Let's Talk About My Hyperfixations

[okapiandpaste]

Favorite things that canonically happened in the Pokemon games:

-Rival Green/Blue takes a picture with your HGSS character because he thinks you’re cool

-he’s also feeling pretty peachy

-Erika talks crud

-someone was like making out or something in Bill’s yard in GSC 

-Giovanni literally ditches his son because he’s upset about a 10 year old beating his butt

-Silver tears a layer of your clothes off

-Children hate Steven Stone because his obsession with rocks is weird

-Prof. Birch runs away from his wife because he thinks she’s a pokemon

-There’s a tv show in Hoenn called the “Hoenn Rangers”

-There’s a magazine about exposed champions

-Characters who act attracted to you usually act the same no matter what gender you are

-Rival Barry gets distracted by a crogunk cutout when the world is ending

-Team plasma + stuff bad for team plasma= plasbad

-N knows the lyrics burn baby burn somehow

-N shouts “that’s an ugly formula!”

- Prof. Birch runs away from his wife because he thinks she’s a pokemon

(add your own bc this is just getting good)

[tumblunni]

- Cyrus randomly stands around monologuing at statues, a lake, a mountain wall, etc just so the player can hear his evil plans

- Cyrus adds space wallpaper to his office between D/P and Platinum

- Trash grandpa Charon has a secret room behind a false wall containing nothing but household appliances and a diary about hugging pokemon

- Professor Rowan beats up some galactic grunts and lectures them on proper manners when conducting an evil scheme

-Professor Rowan subsists entirely on candy bars

- If you refuse to take the pokedex, Professor Rowan gives you six dialogue boxes worth of “…” and says “I’m a very patient man, I can stand in one spot asking you this question all day”

- Looker is introduced running between lampposts over and over

- Looker refuses to let you leave the town until you get a Poketch, because its ‘secret police style’

- Looker gives you handmade tickets of his own face, covered in glitter

- Looker sits inside a giant paper mache rock for hours in a volcano, just waiting for Charon to come along

- Charon’s evil plan is foiled by being punched in the face by a small frog, commanded by a man in a rock costume

- Looker tells you that removing the Magma Stone summons Heatran, outside the mountain holding the Magma Stone.

- Pouring condiments on trees attracts hexagonal bees

- Actual playboy bunny pokemon

- Actual hedge hog pokemon

- A galactic grunt says “Cosmic energy for the win!”

- The galactic nap room. The entire existance of the galactic nap room.

- You have to talk to 32 people on wifi to turn a rock into 108 evil spirits.

- Everybody goes to hell.

[darkeiya]

- Looker dresses up as your mother.

- Team Flare’s employee roster includes Pitbull and a member of the Bee-Gees.

- A concerned NPC addresses Rowan as “old dude.”

- Taking a photo of yourself with a death weapon behind you.

- Your progress out of one city is impeded by a fUCKING CONGA LINE

[weavileonmute-deactivated201606]

- Whenever you beat rival Barry, he never runs toward a Pokecenter. He either runs to a Route, or towards the local Gym (in Canalave City)

[lilac-mage]

 - Brendan denying that he bought dolls when seen at Lilycove Department Store, even though you never question him, only for a Swablu doll to be found in his room after you battle him

[kingofdinosaurs]

-Professor Kukui has a part time job as a wrestler

-Team Skull took over an entire town

-Nanu, the kahuna of Ula'ula island, lives in an abandoned police station outside this town with at least 8 meowth

-Colress’s hair

-Grimsley refers to himself as ‘Uncle Grimsley’

-Archie’s zipper unzips past his crotch

-When you beat Maxie his glasses fall off

-You can go on what basically amounts to a date with any of the kahunas

-Zinnia spends half the delta episode trash talking Steven

-An old lady refers to Steven as ‘that silver haired dreamboat’

[baconflavouredshotgun]

- The SuMo Rotom dex calls the trial captain Ilima a dreamboat.

- Nanu in the background of your champion party. He didn’t HAVE to be there, but he is. Doing the goofy dark z-dance, behind a tree somewhere.

- “Hey guess what?” “I know!” “I didn’t even ask you a question yet…”

- Professor Kukui, a man known to be shirtless all the time, can somehow survive on top of a mountain,still neglecting to wear a shirt.

