iâm going to be really honest with you guys i think the tendency to read the absolute worst possible intentions into every action you donât agree with is getting too automatic and itâs eating you from the inside out

No title available

Kiana Khansmith

Jar Jar Binks Fan Club
NASA
occasionally subtle
Fai_Ryy
h

gracie abrams
I'd rather be in outer space đ¸
One Nice Bug Per Day

Product Placement
official daine visual archive
EXPECTATIONS
taylor price
đ
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
todays bird
almost home
noise dept.

romaâ

seen from Nepal
seen from Brazil

seen from Brazil

seen from Peru
seen from United States
seen from Bangladesh

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Italy

seen from TĂźrkiye

seen from Malaysia

seen from Japan
seen from Germany

seen from United Kingdom

seen from Bangladesh

seen from Lithuania
seen from Brazil
@mangledremains
iâm going to be really honest with you guys i think the tendency to read the absolute worst possible intentions into every action you donât agree with is getting too automatic and itâs eating you from the inside out
My favorite thing about J. Jonah Jameson is that he just hates Spider-Man. He supports mutants and doesn't hate enhanced people. He's not racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic. He just hates Spider-Man. And I'm half convinced that he's faking for the publicity.
He'd probably get pissed if he hears someone hating on Spider-Man for being enhanced.
"Spiderman isn't a menace because he can climb walls! He's a menace because he's climbing walls without a license or safety equipment! He's setting a bad example!"
"I just want you to know that you that your identity as an enhanced person is valid. Your identity as Spiderman is trash."
The Ring: If I had a quarter for every time a hobbit picked me up, Iâd have two quarters. The Ring: Which isnât a lot, but itâs weird that it happened twice.
Of all the bearers of Sauronâs ring, 4 of them were hobbits.
I was wrong. Itâs 5. Not 4
The lineage of ring bearers is as follows.
Sauron.
Isildur
Deagol
SmĂŠagol
Bilbo
Frodo
Samwise
I love how Deagol counts as a ring bearer even though he had it in his possession for all of like five seconds
He held it for the rest of of his life!
[Image description: Tweet by @banalplay saying âbut something happened then that the ring did not intend. it was picked up by the most unlikely creature imaginable: a hobbit, the same fuckin thing that just had it for like 500 years.â End Image Description.] Link to original here. Otherwise reblogging for the final rb there, which made me cackle.
From the ringâs perspective:
1. Home, the finger of my creator and other self.
2. Well, I donât like it but I can work with this. Cause some trouble, get some revenge, find my way home, this is fine.
3. What the fuck is you?
4. Right personality, wrong species, I donât know what you are but I hate you and I donât know why youâre so resistant to my powers.
5. NO NO NO there are goblins everywhere how did I find another one of THESE horrible things. This oneâs even more resistant than the last one and also disgustingly nice. I suffer.
6. Listen, Iâll cooperate, just get me the fuck out of this hellhole full of small cheerful people my power doesnât work on properly. No, not like that. I hate you. Please stop.Â
7. FUCK
8. (Frodo again) I still hate you with every molecule of my mortal form but at least youâre not number seven. Think Iâm starting to get through finally.Â
9. (Smeagol again) YES itâs you I actually missed you now get me back to the Master and NO FUCK NO I HATE YOOOOUUUUUâŚ. *fzt*Â
To our newer & younger fans,
Did you know that we once made a reality show, intending blood thirsty competition, to find the next best web comic, but it turned in to a feel good watch where people made friends instead?
Check out Strip Search on YouTube!
Strip Search is a reality game show for web cartoonists. They will face off in a competition for a reward that could change one of their liv
Strip Search is *amazing*
To our newer & younger fans,
Did you know that we once made a reality show, intending blood thirsty competition, to find the next best web comic, but it turned in to a feel good watch where people made friends instead?
Check out Strip Search on YouTube!
Strip Search is a reality game show for web cartoonists. They will face off in a competition for a reward that could change one of their liv
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 â 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 â 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 â 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 GMâ˘, 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.
I think my only quibble with this theory, and I might be very wrong, is how much it assumes this is Hasbro's slimy marketing department tricking the naive playerbase.
Because Wizards *tried* to make D&D a much more opinionated, controlled experience which would have worked much better as an entry level product with clearer rules of combat, a clear focus on how powers worked inside and outside of combat, a functional card system for powers, everything working relatively consistently between classes, and where more of the work was pushed onto the player to understand their character.
The result was a backlash so huge it created Pathfinder, their biggest competitor since Vampire: The Masquerade's heyday.
My theory with Wizards' marketing department is that they're generally more led than leaders, and they simply aren't in the business of telling people "this product is not for you" and never have been. They'd produce a new entry-level product *tomorrow* if they thought anyone would buy it, but they've simply been burned before.
