It's only an Umlaut if it's from the Umlaut region of Germany. Otherwise it's a sparkling diacritic.

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i don't do bad sauce passes

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DEAR READER
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let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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@onyonyon
It's only an Umlaut if it's from the Umlaut region of Germany. Otherwise it's a sparkling diacritic.
I tried to practice shading on a little bear shaped candle that we have, but I think I gave him depression.
I think if Europe gets to be a continent, then Pluto should get to be a planet. You can't have it both ways, science!
you know English is a good language because it has the expression "many such cases"
In recent posts I've complained that a lot of tabletop RPGs which toss around the term "fiction first" don't actually understand what it means, and I've been asked to expand on that complaint. So:
In my experience, there are two ways that game texts which want to position themselves as "fiction first" trip themselves up, one obvious and one subtle.
The first and more obvious pitfall is treating "fiction first" as an abstract ideology. They're using "fiction first" as a synonym for "story over rules" in a way that calls back to the role-playing-versus-roll-playing discourse of the early 2000s. The trouble is, now as then, nobody can usefully explain what "story over rules" actually entails. At best, they land on a definition of "fiction first" that talks about the GM's right to ignore the rules to better serve the story, which is no kind of definition at all – it's just putting a funny hat on the Rule Zero fallacy and trying to pass it off as some sort of totalising ideology of play.
A more useful way of defining "fiction first" play is to think of it not in terms of whether you engage with the rules at all, but in terms of when they're invoked: specifically, as a question of order of operations.
Suppose, for example, that you're playing Dungeons & Dragons, and you pick up the dice and say "I attack the dragon". Some critics would claim that no actual narrative has been established – that this is simply a bare invocation of game mechanics – but in fact we can infer a great deal: your character is going to approach the dragon, navigating any inclement terrain which lies between them, and attempt to kill the dragon using the weapon they're holding in their hand. The rules are so tightly bound to a particular set of narrative circumstances that simply invoking those rules lets us work backwards to determine what the context and stakes must be for that invocation of the rules to be sensical; this, broadly speaking, is what "rules first" looks like.
Conversely, let's say that your game of Dungeons & Dragons has confronted you with a pit blocking your path, and you want to make an Athletics check to cross it. At this point the GM is probably going to stop you and say, hold up, tell us what that looks like. Are you trying to jump across it? Are you trying to climb down one wall of the pit and up the other? Are you trying to tie a rope to the halfling and toss them to the other side? In other words, before you can pick up the dice, you need to have a little sidebar with the GM to hash out what the narrative context is, and to negotiate what can be achieved and what's at stake if you mess it up; this, broadly, is what "fiction first" looks like.
At this point I know some people are thinking "wait, hold on – both of those examples were from Dungeons & Dragons; are you saying that Dungeons & Dragons is both a rules-first game and a fiction-first game?" And yeah, I am. That's the second, more subtle place where game texts that talk about "fiction first" go astray: they talk about it as though being "fiction first" or "rules first" is something which is inherent to game systems as a whole.
This is not in fact true: being "fiction first" or "rules first" is something which describes particular invocations of the rules. In practice, only very simple games spend all of their time in one mode or the other; most will switch back and forth at need. Generally, most "traditional" RPGs (i.e., the direct descendants of Dungeons & Dragons and its various imitators) tend to operate in rules-first mode in combat and fiction-first mode out of it, though this is a simplification – when and how such mode-switching occurs can be quite complex.
Like any other design pattern, "fiction first" mechanics are a tool that's well suited for some jobs, and ill suited for others. Sometimes your rules are fine-grained enough that having an explicit negotiation and stakes-setting phase would just be adding extra steps. Sometimes you're using the outputs of the rules a narrative prompt, and having to pin the context down ahead of time would defeat the purpose. Fortunately, you don't have to commit yourself to one approach or the other; as long as your text is clear about how you're assuming a given set of rules toys will be used, you can switch modes as need dictates. However, you're not going to be capable of that kind of transparency if you're thinking in terms of "this a Fiction First™ game".
(Incidentally, this is why it can be hard to talk about "fiction first" with OSR fans if you're being dogmatic about fiction-first framing being an immutable feature of particular games. Since traditional RPGs tend to observe the above-described rules-first-in-combat, fiction-first-out-of-combat division, and OSR games tend to treat actually getting into a fight as a strategic failure state, a lot of OSR games spend most of their time in fiction-first mode. If you go up to an OSR fan and insist that D&D-style games can never be fiction-first, then attempt to define "fiction first" for them and proceed to describe how they usually play, they'll quite justifiably conclude that you have your head up your ass!)
Spreadsheet simulator 2023 gotta be my favourite game of this year.
(BoH Spoilers below)
I've been playing a lot of Book of Hours
Something I find really fun about Book of Hours is the contingent and sometimes almost accidental seeming restrictions of the crafting system, and how they sometimes produce really strange realizations.
Spoilers below
Blood is running into my head. Thick brainfog. Heavy sirup of realness.
You are not real, you exist because getting-uppedness
Which is a need of the money
I should not regard you, but I must.
Because entropy makes it so that I need cooperation, from the one
who decides where entropy doesn't go
for a little while
I really like making cocktails
It's kind of like how as a kid, I was really obsessed with making potions.
Isn't it kind of interesting how we ascribe an air of authority to ancient knowledge? In fantasy stories it's so often an ancient prophecy, or an ancient weapon, an ancient sage with ancient wisdom. And apparently the antiquity is what makes it superior to whatever modern equivalent is available
I even had an extremely conservative co-worker once tell me that the problem with modern society was, that we pay no heed to the teachings of the ancient masters anymore. I always assumed he was talking about some kind of Elders of Zion/cryptofascist nonsense there, because he was that kind of person.
But the point is, that we seem to have a cultural fixation with Old Knowledge, and I kind of wonder if this is unique to the West. Because the cultural west has this automythological narrative where we conceptualize the state of our cultural "advancedness" as going through the five stages of:
Ancient Greatness => The Downfall => The Dark Ages => Rediscovery of Ancient Greatness => Modernity.
Or at least something along those lines. That kind of makes me think that we might have a sort of cultural trauma from the fall of the Roman empire, that forces a certain contextualization onto our collective reading of history.
"There used to be functional roads and running water, then the knowledge was lost" Is the story we (read: our medieval ancestors) perhaps used to tell, when in reality there were just a few provincial capitals with all the amenities a Roman aristocrat demanded - until the romans went away; "There used to be stability and governance" Might've been the vague cultural remembrance during the early days of the dark ages, when feudalism reared its ugly head as the best available political solution. But actually it was just a populace trying to remember how to not be a part of an empire anymore.
If that is in any way true at all, it probably used to have a much greater effect in the past than it does now. What little I know about the history of philosophy - for instance - informs me that at one point in the middle Ages, western philosophical thought became essentially stagnant, as Aristotle became quasi-canonized by the church as the authority on all matters philosophical.
So I kind of wonder if that is the source of our fascination with all things ancient.
Here’s something I really want to bring up everytime I see people arguing online about tomatoes and whether they’re a fruit or a vegetable:
That’s not mutually exclusive.
Except it is.
Hello Tumblr
I’ve had this blog for years now, but never really did anything with it.
However, seeing as most of social media seems to have decided to spontaneously self-immolate lately, I figured I’d retreat here and use this as an outlet for all the things in my head that I need to scream into the void.
If you’ve stumbled across this, I assume it was by mistake, but you’re welcome to pick through my brain-leftovers nonetheless.