Doorknobs
…or sometimes, doorknockers.
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@lionesskate
Doorknobs
…or sometimes, doorknockers.
I'm fascinated by tabletop roleplaying groups where their "filler" game is tremendously more complicated than their regular game. "Yeah, our regular D&D session fell through, so we just had everybody make their favourite Marvel characters in HERO 6th Edition and fight each other" I need to study you like a bug.
Tangentially related, but when I was in college the HERO gamers decided to spend a session having their characters play a game of American football. After a bunch of discussion about how to handle e.g. teleportation on the field, they spent 5-6 hours playing. By that time they were maybe halfway through the first quarter, so they decided to call it done.
To be completely fair to HERO, its extraordinarily fine-grained conflict resolution is partially offset by the fact that the expected in-character duration of a typical combat scene is less than a minute. Trying to run a regulation 60-minute football game in a system with one-second combat phases is really on them!
I'm not sure if that first HERO example is more complicated, because I think you're only looking at the system, not the whole picture. It's just "build characters and have them fight", probably in a featureless room. The D&D campaign requires the DM to prepare a whole adventure, with plot and mysteries and puzzles and so on.
While it's true that a one-shot tournament scenario is less complicated in principle than a full adventure, I will point out that HERO 6th Edition is a game whose character creation rules are roughly in the same weight class as the entirety of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition's core rules all put together. If you buy it in print, character creation isn't a chapter – it's a whole separate book. The phrase "just build characters" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your analysis, is what I mean to say.
I think it's about sharing the complexity more evenly.
D20, I find expects a lot from the DM but conversely there's so much support for making a D&D or Pathfinder character that you can do it and start playing without really knowing what's going on.
is okay you do not need hard drive. i remember computer for you.
thank you for teaching me important tech vocabulary @kirbymybeloved
Looks like he's on a space ship hiding from the Alien.
Hey. Was reading your old Hearteater posts. Curious on whether you have new thoughts now that they're more or less out.
Finally someone cares about my Exalted opinions!
I really like the way they're presented in Exigents. They're tragic, horrifying, and genuinely monstrous in a way that's hard to reconcile with being a good person. And they add a really interesting legimitacy to the Usurpation/Solar Purge; the Exalted Host rose up once before when one of their own was too monstrous for the world. Why not again?
I actually really like the presentation of their charms and powers that aren't directly related to taking Pawns. The auroras, opals, being beautiful and cruel monsters... It helps set them apart from like, Ant And Starfish Lunars or God-Familiar hoarding Sidereals. On top of the terrifying and yet simple way their Pawn-taking manifests.
I feel like seeing their powers though, I see why the devs said they were the hardest to work into a mixed circle, or play as heroes. They work really well as tragic NPC's and villains.
I dunno, they're really cool and I wanna see more of them, they just aren't really geared towards being player-oriented IMO? Which hurts their chances of leaving Aprocryphal status. That said, they fit such an important niche in the setting that I'm not shocked that they're popular, and I'm sure they'll find a home in many games.
I think there's potential for them as PCs if you treat their pawn acquisition as a cost of doing business rather than their entire modus operandi.
Something I find interesting about them as characters that their current charmset doesn't do anything with is the idea that to be Celestial-level good at something a Hearteater either has to be extremely passionate about it or the action be undermining something really important to one of their enemies.
In that regard I've seen potential to draw some inspiration from 2e Solars such as how for example the corebook larceny tree has multiple instances of propaganda flavour text that talks as though a Lawgiver is incapable of commiting a crime and have a right to confiscate anything they need and are personally affornted by locked doors, reasoning I've never personally seen from a Night Caste but feels on brand for a Hearteater and pushes them towards being the nasty piece of work who'll only avoid turning an entire city into their pawns because their allies would turn on them if they did.
I've had a couple of people ask for a digestible version of the whole "the real problem with Dungeons & Dragons is false advertising, not anything that's present in its text" thing I keep alluding to, so here's the bullet point version of that argument:
Dungeons & Dragons is owned by Hasbro. Yes, the same Hasbro that owns Monopoly and My Little Pony.