Cynically, it is far better for them to let a competitor go first, show there's a clear market for a different kind of RPG, and *then* make their own competitor to that. As the latest figures in the RPG scene show, this is hard to do (theories on why are a topic for another post)
The same is true of Magic: The Gathering, btw. Wizards *really* doesn't think that Commander is a good entry-level experience for players. They've said so openly! But it doesn't matter, because that's what the players chose to play, and again, Wizards is not in the business of attempting to train its playerbase not to buy the product they insist on buying.
Fundamentally, Wizards has this problem:
And Fifth Edition has chosen a particular way to solve it (roughly described as "look, here are the rules, we know you'll do what you damn well want anyway, so we might as well make it explicit that you can"), where GM burnout is the main toxic byproduct.
But I think it's a misreading to believe that they created the problem, or that they're particularly malicious about exacerbating it. It's just a problem that's hard to solve and, to be fair, putting in the effort to solve it wouldn't benefit them much.
Now, if we can find a way to have my daughter's friends come to me asking to run Brindlewood Bay instead of D&D or to give a show based around Fiasco the same level of public awareness as Stranger Things, I will be entirely supportive of that attempt. But they ain't, and that's not just because Hasbro threw Geek and Sundry a few bucks in the Spring of 2015.
Hell, we've got Brennan Lee Mulligan, probably the most notable advocate for D&D as the 'anything' system who's not currently writing a D&D sourcebook, showing up to the table with Vampire: The Masquerade, a game where combat is generally either social or over in about three rounds, I have no idea how this will go, but I really want to see it succeed, if only because it increases the chances they run Paranoia at some point.
At the end of the day, I think the playerbase has more power than the marketing department. The fact that the culture of play is "let that one friend who's interested in rules do most of the work, while we eat chips and goof around" may in fact be just what being the mass market product looks like. It's not like that isn't how every other tabletop game works.
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 â 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 â 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 â 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 GMâ˘, 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.
I'd love to see some statistics on which tabletop RPG has the highest "mechanical complexity in character creation" to "(lack of) engagement with the outputs of those character creation mechanics during actual play" ratio. I refuse to believe Dungeons & Dragons is the even close to the worst in this regard.
A lot of people saying Rifts and while I agree that the old palladium game had complex characters, those were all things that got used in the game (source: I ran a campaign). The new Rifts frameworks that sit on top of savage worlds are also complicated but also get used.
The question was: What is the most complicated and unused rules on a character sheet. But it sounds like everyone read the first part without considering the full and actual sentence.
No, I think this is a misunderstanding, either of us of @prokopetz's ask based on the word "actual play", or from you of what we're saying.
If we're talking "by the book game mechanical rules", yeah, from my dim recollection, I can see how the stuff in Palladium char-gen flows into the game from the text.
But if we're talking how the game was actually played, I'm not convinced that most of the outputs of RIFTS or Traveller chargen makes it onto the actual table, and that's even if you exclude 'created character, played one session further', which is arguably the default Traveller experience.
Like, this is Jim Rossignol, hardly an RPG lightweight, saying:
"Now, the truth is that teenage me and friends spent about one afternoon trying to run Rifts as it was written, with its many numbers, absurd âmega-damageâ system, endless tables and stats. And nope. Instead we ended up with character sheets full of numbers that players would essentially make a narrative argument to me with â âcome on mate, my Crazy canât be affected by mind control because he has no mind to speak of!â â and then Iâd set difficulty on a d20. Later we realised that the d20 was a pure hangover from other trad games and, since we were doing it purely based on vibes, a d6 would work."
Like, come on, if that doesn't meet @prokopetz's brief, then I misunderstood the original brief.
Just two RPGs dominated my imagination from 1987 to 1996: TSRâs D&D and Palladiumâs Rifts. A few years ago I did go back and run a couple of
I'd love to see some statistics on which tabletop RPG has the highest "mechanical complexity in character creation" to "(lack of) engagement with the outputs of those character creation mechanics during actual play" ratio. I refuse to believe Dungeons & Dragons is even close to the worst in this regard.
I've met GURPS players who roll 500-point characters with all the bells and whistles in whose groups' baseline level of mechanical engagement in active play is "roll 3d6 and the GM makes something up". I know we can do worse.
Even with D&D, we're really talking about edition here. Even the 9 year olds engage with the spell choices they've made in 5e, even if it does resolve to "I roll a D20, does the thing?" Whereas 3.5, the gap between the grapple rules and the willingness to engage with said rules is far higher, because they didn't adopt the "fuck it, you didn't read this far" quite so quickly into the book.
