Yee-and I cannot stress this enough-Hah @nairdde32 - Tumblr Blog

I don't know who needs to hear this but the world is a better place With You In It

A WIP/redraw I have very mixed feelings about! 🔮🌟

The last few weeks have been quite difficult. It's been hard to be in a cheerful headspace. Still, I hope and pray that life gives you something to make you smile 💜

zoctopode

im so used to tumblr that i forgot some troglodytes on reddit wouldnt be even surface level familiar with the concept of the robot lesbian

lifeafterpsychiatry

If you're comfortable accusing anyone of faking disability, you're not a real ally to disabled people

teaboot

One time when I was a kid a group of girls and I had to treat another student for hypothermia by ourselves because she had so many invisible health issues that the adults we asked for help didn't believe us. The student in question was actively hallucinating. When I finally ran for help the people I grabbed were slow as shit to respond, casually joking about how "dramatic" the person in question was.

The kid was picked up by an ambulance 30 minutes later.

Now as an adult working in security I get SO MANY folks- upper-middle aged mostly- coming to me to 'rat out' people they think are faking it.

I was once sent into a bathroom because a client demanded that the "fucker won't get out, so go drag them out"- I was NEVER going to do that, so I did a wellness check instead. You know who it was? A person recently released from the hospital after a car accident. They had a hole in their skull and major hearing loss. They couldn't answer the owner because they couldn't HEAR the owner.

Another time about a homeless man who got around town by kicking the ground from his wheelchair. "You know he doesn't actually need that thing, his legs work fine, it's just for pity points"- Oh, so he's not paralyzed, his wheelchair is performative? Funny story Dale, I actually know that guy, he was backed over by a truck and has chronic pain from his shattered pelvis. But sure, let's make him stand up and walk everywhere so nobody feels too bad for him and tries to help him or something.

"She doesn't need that scooter, I've seen her get out of it."

"Look how fat he is, because he just rides around and refuses to get up."

"She doesn't really need that cane- she comes here without it all the time"

Sincerely, truly, from the bottom of my heart- as someone who isn't physically disabled but hears this shit all the time- fuck off

sakana-no-yama

itsdappleagain

people in my replies arguing for their fav white guy???

selkiecremie

tmes love telling transfems what is and isn't transmisogynistic

poetrylesbian

heated rivalry is set in a wild fantasy world where male professional athletes deserve to live

prokopetz

Predictions for Dungeons & Dragons under Hasbro's management in the coming years:

Uma Musume style horsegirls introduced to the Forgotten Realms; setting's lore revised so that they've always been there.

Advancement rules now stipulate per-session XP bonus based on lifetime D&D Beyond purchase history.

Compendium of exclusive feat trees for specific gender and sexual identities. Bisexuality receives no feats of its own, being mechanically implemented as "half gay"; the resulting synergies are disgusting.

Editorial error in revised Dungeon Master's Guide accidentally refers to Dungeon Masters as Hasbro's employees.

"Noble savage" coding of barbarian class walked back, refocused on European folkloric touchstones such as the Ulster Cycle; all barbarian characters become Irish stereotypes.

AI-based DM service trained exclusively on work of Ed Greenwood launched; withdrawn a week later citing "guiderail issues".

Expanded discussion of navigating player expectations frames "not showing up at all" as a valid playstyle.

Dragon-blooded sorcerer subclass revised to state that one of the character's ancestors was "very good friends" with a dragon.

drunkenlemur

Didn't that last one actually get implemented into canon?

prokopetz

Hasbro has indeed spent the last several years pushing back against dragonfucking jokes so hard that they've gone as far as to revise some of the setting lore to imply that dragons don't even fuck each other, but they haven't yet had the guts to pull the trigger on taking the option of literal dragon ancestry off the table for sorcerers.

(The 5.5E writeup for dragon-blooded sorcerers does list "making a bargain" with a dragon above the actual-ancestry option, though, which is funny as hell. Yeah, I'll bet it was a mutually beneficial exchange!)

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?