Hasbro wants D&D to be the only tabletop RPG that anyone plays.
In order to accomplish this, Hasbro needs D&D to be a universal entry-level game.
D&D is not a universal entry-level game.
All game rules are opinionated about how the game ought to be played, and as tabletop RPGs go, D&D's rules are more opinionated than most. This is not a flaw, but it's not what Hasbro needs.
D&D is also on the high end of complexity as far as tabletop RPGs go, and it's complex in a way that strongly rewards system mastery, so it's pretty far from "entry level".
Hasbro could produce a version of D&D that's at the very least less opinionated and more entry-level than it presently is, but they don't want to, because they've determined that certain rules features which run counter to both of those goals are critical to D&D's brand identity.
They also don't want to produce multiple versions of D&D tailored for different audiences, because they want every single D&D group to be a potential purchaser of every single D&D product; they'd be effectively competing with themselves for their own customer base if the published game was actually modular in any meaningful way.
So how does Hasbro square that circle?
Simple: they lie. They insist that D&D is in fact a universal entry-level game in spite of all evidence to the contrary, and back their advertising up with sponsored thinkpieces and podcasts and such to "prove" it.
Further, they've spent decades fostering a culture of play which conceals the gap between the game they're advertising and the game they're selling by ascribing any appearance that D&D isn't a universal entry-level game to the incompetence or malice of individual GMs.
The game the rules want to produce disagrees with the game the group wants to play? Nonsense – even the rankest beginner should be able to produce any experience of play using any set of rules, and if your GM can't, they're a Bad GM.
The game is hard to learn? No, it isn't – your GM is merely gatekeeping you. This wouldn't be a problem with a Good GM.
The upshot is that the published rules are more or less irrelevant with respect to achieving the desired experience of play, because they're operating within a culture of play which dumps 100% of the work of making that desired experience of play happen on the GM.
Indeed, much of what modern D&D presents as GMing best practices are really methods of working around the fact that the rules you're using disagree with you about what kind of game you're playing.
(It's not a coincidence that D&D's entrenched culture of play also insists that it's normal for GMs to be miserably overworked and treats GM burnout as a big funny joke, then turns around and loudly wonders why there's a constant GM shortage.)
The trick is, because you're still at least notionally using the rules of D&D, the fruits of all that GM labour are perceived as the product of "playing D&D", not of the GM's hard work.
In essence, Hasbro's business model for Dungeons & Dragons is selling you your own GM's labour with a D&D sticker on it.
It's a very neat trick, if you can pull it off.
Now, at this point some readers may be asking: well, sure, but not all GMs are doormats. What about "killer" GMs who do gatekeep and railroad their players and otherwise act like complete tyrants? I hear horror stories about them all the time.
That's the second trick: these are not opposites. The GM as human Xbox and the GM as tyrant of the table both represent the GM doing all the actual work of making the game happen. The latter isn't the outcome that Hasbro wants, but it's a logical conclusion of the position they want the GM to be in.
I've seen a few folks in the notes respond "okay, but if that's true, why is D&D so much more flexible than most indie RPGs?", and the answer is that it's not. That's part of the sleight of hand I've talked about where the GM's labour is framed as part of the product. To break it down:
As noted above, all game rules are opinionated about what kind of game they wanted to produce. This isn't just a matter of setting (though setting-neutral games are often misleadingly called "universal" games), but also a matter of the basic structure of the narrative which emerges when you follow the rules.
The rules of Dungeons & Dragons is not less opinionated than those of your average indie RPG, and in fact are more opinionated than most. (And again, having strongly opinionated rules is not something that's wrong with D&D; it's merely something that's inconvenient for Hasbro's marketing goals in a way they're unwilling to address.)
In brief, D&D really, really wants your game to be a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl. If the GM is using the framework of play furnished by the rules at all, or if the players are responding to the rules' player-facing incentives even a little bit, it's going to squish your game into something dungeon-crawl-shaped.
(This should not be surprising; it's literally in the name!)
The rules of D&D being opinionated in this way tends to fly under the radar for a couple of reasons, one less problematic and one more so.