- Team Skull are the only people in the series to make you pay for a Pokemon Center, and they only do it because they’re broke and have barely any power. They’re not being mean, they’re just low on funds.

- Multiple people have attempted to fuse with Pokemon.

[galladevoirs]

..Welcome to the world of Pokémon

[lunarlapin]

My favorite one hasn’t been added yet:

- “Where are your from?” Your options to respond are “yes” and “no”

- That woman in ORAS who can win every kind of contest with the same Altaria

[pokemonheritageposts]

Pokemon Heritage Post

[derrickwildsun-deactivated20250]

That video of Alex Hirsch reading S&P notes for Gravity Falls conveys a few things to me:

1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.

2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.

3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.

4) conservatism, not the left, is and always has been the biggest voice of censorship in American culture.

[sci-fantasy]

J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, was before that a producer and writer for a number of cartoons in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s (The Real Ghostbusters and the original She-Ra, most notably). After a few years of dealing with the censors and their obsession with finding Satanism (or at least looking for Satanism to further political agendas) he wrote an article about the whole corrupt and bullshit system.

And published it in Penthouse, to force those same censors to buy a skin mag. The editor there asked, why Penthouse?

That one is from his autobiography, Becoming Superman. See also:

(As he goes on to say, he’s never worked in animation again–he’s effectively been blacklisted by the cartoon industry.)

[transhuman-priestess]

Every time something like this comes up, I remember two stories about making media. The first is about movies, and comes from Quentin “Feet Man” Tarantino.

When he was making Pulp Fiction, he was worried that the MPAA would object to the high level of violence in the film, so he shot a bunch of extra-gory stuff that he didn’t actually want in the film, and added it in before submitting it to the MPAA. Predictibly, they asked him to cut most of it (without even commenting on some of the things that had him worried, like the bits of Marvin’s skull that lodge in Samuel L. Jackson’s hairpiece). The resultant cuts were actually more permissive than he’d expected, so he cut a little more and submitted it, and it got passed with an R.

The second story is about that artist on Morrowind whose name escapes me (I’m not a big ES fan tbh) who figured out that if he made two creature designs, one weird and what he wanted, and one even weirder, he could get Todd Howard to agree to just about anything by showing him the whopper first, then going back and “working” for another few hours on a second, “toned-down” version, and it worked every time.

The reason I bring these up is that the thing that drives censors isn’t some extant physical rubrick of what is and isn’t acceptable, it’s the idea that they can have absolute power over someone else’s creative work. It’s about the social dominance of the interaction.

There is nothing so innocent, so clean, that a censor will not find some fault with it. Because they must find something wrong with it to justify their existence, and because it makes them feel powerful.

This is true of all censorship.

[godslush]

Out of order with the Bsky posts because the aspect ratios are messy.

Appropriately, The Ender heralds the end… of this image series…

…until the update next month.

[godslush]

Aaaand the base-game Extra characters!

With that, there's just DLC (and some miscellaneous monsters) left!

[n0rtist]

Spent too long trying to do the Peakuniku dance

[bedrock-to-buildheight]

Your own person, all along

[bravelycowering]

a rather unfortunate hobby of mine is recreating undertale/deltarune songs so that i can replace the melody with megalovania. i dont know why i do this

[bravelycowering]

Visit Original Link

like this

[bravelycowering]

Visit Original Link

i will not be stopping

[bravelycowering]

Visit Original Link

[bravelycowering]

Visit Original Link

[bravelycowering]

you and i both know these bars are too far apart to stop me

[bravelycowering]

Visit Original Link

aaand another one

[bravelycowering]

cant forget this one

Visit Original Link

[bravelycowering]

Visit Original Link

[bravelycowering]

probably something like this

Visit Original Link

[gogogoat495]

[ID: A bunch of Undertale tracks with their instruments set to play Megalovania (Once Upon a Time, mus_st_him, Death by Glamour, Your Best Friend, Temmie Village, Start Menu, and Power of "NEO") with tags reading "#I think this might be illegal actually op #go to undertale jail" and a pic of OP's avatar in Papyrus' shed, and a comment by @cherub-investigation0802 reading "Okay now Im curious of what the inverse is like" with Megalovania set to play Fallen Down. /End ID]

[mosquitoking]

"Let's roll, PRIME!" "Arise, ULTRAMAN!!"