If you're having trouble remembering what the rules for a particular thing are – or even that those rules exist – that's often a good sign that engaging with those rules isn't fostering your desired experience of play; however, it doesn't tell us anything about what that desired experience of play is, other than "not that". (Also, it's worth examining whether this is actually a domain-specific issue; many groups find it necessary to frequently stop and review the rules in many contexts, but this tends to be seen as more tolerable in turn-based frameworks like combat than in contexts that lack such a framework.)

jewishtransdyke

Maybe I'm missing the point, but here's my thing: you're playing a game that is played by talking. Why, then, do you need detailed game mechanics about talking (the thing you're already doing)? Why not just talk, and save the game mechanics for all the stuff that you can't just do for real at the table (e.g. hitting each other with sticks)?

prokopetz

That's definitely a reasonable perspective, though it depends on a very particular notion of What Game Rules Are For.

Suppose, for example, that your tabletop RPG character has occasion to play a game of Texas hold 'em. There are two basic ways this could be played out:

Roll some dice to decide who wins, and based on the outcome of that roll, produce a description of your character having played a game of Texas hold 'em.

Pick up a deck of playing cards and play a round of Texas hold 'em, you in the person of your character and the GM in the person of your NPC opponent, making all relevant decisions in character as your respective roles.

We certainly wouldn't say that the second one less constitutes "roleplaying" than the first. Some in-character activities, however, are less amenable to this sort of step-by-step acting out – at least, not without a lot of special equipment – and one of the functions of detailed frameworks of rules, such as the prototypical "combat system", is to furnish a game-mechanical proxy through which this sort of fine-grained IC decision-making can occur.

(Hell, if you were feeling mischievous, you might even argue that a game with a crunchy combat system is more "RP focused" in this sense than one which simply produces produces a description of your character having had a fight, in the sense that it both obliges and enables you to act out the process of actually making all those nitty-gritty IC choices.)

From this perspective, one might easily conclude that the purpose of RPG rules is to furnish such game-mechanical proxies; by extension, when no proxy is needed because sitting at a table poses no obstacle to acting things out in detail, game mechanics need not enter into it.

That's not the only possible perspective on What Game Rules Are For, though. Take me, for example: from my perspective, game rules are toys. They're made of methods and procedures rather than metal and plastic, but they're toys all the same, and I want to mash their faces together like a kid making their action figures make out. Whether or not a game-mechanical proxy is strictly required in order to play out the activity in question just isn't terribly relevant to me, because that's not why I want the rules to be present in the first place.

This being so, if somebody comes to me asking how best to address or model a particular activity in a framework of rules, I'll assume that they likewise have a reason to want such a framework to be present. I've got nothing against freeform RP, but I'm going to do you the courtesy of assuming that you've already considered and discarded that option and aren't just wasting my time!

daughter-of-sapph0

to kiwifarmers, hating someone isn't enough. it always needs justification. hating someone without a reason is plain bullying. but hating someone with a reason is "justice".

but the justification is not the reason for the hate, it follows after it. its always secondary. its always some bullshit they made up after the fact to declare them as an acceptable target.

it's interesting, then, that in every single instance, the "evidence" is either entirely fabricated or the kiwifamer has to make massive leaps in logic to present what the lolcow does as "bad".

which leads to the logical conclusion of pretty much every thread about lolcows, either its a straight up lie or its "we need to lynch this person because they draw pictures i dont like!!!!!"

daughter-of-sapph0

every single lolcow "callout post" is like this

daughter-of-sapph0

you know that their "justification" is always made up after the fact and not actually the starting reason for their harassment, because if it was solely the reason for their mob justice (it still wouldn't be excusable, but also) they would go after cishet allistic white people who do this shit way more.

like, using this as an example. you have someone who hates a trans girl on the internet. and they decided they need a reason for hating her. okay, lets see... uh, the trans girl wears a silly hat! lets fucking kill her... except the trans girl wears her silly hat very infrequently, or in some cases its a straight up lie and she never wears a silly hat at all. and there are five hundred thousand other cishet people in the world who wear silly hats every single day and never receive any hate for it. they shouldn't, of course. but its so bizarre that the kiwifarmer is going after the trans girl instead of other people who wear hats more often

except its not bizarre. the purpose of a system is what it does. it was never about the hats in the first place.

they need a reason to convince non-transmisogynists (or at least people who dont think they're transmisogynists) that killing this one specific trans woman is okay.

