I still don't know how to use this website

[animusbell]

celestia is such a funny character like she's constantly manipulating twilight and friends to do shit instead of just asking and you could arguably frame that as being bc she's a "god" and pushing fate to her design or whatever, except that she engages with the group like a normal and relatable person, which makes it more like villainous machinations, except 90% of this manipulation goes towards things like "I don't want my party to be boring shit again. put my little country girl blorbos in there with zero prep so they fuck it up bad"

[animusbell]

you think you've fucked anything up around princess celestia and she's like heh. no worries. all according to keikaku

[jukashi]

Celestia instantly makes more sense as a character when you ignore the princess stuff and remember that she's a 1000+ years old wizard. Of course she does manipulative trickster stuff to teach moral lessons and/or cause chaos to amuse herself, that's classic wizard behavior. Of course sometimes she's actually socially awkward and bad at personal relationships and has bad ideas that she thought were good that result in her eating shit embarrassing style, that's classic wizard behavior. Of course she lets the aristocrats and nobles run around being assholes she's still running on wizard advisor programming, she's basically trying to merlin the entire upper class of equestria instead of just a king and some knights. "Yeah uuhhh we'll release the incarnation of chaos himself from his ancient prison because we think this shy girl can be friends with him", terrible plan if you're thinking like a ruler, amazing plan if you're thinking like a wizard. Just look at Canterlot 'Castle' for five seconds and ask yourself if that's in any way a castle. No. Wizard tower, yes. Wizard.

[animusbell]

You are so right actually

[qqchurch]

[advanced-passenger-train]

[probablily]

I just love it when things are earnest like everyone get more earnest now

[mens-rights-activia]

[murdaawasthecase-deactivated202]

Lmaoooo who is making these

[mens-rights-activia]

Mens-rights-activia

[suzyisgone]

Okay, so, I already posted this backrooms/poolrooms fanart cause I was in the middle of drawing it and finished it after the other person's drawing (which I adore! >:D) and posted it on the same thread, but because Tumblr is weird now, it didn't show up in the tag, so I'm posting it again. U^U

Here you are! :)

I'm planning on doing more with more open space to express the liminal-ness of the backrooms, as well as some with other characters, but for now this is what I've got. UvU

Hope you enjoy! :D

( @dingodoodles )

[prokopetz]

Did you play AD&D? I can't remember how old you are, so hopefully that's not too offensive. If so, was a typical game really as hostile as people say it was?

That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".

A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!

In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.

The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.

A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.

In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).

It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide or was furnished with a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.

Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?

The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!

These kids purchased the repackaged survival modules along with all their other D&D books; having no frame of reference, they assumed that these represented what a "standard" D&D adventure was supposed to look like – and since they weren't experienced players with whole binders full of pre-generated backup characters at their fingertips, the result was a lot of seemingly unfair total party kills, and a lot of kids concluding that the previous generation's GMs must have been objectively insane.

[stephenleasheppard]

There is an additional amusing point of order here, which is the answer to the following two questions. I once had a discussion with someone in Gary Gygax's gaming group, who was involved in early TSR work a bit. Allow me to paraphrase my questions and his answers.

Why publish survival modules as your primary format of published adventure?

"Because that's what we had -- they were already laid out for publication. Why not publish them and make some money off it?"

Did it ever occur to you at the time that publishing adventures like these would shape the larger D&D culture's expectations of what play was supposed to look like?

"No, why would it?"

[chuckdrawsthings]

time wasted

[tikkety-tok]

I swear, even if you haven't seen FMA, I think you might appreciate the fucking talent! 🤩

[reallycoolsoup]

The hotdogs taped together with what looks like scotch tape really makes this for me

[shegs]

I FOUMDH IT

[princess-anri]

Regular Couple

[pawhold-deactivated20180415]

this ended homophobia

[nikoni]

happy pride month

[cuppydogshane]

My Name is 8 PM. and I am always arriving when you atrent Looking

[the-disemvoweler]

M Nm s 8 PM. nd m lws rrvng whn y trnt Lkng

[consonant-remover]

8.y

I o a a i's ooa eo

[cuppydogshane]

if you two had a baby it would be a regular sentence. or perhaps silence.

[unyieldingsilence]

‎

[cuppydogshane]

Right.