The relatively benign reason is that many popular RPG premises are not done any great violence by being squished into the shape of a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl.
A cyberpunk smash and grab caper? Basically a dungeon crawl already.
A special forces op in a modern military game? That doesn't need to be shaped like a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl, but it can be shaped like one and remain intelligible as what it's supposed to be.
Gritty logistics-driven survival horror? Not inherently dungeon crawl shaped, but the two genres are compatible – a game can be both at the same time, as video games like Fear & Hunger and Look Outside demonstrate. (Indeed, Look Outside's apartment building follows the structure of an old school D&D megadungeon nearly beat for beat!)
Thanks to D&D's pervasive cultural influence informing what people expect a tabletop RPG to be, as long as this kind of compatibility is present, many folks won't even notice their intended premise is being squished into the shape of a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl.
If your chosen premise isn't compatible in this way, or if the group notices what's happening and decides to push back against it, though? That's where the sleight of hand I alluded to above starts to come into play.
Remember: a Good GM™, even a total novice, ought to be able to use any set of rules to produce any desired experience of play, right?
So get to work!
i.e., just as much of the game's putative approachability is the product of Hasbro selling the players their GM's labour in a D&D-shaped box, much of D&D's putative flexibility is the product of the GM being sold their own labour in a D&D-shaped box.
To be clear, this is not militating against homebrew content or rules. Homebrew is perfectly cromulent, and certainly, some games are more or less structurally amenable to it (though modern D&D tends to fall on the "less" side).
The problem is that what we've got on our hands is a culture of play that wants to have its cake and eat it too: when doing extensive homebrew is treated as part of the GM's basic, entry-level responsibilities, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking of the product of that labour as merely being a feature of the game.
Which is, of course, exactly what Hasbro's marketing ghouls want.
Collection of all of my sapphic couples in traditional costumes around the world sketches (will continue to add more !)
You can tip me here <3
PURSUIT OF JADE 逐玉 (2026)
Reclamation, Page 70
Few moments deserve the full-color glowy treatment more than Exaltation.
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Expressions People Use When They Lose a Game (Electronic Fun with Computer and Games #5, Mar. 1983)
something I really appreciate about Exalted is that the Eternal Empire is 700 years old, has even the modicum of stability that it has solely due to everyone living so damn long, and it has major shifts in its politics like once every few decades.
Yeah, Exalted approaches its history in a refreshingly realistic way for the fantasy genre rather than having these centuries or millennia long abysses of time where nothing meaningfully changes.
And for Day 3 of Lady Death/Chastity week: Escher Girl flirting! At least I think they're flirting.
(Panel from Lady Death/Chastity #1 (2002), Chaos! Comics)
I'm imagining they're about to do some Escher Girl version of this
Skip Google for Research
As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse. It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms
As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable. As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.
Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.
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Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free
I want you to remember:
The fascists hate you too and they just will pretend otherwise until after they've killed the rest of us, before they turn on you.
Thanks to whoever tried, but I knew they'd never allow it.
Let's do it the old fashioned way. Spread it far and wide.
Reminder: you can't be the whole wall against stopping fascism by yourself. Nobody can. But you damn sure can be a brick.
There's a lot of good comments and tags in the notes, but this one is very important, I feel like it deserves some emphasis.
Part of how authoritarianism works is telling you that you can't stop it. And you can't stop it by yourself. But it wants to stop the train of thought there and let you fall into despair.
You need to remember the next part: you don't have to stop it by yourself.
You're not alone. Take care of your community and let your community take care of you. Supporting each other is so vital.
Did I reblog this before? Imma do it again, if so.
I'm looking for a good alternative to Pinterest, I've had some artwork of a Minoan woman get deactivated on me because of nudity and there doesn't seem to be humans involved the review process anymore.
Longed For As The Sunwarmed Earth, an exalted game character for an eastern european inspired exalted game. She's a matchmakerrrr
Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make me a match, Find me a find, catch me a catch Matchmaker, Matchmaker Look through your book, And make me a perfect match
It was dreamlike. Nightmarish? Not always. Sometimes it was beautiful.
Annihilation (2018) dir. Alex Garland