and so many of you feckless morons believe them without a second thought

poobletoods

i am no longer fucking asking

poobletoods

for all your no longer fucking asking needs

bgm05

casual pokemon player meme: I would like to have sex with this animal

competitive pokemon player meme: Bro thought he could switch his 252 Spe Borgulon into 252 SpAtk Choice Codpiece 2x Funny Dance STAB Mega Booboobus Peerless Tsunami 💀

motherfucker-unlimited

bebsi-cola

actually pigs shouldn't be at pride even outside of uniform. fuck those guys

bebsi-cola

if you decide to become a police officer then that outweighs any other marginalised identity you can rustle up like. not sorry, who asked you to willingly become a pig

pekkhum

I have heard of black people warning their kids that the race of a police officer is cop and you should not expect solidarity from them. The same applies to other types of minorities.

The sexuality of a police officer is cop.

The gender of a police officer is cop.

When you become the enforcer and protector of capital, you are making the deal to be slightly favored by the system over others like you, in exchange for being its servant. Your solidarity is with the system that you serve, even if it hates you.

If you want solidarity with those the system hates, you cannot be the system's servant and defender.

dynamaxed

hi! carey means needs help still - he's the voice actor for frylock in aqua teen hunger force! adult swim screwed him badly and pays no residuals and barely paid him during the show's run. he has heart failure and survives on con earnings, plushie sales, and donations while waiting for disability to get back to him. posts used to make the rounds for him, but haven't in a while, so i wanted to make a new post!

if you'd rather buy a plushie - here's the shop he and his wife run!

firecrystals

update: CAREY MEANS AND HIS WIFE ARE HOMELESS AS OF A FEW DAYS AGO

his wife also been in an accident and has been down and out due to illness and injury

ppal + gfm + site shop

sailatina3

I like how the infamous tiannemen square tank video shows literally nothing bad happening to the guy at all whatsoever.

tamamita

ferristriangle

So, just out of curiosity a few years back I clicked on a headline for like an annual day of remembrance for tiannemen square, and it included a video so I wanted to see if they would play the full clip.

That clip stopped at the same point that the clip is always stopped when used in news stories, but the article linked a source about tiannemen square for further reading.

I clicked on that source, and it was very similar to the first article, roughly 2-3 short paragraphs of declarative statements, the same clip edited to cut off before it shows "tank man" climbing on top of the tank shortly before walking away unharmed, and another link to a source for further reading about the events at tiannemen square.

At that point I wanted to see if I would ever get through this chain of an attribution of an attribution down to any primary sources or even a single article that just showed the full, unedited clip at the very least.

Every link I clicked on had the same exact structure. It was an article from a major publication, they all featured either the singular famous still frame of Tank Man standing in front of the tank or they showed the edited clip that is cut before the clip shows him walking away safe and unharmed in order to imply that the tank ran him over, they all had a short summary of events and then the "source" provided if a reader wanted to verify the facts of the article was just another article repeating the same thing which linked to another article repeating the same thing which linked to... and so on and so on.

I probably went a few dozen links deep and never found a single article that used any primary source documents or historical analysis or investigative reports as a source for any of the claims made in the article. The only primary source to be found was the singular video that every article refused to show in full.

And to be clear, this isn't just some odd quirk of this specific event. This pattern is exactly how most modern propaganda makes its way into the public consciousness. When a claim or accusation is made and the source making the claim is of dubious veracity (such as when the US state department, intelligence agencies, and various affiliated NGOs make claims about states or groups that are targets of US aggression and intervention), then going through this process of publishing hundreds of articles that amount to little more substance than saying "BBC reported that NYT reported that The Sun reported that WaPo reported that The Guardian reported that an anonymous state department official said something happened" serves two purposes.

The first purpose that this process serves is that the original source that is of dubious or sometimes completely discredited veracity is now buried from scrutiny under and attribution of an attribution of an attribution of an attribution.

The second purpose this process serves is that it creates the appearance of academic, journalistic, and/or scholarly consensus even though this large volume of reporting ultimately traces back to a singular source.

Anyway, this is a fun and good practice that everyone should get into the habit of that totally isn't jokerfying in the slightest!

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