'none of this is normal'

I like to reblog things! mostly ends up being fannish fancies.

[goblinsarts]

Some critical role art (this was before the undead era)

[quasi-normalcy]

Star Trek equivalent of a "Glup Shitto" is some obscure class of Federation starship that was only ever seen on screen for 0.68 seconds as a battle-damaged wreck at Wolf 359, but which somehow has a model from Eaglemoss, multiple, lengthy video essays discussing its lore, and an extremely vocal fan campaign by people demanding that it be made playable in Star Trek Online.

[griffonatrix]

USS Jupp

The USS Jupp was a kitbash studio model built by the VFX house hired by Paramount Pictures for special effects in the Star Trek: Deep Space

ah you mean the jupp shippo

[insectsect]

just watched season 5 episode 16 for the first time and got so pissed the fuck off i had to immediately draw a julian with joy in his life. world so cruel. i'll save you

[fishmechs]

[jburneko]

From an RPG perspective, I've been struggling for years to explain that "playing a character in a myth" and "treating a mythic world as if it were real" are two fundamentally different things. A part of this frustration is that I want a whole lot more of the former and a whole lot less of the later.

[iojg]

okay alright. can you elaborate just a bit? particularly on how specific you are about the meaning of "myth", as it throws me off

[jburneko]

So, I'm sure scholars probably have a more technical definition of "myth" than I'm using. I'm primarily talking about when elements of a story are meant to be received and processed emotionally rather than logically.

For example, we might have a character that wears jade armor and sits on a throne of ruby. Now if your mind starts thinking things like what the implications are for the culture and economy of a society that uses jade for armor and ruby for furniture design then you're thinking in the wrong direction. Same if you start thinking about the actual real world properties of jade and ruby and what you could possibly make with such a large and plentiful supply of it. No. Just. Stop. Don't do that. Instead, be *emotional*. What *feelings* does such an image/character invoke you. Disgust at their opulence? Awe at their power? Respect for their commanding presence? Fear? Now have your character react *to that feeling*. What emotion do YOU want your character to reflect back. In an RPG, your character TOO is a pile of evocative aesthetics in both image and action. Do a thing that will evoke a feeling IN ME as a fellow player at the table. You can't control WHAT feeling I have, but you can do something evocative, "logic" of the situation be damned.

[iojg]

i kinda see what you are getting at, hopefully. i think it's really mostly about being impressionistic, isn't it? my mind immediately drifts to pulp fantasy, to which such "loose" imagery seems to be very important. i personally don't get much from it mostly because i'm not that great at visualizing. i could never really get into howard because of it, for example. would you say this generally applies outside of fantasy roleplaying, though?

[jburneko]

Pulp fantasy (and actual mythology) is where you see it at its boldest. But I'm not talking *purely* about visuals it can apply to "entities" whose only "logic" is their symbolic/metaphorical place in the narrative.

You see this a lot in standalone horror novels that don't get caught up in their own "lore." My absolute favorite example of this is "The Library Policeman" by Stephen King. The creature in that book and how it "works" is wholly defined by the scope of the protagonist's personal trauma. It does not "exist" nor has "logic" independent of the protagonist's emotional journey. Sure, it all makes "sense" in that story but trying to tease out the creature as an independent entity with a consequential "existence" simply falls apart.

I would also point to something like Frank Miller's Sin City stories. The characters are BOLD archetypes with no substance behind their evocative presence. Senator Rourk is a complete tautology. He is a Senator because he's rich and powerful and is rich and powerful because he is a Senator. Things happen because Rourk wants them to happen. By what means? What's the power structure propping him up? Who are his allies? Who are enemies? What is the network composing his wealth? These things are not only unanswered, I would suggest they are UNASKED. It simply doesn't matter. Rourk might as well be Zeus.

It is that element of UNASKING, I am focusing on.

This is one of the reasons film franchises begin to lose their luster because later films are often built by asking questions the earlier films not only didn't ask, but were never designed to answer. "Fandom" may be clamoring all the time for "answers" but they're always disappointed when they get them and for good reason. The questions never should have been asked in the first place.

[exhosionn]

happy vax’ildan! (i just binge watched the entire animated series in the past 3 days. i love me a good doomed sibling)

[prokopetz]

Every time I shitpost about Hasbro's mismanagement of Dungeons & Dragons as a franchise I get people coming out of the woodwork to demonstrate that they conceive of all criticism of the corporatisation of the tabletop roleplaying hobby as an extension of being "anti-5E".

[ccattnipp]

Up✨

[prokopetz]

what would a ttrpg that prioritizes roleplay and actually functions as such look like? i've played a few that claim to be "rp forward" and every time the mechanics meant to facilitate roleplay ended up impeding it - and meanwhile i've had perfectly rewarding rp experiences in crunchier systems with no mechanical social encounter support at all. is there really a way to build rp into a system that works, or is it just a unicorn idea?

"Proiritising roleplaying" doesn't mean anything – it's a piece of vacuous marketing text targeted at people who've constructed their identity politics upon arguing about the correct way to pretend to be an elf.

