JBB: An Artblog!
YOU ARE THE REASON
Discoholic 🪩
Game of Thrones Daily
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Love Begins
⁂
titsay
hello vonnie
Kaledo Art
No title available
art blog(derogatory)
ojovivo
Monterey Bay Aquarium
No title available
Product Placement
styofa doing anything
NASA
No title available
shark vs the universe
seen from United Kingdom
seen from France
seen from United States
seen from Netherlands
seen from Mauritius
seen from Brazil
seen from United States
seen from Belgium
seen from Malaysia
seen from France
seen from Hungary
seen from Hungary
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Belgium
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from Maldives
seen from Türkiye
@rasalhage
Link to the article
We regret to inform you that the sunshine and friendship app is actually a children killing app.
I have been telling people for years that the company behind Pokemon Go had no-shit, for-realsies ties to the CIA and people never really took it that seriously. Anyway.
generational abyssmal dogshit coming down the pipe
he's so real tho
sometimes being a fan of something means not wanting them to make any more of it
people who are scared of math want to defeat capitalism without studying or understanding economics. sometimes science gets elevated to a magical art so it's less scary and more sacred or something, but counting numbers? modeling and predicting? understanding monetary policy and economic principles? no that's too hard and scary, I just want to make wool in a cottage for $100k a year and everyone will clap. maybe perhaps ceding an entire domain of study to the fascists is bad
people will literally wait to overthrow Money and just hold a sincerely magical belief that humans will "revert" to what, trade society? and then they'll never have to understand fiscal principles. because money evil and understanding it will compromise their mental purity (and require them to do math). "why were these pears grown in Madagascar and packed in Thailand?!" because it makes sense, and you don't know how trade works, so you just go "oh that must be Bad, no need for me to understand more!" let's also stop learning about Bad history too, and Bad art. your mind must be so powerful and discriminating.
#is it good for countries to be self-sufficient. are things better when people who look like you and speak your language make them#out of all the monstrosity capitalism gives us you're gonna go after INTERNATIONAL TRADE?#quite possibly the thing that has enabled more human flourishing than almost literally any other development?#idk I'm not gonna die on that hill but it's gotta be top ten for sure#i should drive my car to the farmers market#it stopped being forgivable for the cottagecore assholes to whine about this when an elected fascist started imposing tariffs#i hate when you people force me to defend liberalism (via aquaflv)
PRAISE
i love writing out numbers and then putting them in parentheses like "one (1)" even when i dont need to i think its funny
happy pride month
this one kinda hurts when i see it every pride month. im glad to see an art piece of mine still circulating, and with nearly 100,000 notes too! it just hurts that im separated from it. everyone in the notes thinks im gone. im still here, but my potential community and connection is lost because im forgotten in place of the art. yeah, my deactivated profile does add to the profoundness of what i was saying, but i am still removed.
Level 1: Asylums are scary because there's crazy people there.
Level 2: We shouldn't treat mental health facilities as objects of horror because it stigmatises mental illness.
Level 3: Asylums are scary because there's psychiatrists there.
Inadvisable tabletop RPG jam premise #137: Game jam where each entry consists solely of paratextual discussion of the mechanics of a hypothetical or invented RPG; examples include an errata document, a developer Q&A, or a forum thread debating the correct interpretation of a particular rule.
@shoutyourporpoise replied:
I could SWEAR you’ve made this post before, or perhaps this is such a characteristically “you” concept that I already imagined a world in which you had
I don't think so, no. I did once (unintentionally) curate a game jam about writing supplements for invented or hypothetical games, the product of which you can find here, but this is a different thing.
(If anyone really wants this one to be a thing, though, feel free to toss your entry into the reblogs. I'm not going to do a proper game jam on itch.io or whatever because its UI really wants you to have cover art and a promotional blurb and such, and this doesn't feel like it warrants it!)
Boneseller38: Does anyone know how the rules for tertiary weapons are meant to work? We had an argument at the table last night since it reads like they're supposed to be a last resort thing you can't use very often but it doesn't put any clear limits on how often you can use them? If I'm playing a caste with good tert pics why wouldn't I just use them every turn?
Josh_Shrubbery: Check the forum rules, dipshit. You need to post the section you're talking about so we actually know what ruleset and expansions you're going by. This is just clogging the category.
W0r1dB4N3: Kinda rude but we do need the specific quote, those rules get changed up a lot. Terts have been a balance nightmare in every edition.