[thewriteadviceforwriters]

🍖 How to Build a Culture Without Just Inventing Spices and Necklaces

(a worldbuilding roast. with love.)

So. You’re building a fantasy world, and you’ve just invented: → Three types of ceremonial jewelry → A spice that tastes like cinnamon if it were bitter and cursed → A holiday where everyone wears gold and screams at dawn

Cute. But that’s not culture. That’s aesthetics.

And if your worldbuilding is all outfits, dances, and spice blends with vaguely mystical names, your story’s probably going to feel like a cosplay convention held inside a Pinterest board.

Here’s how to fix that—aka: how to build a real, functioning culture that shapes your story, not just its vibes.

─────── ✦ ───────

🔗 Culture Is Built on Power, Not Just Style

Ask yourself: → Who’s in charge, and why? → Who has land? Who doesn’t? → What’s considered taboo, sacred, or punishable by death?

Culture is shaped by who gets to make the rules and who gets crushed by them. That’s where things like religion, family structure, class divisions, gender roles, and social expectations actually come from.

Start there. Not at the embroidery.

─────── ✦ ───────

2.🪓 Culture Comes From Conflict

Did this society evolve peacefully? Was it colonized? Did it colonize? Was it rebuilt after a war? Is it still in one?

→ What was destroyed and mythologized? → What do the survivors still whisper about? → What do children get taught in school that’s… suspiciously sanitized?

No culture is neutral. Every tradition has a history, and that history should taste like blood, loss, or propaganda.

─────── ✦ ───────

3.🧠 Belief Systems > Customs Lists

Sure, rituals and holidays are cool. But what do people believe about: → Death? → Love? → Time? → The natural world? → Justice?

Example: A society that believes time is cyclical vs. one that sees time as linear will approach everything—from prison sentences to grief—completely differently.

You don’t need to invent 80 gods. You need to know what those gods mean to the people who pray to them.

─────── ✦ ───────

4.🫀 Culture Controls Behavior (Quietly)

Culture shows up in: → What people apologize for → What insults cut deepest → What people are embarrassed about → What’s praised publicly vs. what’s hidden privately

For instance: → A culture obsessed with stoicism won’t say “I love you.” They’ll say “Have you eaten?” → A culture built on legacy might prioritize ancestor veneration, archival writing, name inheritance.

This stuff? Way more immersive than giving everyone matching earrings.

─────── ✦ ───────

5. 🏠 Culture = Daily Life, Not Just Festivals

Sure, your MC might attend a funeral where people paint their faces blue. But what about: → Breakfast routines? → How people greet each other on the street? → Who cooks, and who eats first? → What’s considered “clean” or “proper”? → How is parenting handled? Divorce?

Culture is what happens between plot points. It should shape your character’s assumptions, language, fears, and habits—whether or not a festival is going on.

─────── ✦ ───────

6. 💬 Let Your Characters Disagree With Their Own Culture

A culture isn’t a monolith.

Even in deeply traditional societies, people: → Rebel → Question → Break rules → Misinterpret laws → Mock sacred things → Act hypocritically → Weaponize or resist what’s expected

Let your characters wrestle with the culture around them. That’s where realism (and tension) lives.

─────── ✦ ───────

7.🧼 Beware the “Pretty = Good” Trap

Worldbuilding gets boring fast when: → The protagonist’s homeland is beautiful and pure → The enemy’s culture is dark and “barbaric” → Every detail just reinforces who the reader should like

You can—and should—challenge the aesthetic hierarchy. → Let ugly things be beloved. → Let beautiful things be corrupt. → Let your MC romanticize their culture and then get disillusioned by it later.

─────── ✦ ───────

📍 TL;DR (but like, spicy): → Culture is not food and jewelry. → Culture is power, fear, memory, contradiction. → Stop inventing spices until you know who starved last winter. → Let your world feel lived in, not curated.

The best cultural worldbuilding doesn’t look like a list. It feels like a system. A pressure. A presence your characters can’t escape—even if they try.

Now go. Build something real. (You can add spices later.)