The basic problem is that the term "roleplaying" is, itself, not well defined; in practice, it means whatever the person trying to sell you something wants it to mean. Here, for example, by invoking the presence or absence of "mechanical social encounter support" as the distinguishing feature of self-styled "RP forward" systems, you seem to be implicitly defining "roleplaying" to mean "set-piece encounters in which a player character attempts to persuade an NPC to do something for them without resorting to violence". Is this justified? Is playing out the process of hitting each other with sticks not "roleplaying"? Why not?

What most people mean when they toss the term "roleplaying" around in the context of tabletop games is something in the vicinity of "roleplaying is when we do things I'm interested in doing, and not-roleplaying is when we do things I'm not interested in doing". As all game rules are unavoidably opinionated about what player characters ought to spend their time doing – indeed, arguably this is the only thing that rules can meaningfully express opinions about! – the question of "does this system 'prioritise roleplaying'?" is typically reducible to "does this system agree with me about what kind of game I'm playing?". Games are then sorted into "priorities roleplaying" and "does not prioritise roleplaying" based on which side of the answer to that question they fall on for the person doing the sorting.

This is the ultimate root of a lot of this "the best sessions I ever had never touched the rules at all" stuff. For a variety of reasons, many people have genuinely never experienced playing a tabletop RPG whose rules agree with them about what sort of experience of play they ought to be having, and in some cases they can't even imagine what that would look like. If you and the system you're using disagree so badly about what kind of game you're playing that "engaging with the rules" and "engaging with my desired experience of play" are mutually exclusive activities, it's not surprising that ignoring the rules entirely would be your best play.

In this light, your question of "what would a system that really prioritises roleplaying look like?" translates to "what would a system that actually agrees with me about what kind of game I'm playing look like?", and that's not a question I can answer unless you're willing and able to get a lot more rigorous about what you mean when you say "roleplaying".

[churchyardgrim]

Here, for example, by invoking the presence or absence of "mechanical social encounter support" as the distinguishing feature of self-styled "RP forward" systems, you seem to be implicitly defining "roleplaying" to mean "set-piece encounters in which a player character attempts to persuade an NPC to do something for them without resorting to violence".

well, no, i was actually thinking about scenarios like navigating a ball/gala type event and exploring the plot through verbal conversation, but i suppose i didn't say that, so fine, egg on my face

i ask this because i've been thinking a lot about why i keep bouncing off games like Blades in the Dark and Monster of the Week, both of which like to bill themselves as "rp forward". there's a lot of tools and toys to play with in terms of social encounters for both of those games, to be applied in heist and monster mystery situations, respectively, so i think we can safely say that we're aware of what the rules want to be doing in this instance, and are broadly in agreement with them.

but in practice, i often forget that i even have those tools, or the conversation regularly grinds to a halt while people review their abilities lists, and it's just.... weirdly exhausting. and i keep thinking that surely there must be a better way, but i'm not a game designer, so fuck me if i know what that better way might look like. hence, asking an expert.

i suppose we do need more precise terminology, because yeah "roleplaying" is technically applicable to any aspect of game engagement you can think of. "navigating social situations" is slightly narrower, but maybe just "having a conversation" is what we're after. and maybe part of the problem is that most people are already halfway proficient at having a conversation? in ways that we're not proficient at the aforementioned hitting each other with sticks. so we can just Do It without needing to abstract parts of the process into dice rolls and hit points, because we can just observe what the other guy says and then decide how our character feels about it and how they want to respond.

so is the answer to this just "roleplay is a fake category, and none of it matters"? surely that can't be it. surely someone must know what they're doing here, and can come up with a framework to gamify Having A Conversation in a functional and satisfying way.

[prokopetz]

There are a couple of big issues here:

You've settled on defining "roleplaying [mechanics]" as "gamifying having a conversation". What does it mean to gamify having a conversation? In what way, and to what purpose? My previously proposed summary of "[having rules for] set-piece encounters in which a player character attempts to persuade an NPC to do something for them without resorting to violence" is one way of gamifying having a conversation, but you've said that's not what you mean by that; so, what do you mean?

Is "gamifying having a conversation" really the only context in which your games grind to a halt because nobody's bothered to learn what's on their own character sheets and they need to pause to refresh themselves? Or does that happen all the time, and you're simply more tolerant of it in "hitting each other with sticks" contexts than otherwise?

[linzer-art]

when you're a demon and your angel crush asks you to bite his face and draw blood

[ladytabletop]

Quietus by Sinister Beard Games

Love a game that understands exactly why we use safety tools and why it can be fun to challenge ourselves in tabletop games.

[papanowo]

reminiscing of yonder fellow...........

[ode-on-a-grecian-butt]

[overtherails4u]

[sewryovk]

To a world where the past doesn't haunt, and hope simply stays.

IF only they both live……

also this is a commission plz donot use＜3

[princesshamlet-deactivated20210]

the first ever pride flag (1978) versus the TMP movie poster (1979)

happy pride month!

[trekheritageposts]

star trek heritage post (June 2nd, 2017)

[papanowo]

happy pride to these FREAKS

[probablybadrpgideas]

The nechiropractor; a necromancer who combines the dubious art of chiropractics with necromancy for a life-altering experience. Their methods include the humanoid equivalent of spatchcocking, in which the customer’s spine is removed so that they can lay flat and also so the spine can be tended to by the chiropractor more effectively. Afterwards, the art of necromancy is used to put the customer back together. The most bizarre part is that it works.