special responsibilities, but as a volunteer service provider whose job is to facilitate other people playing D&D.)

The observation I'm gesturing toward here is that Paranoia is a game that actually, textually works this way – i.e., the GM is a performer putting on a show for the players, and the rules are fake and don't matter – but it does so within a narrative frame where the GM is both allowed and encouraged to demand that the players dance for their amusement, so at least the fuckery flows both ways. Contemporary D&D's culture of play doesn't even offer that (indeed, in many circles a GM who expresses any preferences at all regarding what kind of game they want to run would be regarded as an odious gatekeeper!), then has temerity to wonder why rapid GM burnout is such a massive problem.