But I feel like Palladium's Rifts has to be right up there. Character creation is a full-on beast, and the play ruleset is awkward even to veterans. I fundamentally refuse to believe there's a playgroup who got close to playing it "right" without the fun dropping right out.
Ooh, what about Traveller, with its "character creation so deep you can die during it" and its primary gameplay mechanism being "spreadsheets".
Although I suspect the kind of people who like Traveller will actually want to engage with the fiddly mechanical bullshit.
I'd love to see some statistics on which tabletop RPG has the highest "mechanical complexity in character creation" to "(lack of) engagement with the outputs of those character creation mechanics during actual play" ratio. I refuse to believe Dungeons & Dragons is even close to the worst in this regard.
I've met GURPS players who roll 500-point characters with all the bells and whistles in whose groups' baseline level of mechanical engagement in active play is "roll 3d6 and the GM makes something up". I know we can do worse.
Even with D&D, we're really talking about edition here. Even the 9 year olds engage with the spell choices they've made in 5e, even if it does resolve to "I roll a D20, does the thing?" Whereas 3.5, the gap between the grapple rules and the willingness to engage with said rules is far higher, because they didn't adopt the "fuck it, you didn't read this far" quite so quickly into the book.
But I feel like Palladium's Rifts has to be right up there. Character creation is a full-on beast, and the play ruleset is awkward even to veterans. I fundamentally refuse to believe there's a playgroup who got close to playing it "right" without the fun dropping right out.
"You canât make the volume of cards Magic does and not make âstrictly betterâ cards. The big issue is when itâs raising overall power level."
Interesting. How do you determine whether it's raising the "overall" power level?
When youâre eclipsing format defining cards with strictly betters.
There's an excellent Extra Credits YouTube on this wrt to Hearthstone.
The fascinating thing about Magic is how long *every creature* has been in the "Magma Rager" bracket.
Hello Mark. Over the history of the game the templating and rules team has done some good work cleaning up the wording on cards and making it clearer and more concise. Changing "remove from the game" to "Exile". "Comes into play", to "Enters the battlefield", to just "this [card type] enters." "Add G to your mana pool" to just "Add G." I know some of these have had pushback from some fans, but for the most part I feel they have made the game easier to understand and less wordy. I know this has happened over many years but give whoever is still around and working on templating today a high-five.
Also, I have a request for the team. Can they take a look at the wording of "activate only anytime you could cast a sorcery" and "this triggers only once each turn." You have been using these effects more often and they are both a lot of words to devote to a fairly simple idea. Also, while doing so 2 things to consider. One, it would be great if these restrictions were moved earlier in the abilities. Right now it can feel like someone showing you a big cake and then right before digging in saying you need to first eat your vegetables. Second, there can be some confusion when an effect gives your sorceries Flash and if that would also apply to abilities (it doesn't), which could maybe be fixed with different wording.
I know these aren't as simple as it might seem, and wouldn't be surprised if there are already discussions about one or both of these. I just wanted to come out and say as a long time player (and fantasy card creator) that I appreciate the work they have done and hope they continue to improve things.
Templating is way more complicated than it seems, but it is something we are constantly looking to improve.
Possibly the best way is to introduce the concept of "reaction" for "playable whenever you have priority".
This would then such abilities "cannot be activated as a reaction", which would clearly delineate a distinction between them and sorceries which can't be cast as a reaction unless they have Flash.
Instants and stuff with Flash would be spells you can cast as a reaction.
Hello mark
I'm certain you at wizards have excellent reasons to stop printing vanilla creatures, but I would still like to advocate for them. My two arguments are as follows:
Commons have too many words on them and this will help simplify a game that I believe is getting more complex each set.
If you use less common creature types (eg. monkeys!!!) these vanillas will see commander play and be loved by a portion of players to help fill out their typal decks.
Thank you for reading. Feel free to tell me where I'm wrong!
Here's the challenge. As limited design has advanced, we have shaved away what we used to call discriminator cards, that is cards that no deck wants to play, things you learn to not play with. In addition, we have to be very careful that no common card is only wanted by one deck archetype, otherwise that drafter gets that card most drafts, and it lessens the variety of play.
As vanillas mostly want to live at common for simplicity purposes, it becomes harder to use them. Not impossible, as we do make them on occasion, but they only work in places where multiple archetypes need them, and that's just hard to do with a card with so few knobs on it for play balance.
For people wondering about discriminator cards, there's a really interesting effect I've both observed and been subject to.