—rin t. // writing advice for worldbuilders with rage and range // thewriteadviceforwriters

Sometimes the problem isn’t your plot. It’s your first 5 pages. Fix it here → 🖤 Free eBook: 5 Opening Pages Mistakes to Stop Making:

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✦ A free (and actually helpful) guide to leveling up your first 10 pages ✦If you're unsure whether your opening is ✨doing enough✨ to hook re

🕯️ download the pack & write something cursed:

Write the Darkness: 75 Dark Academia x Horror Prompts

A gothic prompt pack for writers who love cursed universities, secret societies, and scholarly rot.✎ Write the Darkness ✎A 75-prompt horror

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[dankmemeuniversity]

[xelayxes]

[xelayxes]

@matzahball

[dracophile]

For a second I didn’t realize it meant “high” as in a stoner--I thought “High Geologist” was like a rank of geologist or something and he was insulted you would challenge him to naming stones

[hamptercatapult]

great poast every one👍

[shirecorn]

I have drawn him.... The High Geologist

[syberfire117]

Can’t believe he’s ace

[shirecorn]

He is now And here’s the photo evidence:

[aphorisnt]

hey guys...https://twitter.com/MatthewLillard/status/1322648148364324864 so does this make it canon?

[anim-ttrpgs]

it really is gleeblor to try and explain to a lot of people that no the GM did not covertly orchestrate every single element of my PC's victory, and when you try to say that, they get all like "oh you sweet summer child" at you like you still believe in Santa Claus

It completely robs you and your PC of absolutely any accomplishments.

I promise you this isn't Critical Role, plot armor does not have to be the default, and the alternative is not just adversarial GMing

[vixensdungeon]

It turns out that "the GM wants to see you succeed" is not actually the same as "the GM makes sure you succeed."

No, the GM wants to see you succeed, so they put obstacles in front of you for you to try and succeed against!

[anim-ttrpgs]

I'm always saying there can be no success without the risk of failure, you can't "win" if you can't "lose."

and some people don't like to lose, some people don't like to even have the possibility of losing. And in that case I think those people should not play games where the possibility of losing is baked into the rules and then go out of their way to remove it(and this is for their own enjoyment), and they especially shouldn't act like it never existed in the first place(for my enjoyment), that's the part where it really really becomes a problem.

[maximumzombiecreator]

This is a long story, I apologize, but it happened recently so it's top of mind and I think it's a great example of this.

The party in my pathfinder 2e campaign are currently competing in a tournament. (Sidenote: I would very much recommend tournaments as a structure to anyone running PF2e. This is a crunchy, combat-as-sport game with a ton of extremely situational but powerful items, spells, and abilities. In a structure where the characters are given the ability to research and prep for their opponents, the system absolutely sings.) It has been a long tournament, six rounds of qualifiers and then a 64 team double elimination bracket, but they are in the losers bracket in the top 4.

Their opponents are one of the teams they've tentatively made friends with over the course of the tournament, but the grand prize is a matter of life or death for both sides. No punches will be pulled. Over the course of the tournament, the party has faced opponents with a wide range of skills, synergies, and strategies. This team isn't the most powerful in the tournament, but they're in the top 4 because they are the smartest team in the tournament. That's how the characters became friends with them in the first place: when the party needed help analyzing their enemies and finding weaknesses, they went to this team. Now, they know that same analytical eye is going to be applied to them.

To ensure the players' expectations are aligned with what the characters would know, I am very frank with them. I tell them that I sat down and looked at every fight they'd done in the tournament, and any strategy, ability, or approach that they used repeatedly, the enemy had planned for. I didn't cheat, didn't give them anything they couldn't get access to in their prep time, but I had done all the planning the enemy would have, and I am very prepared to win.

The party decides their best approach is to do something new, something the enemy can't have seen coming. They buy scrolls of Water Walking for the whole party and bid their tournament currency on the flooded arena layout, one they haven't had to fight in yet.

This pays off massively for them. I hadn't had the enemy prep for that, and with only one of them having much skill in athletics, swimming is a weak point for them. This confines them to the few sections of platforms and bridges that are above the water, as well as a single raft. The party takes advantage of their superior mobility to split the enemy, and go after the softer targets. I'm forced to dig deep through their abilities and spells, narrowly managing through a few lucky misses to keep all the enemies alive and consolidate their position onto a single bridge.