[ominous-signs]

_

[koiagain]

I guess you could say he’s ve… he’s a very h…

[rookiebe]

got the hot springs ticket but i think they are about to get kicked out for committing various social faux pas 😔

🧪 🚗 ☕

[rookiebe]

dude. she said i love you so much i wish i could build a giant maze or perhaps an abandoned factory and put you in it and watch you solve various puzzles to receive peanuts and seeds 🗣️ 📣 whats not clicking

[canidykes]

the big man is the masculine dom and the dom is the top and the little man is effeminate and transgender but fully passes as a cis man and has top surgery but since he doesnt have bottom surgery he literally has to be a bottom theres no way for someone with a vagina to top and the bottom is the sub and they are both uncomplicatedly homosexual with zero positive emotions for women and they both have adhd and autism but only the kind of autism that doesnt actually disable you and they also crossdress but in a specifically humiliating way (why would a MAN wear a DRESS??? 🤪🤪 etc.) and they live together in a big house that they can both effortlessly afford and they're married and have 2 kids a dog and a cat (because Big man is dog coded and Little man is cat coded) and neither of them have jobs or lasting damage from canon events they've been through or physical disabilities or PTSD that I cant turn into Angsty Ship Content and the sun has a big smiley face and birds are just V shapes on the paper it doesnt have to be more complicated than that you dont have to flesh them out. you dont have to. and if you think about it wouldn't it just be soooo much effort to draw a whole bird?? youre just having fun its mean to ask you for detail. and my teacher lives at the school and the bus driver lives in the bus and everything is exactly the same :)

[no-sharks-on-the-sun]

[no-sharks-on-the-sun]

they killed him for this

[wifihunters]

its pride month and im very burnt out from working in healthcare however i do love it for the ambiguity the uniform/masks offer. had a conversation with a patient after seeing him for a day or two where he was like

"Sorry, I don't mean to offend--"

Which of course, I brace for hell, since he is around 60, and i am a gangly cryptid that people usually struggle only to find the right slur to apply to. But i dutifully keep my work voice and go "nah nah, don't worry, what can I do?"

He hits me with "Are you--uh, I've been saying 'thank you ma'am' but are you... okay with that? What should I call you?"

And i live in a small conservative pocket within one of the most liberal states in the US, so my experience in public is varied. People have guessed, they've gone with she, he. they, they've awkwardly avoided it, but no stranger had ever asked me.

So i panicked and chuckled. This felt kind of like walking into a fake tumblr post. I said "Oh, you can call me whatever you want, its fine."

Any cis person would probably sound a little insulted. i knew i was confirming some kind of gender fuckery, but giving him the out that he didn't have to change anything. Fucker kindly smiles though, and like. Pounces. Asks, much more confidently, "But would you prefer sir? What are your pronouns?"

He's on script now, I'm astral projecting to a different plane where i'm a bug on a well lit microscope and my throat's a little tight all the sudden. I say, "Oh. I uh--I use they/them."

I use they or he, but 'they' is the language curveball. I know this, which is why i usually just let people use whatever. He nods, and I choke out (because its been a bad bad day, autoimmune flare pain on top of record high patient numbers) "Thanks. No one... has ever asked me. Have a good day."

He told me the same, I booked it, because the dim room was hiding watery eyes but not for much longer. Got it together in a nearby closet (ha) and moved on.

Came back later on in the evening because I had promised to visit when his wife was there earlier in the day. She's sweet, he's sweet, I do my usual spiel, he avoids any 'ma'am' studiously, but on me going to head out again, hits the dilemma of having no polite substitute for 'ma'am' or 'sir' that isnt gendered in some subtle way, and he's fucking trying, but this is not second nature obviously.

So what comes out is "Have a wonderful night, Them!"

Beaming, proud, right next to his extremely confused wife, who he seems to have not outted me to (nice) who now thinks he's probably having a stroke (funny, but not nice lmao)

Anyway, tldr, not adding to the well-meant bigot strawman theory, man wasn't a bigot, it was just. Nice, that in a sea of alt, visibly queer or vocally liberal people my age or younger who never thought to ask or just didn't want to deal with the awkwardness of stumbling through it... some lone dad guy decided 'good enough' wasn't enough and volunteered to correct himself.

[johnny-depp-is-loved]

what is this genre of photos called

[scatterpatter]