Consider Lens of Clarity.
This card is *terrible* in limited. Any limited player will tell you that having something with zero board presence and no ability to affect the board is a draw that will end up killing you.
But because Wizards printed it, you would find people jumping through hoops to explain a board state where this could be good. People would draft this above a perfectly reasonable creature.
These kind of "skill-testers" were just an excuse for veteran players to win easy games against newbies. They required all the skill of (*checks notes*) remembering not to accidentally include them in your deck.
For more on this and cards like Fog, I recommend Marshall Sutcliffe's Soapbox.
Hello mark
I'm certain you at wizards have excellent reasons to stop printing vanilla creatures, but I would still like to advocate for them. My two arguments are as follows:
Commons have too many words on them and this will help simplify a game that I believe is getting more complex each set.
If you use less common creature types (eg. monkeys!!!) these vanillas will see commander play and be loved by a portion of players to help fill out their typal decks.
Thank you for reading. Feel free to tell me where I'm wrong!
Here's the challenge. As limited design has advanced, we have shaved away what we used to call discriminator cards, that is cards that no deck wants to play, things you learn to not play with. In addition, we have to be very careful that no common card is only wanted by one deck archetype, otherwise that drafter gets that card most drafts, and it lessens the variety of play.
As vanillas mostly want to live at common for simplicity purposes, it becomes harder to use them. Not impossible, as we do make them on occasion, but they only work in places where multiple archetypes need them, and that's just hard to do with a card with so few knobs on it for play balance.
If you're familiar with the history of tabletop roleplaying games, you've probably heard the story about how the proto-RPG that would become Dungeons & Dragons originally just had fighters and wizards as hero units, and how the third class, the cleric, was introduced specifically to provide a game-mechanical hard counter to another player's vampire fighter in a long-running PvP game.
So here's a fun hypothetical: what might D&D's third character class have looked like if that rival player's fighter had been a different sort of goofy 1970s horror movie critter? What does the hard counter to a wolfman or a Frankenstein's Monster or what-have-you look like when generalised into a character class?
("Isn't that just a" nope â you don't get to reach into the future and back-port a fully formed character class that hasn't been invented yet. Start from first principles!)
OK, let's place ourselves. Proto-D&D grew within the Chainmail miniatures game in the 70s, developing eventually into OD&D by '74. So we want our media environment to be early 70s, late 60s. Let's pick a wolfman/werewolf as our hypothetical enemy player character; what's the state of werewolf stories at this point? The big ones are Werewolf of London from way back in '35 and The Wolf Man in '41. An American Werewolf in London won't be out for a few years yet; by 1981 we're well into AD&D 1st edition, by which time the basic core of Fighting-Man, Magic-User, Cleric, and Thief has already become established. So let's take WoL and TWM as our foundation -- what does "a werewolf" look like in popular conception at this time?
Werewolf of London introduced many of the modern common aspects of "a werewolf". They're anthropomorphic wolfmen, and the condition is treated as a form of disease or a physical condition ("werewolfism" or "lycanthrophobia"); the main character catches it in Tibet from a, like, evil Tibetan guy. It is transmitted through bites, and the transformation is induced involuntarily during the four nights around the full moon and can be induced at least partially by simulated moonlight. The transformation be suppressed or undone using the sap of a very rare exotic plant that grows under moonlight, and the werewolf character attempts to use it to self-medicate. When transformed, werewolves are savage beasts compelled to destroy the things they love and only turn back once they kill something, but retain enough intelligence, for instance, to use clothing to disguise themselves. The werewolf is physically fearsome but does not need special implements to kill beyond physical force or a gun; the transformation reverts on death. The impression generally is of "werewolfism" as a very physical, almost scientific thing.
The Wolf Man pivots back to a more mystical take on things. Werewolves again transmit their condition through bites, transform involuntarily, do not control themselves when transformed, and retain no memory of their rampages. The plant element is absent here, and silver is treated as the only thing that can harm a werewolf; this seems to derive from some German legends on the topic. Werewolves also have seemingly designated victims in their hunts, and know them because they can see pentacles on their hands when in their human forms. Magic can be used to temporarily revert a werewolf to human form, and the transformation again reverts on death. There's again an association with "superstitious" "backward" lands, with the idea here being of werewolf legends having a long history in rural Wales and being associated with Romani people also (no, that's not the term the movie uses). This movie is much more successful than its predecessor and is what largely makes the werewolf into a stock horror monster.