Once everyone is on solid ground again, reflexively, the party falls into their old habits. And that, unfortunately, is just according to keikaku. The enemy knows just where to position themselves, has just the right consumables and spells on hand. Attacks of opportunity shred their attempts to heal. Dispels rip through their magical defenses. The inventor is forced to shatter his shield to survive a brutal critical, and in a panic, the party falls back onto the water and throws down a smoke cloud to protect themselves from the onslaught of arrows raining down. Just as they've done in a half dozen other fights. And, so, the enemy is prepared. Beads of Fireball, purchased with the same tournament currency the party used to buy this arena, are hurled into the smoke, blasting every one of the player characters down into critical health.

The enemy front liners leap down onto the raft to pursue and finish off the rapidly depleting party healer. The martials rush in to stop them, and the players' dice betray them while mine do not. In a brutal exchange, both of the party martials are dropped, leaving only the healer and the bard on critical health. Neither of them are capable of dealing any significant damage.

We all realize that the fight is as good as over. I'm disappointed. The drama of the tournament had been building, and I was excited for the climax. But, apparently, that's not what this story is. That's okay, I can roll with it. I just have to finish off this fight.

The party healer, a divine sorceress, realizes that after charging in and getting on the raft, all the enemies are, coincidentally, standing in a line. She starts casting a spell.

Inner Radiance Torrent is one of my favourite pathfinder 2e spells. It's basically just a big dumb line AoE damage spell, but what makes it special is the fact that the caster can spend an additional turn charging it to really crank the damage up. This is almost never practical to do. Unlike in Dragon Ball Z, the enemies do not stand still while you charge up your beam attack. But in this one case, the enemies mobility was limited, they had a single target to pursue, and they couldn't see what she was doing in the smoke. They had no reason to break from their positioning, and she had nothing left to lose. I play their turns as optimally as I can without using information they don't have. They blast bombs into the smoke, and she nearly goes down. They refresh their buffs. They row the raft forward, weapons at the ready.

The smoke clears. Bloodied and burnt, standing atop the water's surface, the sorceress has a fully charged Inner Radiance Torrent gleaming between her palms, giving the enemy just a split second to realize the mistake they'd made before she unleashes a desperate, last chance kamehameha wave through them.

We all know the DC of the saving throw. I roll the dice openly. Fail. Critical Success. Fail. Fail.

It's the enemy alchemist, the mastermind of the group, who succeeds. I describe him throwing himself aside as the beam rips through the rest of his team, dropping all of them, ripping through the bridge behind and sending a storm of debris raining across the arena. By delightful coincidence, drawing the line across the map, the beam keeps going and hits the box where the BBEG is watching the tournament from. I roll a save for her as well. She critically succeeds. I describe her calmly raising her hand and stopping the beam, the massive wave of energy dispersing harmlessly around her. This is not going to help with how much they want to fuck her.

The alchemist gets back up and fights to win, but at this point, high on their comeback, the PCs are unstoppable, and this weak fucker can't row very well so they rip him apart from range and secure the win.

It was an absolutely incredible fight, an amazing session, a memory that I'm sure will last ages, and it could never have happened if we hadn't all been sure that the player characters had lost, that the fight was over, if we hadn't known that I, as GM, was playing as hard as I could to beat them. It's the kind of win you can only get when you came so close to losing, and the idea that I would give that up for something that I planned? Unthinkable.

[tobiasdrake]

They should make a Reverse Death Battle. As sort of a comprehension exercise for the way action and characters' strengths interweave with narrative and storycraft.

Like. Okay.

We did all this powerscaling and determined that this character is stronger by xyz margins, and their powers counter the other's, and more often than not they would win.

Now write me a fight scene where the weaker character wins. There are no restrictions on how this can be accomplished but it must still make sense with the established factors about the characters' comparative abilities.

[mugokii]

[mugokii]

[prokopetz]

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.

[prokopetz]

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 are not less opinionated than those of your average indie RPG, and in fact are more opinionated than most. (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.

[prokopetz]

(I feel I should emphasise for the folks going "yeah, D&D sucks!" in the notes that at no point in either of these breakdowns have I said anything for or against D&D as a game. These problems would still exist even if D&D was the best game in the world at being the kind of game that it is!)

[newtidy38]

Tbh wasn't even close to finishing this one :/

But it looks kinda good I guess??