We can see the influence of this in the following years, beginning early. "The Werewolf Howls", published in Weird Tales #36-02 (making it November-December 1941, almost contemporary with The Wolf Man) we see much of the same ideas -- werewolves are associated with superstitious foreign lands (this time rural France), have a humanoid appearance, and are harmed by silver. The transformation is involuntary, traumatic, and occurs with the rising of the full moon. Later entries into werewolf movies, besides various Universal crossover gigs, include The Mad Monster (1942, the werewolf is turned into a berserk wolfman by a special serum made by a scientist furious about being ridiculed, does not control himself, dies in a burning house) and The Undying Monster (also 1942, werewolfism is a product of a hereditary curse, werewolf is killed with regular bullets).
So broadly speaking we can say this about what "werewolves" and "wolfmen" are like by the time a bunch of fantasy nerds are sitting down to play customized wargames in the 70s?
Werewolves can range from purely magical (family curses, hexes) to purely scientific (diseases, simulated moonlight, serums).
Werewolfism is highly physical, and dealt with using physical things (special plants, silver, fire, good old-fashioned violence) more often than with magical means. Werewolves are also physical dangers. They won't enthrall you like a vampire or make evil magic like a witch, they'll mainly tear you to pieces. The exception is that-
Werwolfism is infectious. Get bit by one, you're a werewolf too.
Werewolfism is transformative -- its defining feature is turning from one thing to another.
Werewolves are tough and scary -- if you don't have the right stuff to take one down they'll just keep coming.
Werewolfism is not voluntary -- you can't control if or how you transform and often can't control what you do when transformed.
So then, what does our hypothetical werewolf PC look like -- that is, how do these things filter through the intent of creating an overpowered player avatar? I think that we can at least downplay the involuntary elements -- that simply does not seem like something you would want to include if you're creating a deliberately overpowered PC. I will assume that the transformation element remains. Let's say then that this hypothetical character is a berserker sort of figure, remaining human most times and turning into a berserk whirlwind of claws and teeth during battle; essentially he gets to benefit from being an overpowered monster slash combat encounter during battle and from being a regular human character in other contexts.
And then, what does our hypothetical PC-countering-PC look like? The weaknesses of the werewolf are generally understood as being materials or sometimes rites, and often serve to control or reverse their condition; this plant or that spell reverts their form, that metal cuts through their toughness. Werewolf-fighting heroes tend to be posses of gun-wielding characters, but they're usually outmatched by the wolf -- you need to know their weaknesses to really get them. So perhaps our character-meant-to-counter-another-specific-character is built to deny the werewolf munchkin his ability to turn into or stay a wolf, and perhaps also to use silver knives/arrows/whatever to harm it directly if that fails.
So generalizing that into a standard class, I propose that this potential third player type to be the Herbalist, a class that emphasizes the use of special plants, reagents, substances, and potions, supplemented perhaps with some magical words and gestures, to provide benefits to allies and to hurt or depower enemies -- what we'd call a buffing/debuffing class today, maybe, but also picking up the "sometimes healer" shtick of real-life cleric classes and being able to do precise but situational harm to enemies. In later editions, this maybe gets generalized into an Alchemist class to be a general potions/poisons/acid bombs type of figure.
This is someone who truly understood the brief.
Tumblr's algorithm keeps trying to get me to join a community whose cover art is an MS Paint drawing of a really jacked Garfield. I have no idea what the community in question is even about because each time I see it, its name and description are obliterated from my mind by Garfield's burgeoning pectorals.
Like, I get that encouraging a culture of hyper-pathologising oneself is bad, but it's also extremely funny that I could lament that literally any of my Tendencies is a symptom of this or that neurodivergence and be guaranteed to get a dozen people who also have that neurodivergence replying "that explains so much".
The propensity to attribute random personality traits to autism is a symptom of autism.
It is rather worrying that our cultural landscape managed to turn mental health into horoscope, tbh
I especially like the ones where disputing your diagnosis with a particular condition is a listed symptom of that condition.
I swear I have encountered discourse that, by inference, essentially seems to believe that 'liking things' is a symptom of neurodivergence.
There's a very specific slice of neurodiversity discourse that's founded in the idea that the eugenicist perspective on mental health is essentially correct; it's merely mistaken about which particular neurotype is the Master Race. This usually snowballs into the idea that those who lack a specific neurodivergence â typically, but not always, autism â are basically meat robots with no interiority or capacity for introspection, and concomitantly, that only folks with that neurovergence count as real people. The result is that you end up in the awkward rhetorical position of being obliged to interpret any evidence of personhood as evidence of neurodivergence, which is one of the ways we arrive at shit like "only autistic people have interests".