Boneseller38: Sorry, I'm back, dealing with life shit. We're running 4th Edition with the Still Water, Soft Rains expansion but none of the later ones since they'd break the module. Here are the two parts that confused me.
"Unlike their natural and wielded weapons, the tertiary weapons of a Stranger represent the culmination of their mastery, drawing directly on their lifeforce and knowledge to force patterns onto the world around them. They follow the same rules as Riddle Engines, as they operate under the same principles, but are not consumed when used, instead leaving the user drained both physically and psychologically. "
"During a Stranger's second combat phase, they can make attacks with wielded or tertiary weapons equal to their Attacks stat, or use a consumable with the Thrown, Ranged, or Riddle Engine keyword."
First quote makes it seem like they're supposed to be a rare special move but there's no mention of any kind of actual limitations. Yeah there's a bit of self-damage and usually a status effect on the weapon statblocks, but I picked Tidebreaker Caste and Secret of Rime at level 1 so they literally just don't affect me. Is there something I'm not getting? Why wouldn't I just spam it every turn?
Josh_Shrubbery: You can't just run a cheese build and then act confused when it's a cheese build.
Boneseller38: It's literally one of the example characters.
W0r1dB4N3: Running 9 Gates? Nice. Yeah, 4thE was kinda weird about that. A lot of people got really mad about how tight the limits were in 3rd, especially since the short stories have Strangers using what would be terts IG multiple times in a row (at great cost, of course), so they tried to do something like that but balance it around the "average" caste. I don't think they actually expected anyone to spec survivability just to spam them. SWSR made it way worse with Tidebreaker. I think they erratad some of the self-damage numbers higher but you can still totally do it with 1-2 extra defensive secrets, tertspam is THE classic 4thE meme build.
[THREAD LOCKED BY MODERATOR - QUESTION RESOLVED]
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.
Didn't that last one actually get implemented into canon?
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!)
Another day being an Elder Red Dragon. Adventurers keep asking if they can fuck me. Buddy, they won't even let me fuck a dragon.
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".
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.
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.)
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)?
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!
I believe that this is brushing right up against (and partially overlapping) the Rules Elide blogpost-and-subsequent-years-long-conversation, which I was chewing on again recently after hearing about the GUNFUCKERS tweet (deleted, reproduced)
I don't think I agree that "rules elide" is universally true, but I do agree that a system can have hard rules; rules that are (theoretically) quick to resolve, aren't particularly interesting to consider, and leave no room for creativity or negotiation. Stuff that you could hand over to a computer to resolve without skipping over any decision points.
Example: Boot Hill. Also relevant: [the blog post about using boot hill for a political intrigue game.](https://www.chocolatehammer.org/?p=5773)
My new experimental stance: hard rules are a short-circuit, a strict A->B; they move cognitive load off themselves and onto the decision points (or conversations) around them, because they present fixed points to let people think about whether to use those hard rules or not. In effect, hard rules will be located right next to (or may be within) whatever your system is "actually about" but themselves will not be it.
There's also the whole issue that you can have 6 people at the same table all playing different games - you could have one player trying to keep their team fiscally solvent, another trying to finish quests, a third playing a dating simulator, the next trying to tame every monster, etc. But a ruleset (and the system that it "wants" to be) still has qualities of its own; the ultra-subjective framework doesn't seem to be giving me any interesting tools to work with.
Perhaps it can be examined by what the players are thinking about between sessions or how they'd summarise the last session they were in?
Within that lens, PF1 is actually about character-building and showing off what it can do...
I'm familiar with the thought exercise, and I've never found it terribly interesting because it's an obvious rhetorical sleight of hand. Neither Dragons & Damsels nor Gunfuckers are "about" convincing dragons to free princesses in any meaningful way. The former is so uninterested in convincing dragons to free princesses that it abstracts it all the way down to a single essentially non-interactive roll of the dice, while the latter simply has no opinion on the matter. There's nothing about Gunfuckers in particular that produced the described outcome; any premise or framing device which took the possibility of fighting the dragon off the table would have sufficed, and claiming otherwise is, at best, giving an essentially unrelated text credit for your GM's labour. It's falling prey to the same mentality that insists that Dungeons & Dragons is "about" all sorts of things on which its text is silent because you saw a podcast where the GM made something up.
(In fact, I'd go so far as to say that a hypothetical tabletop RPG which consists of absurdly hyper-lethal combat rules and nothing else is an objectively badly designed game, because the only thing its text has opinions on is what the game isn't about. I can get experiences of play that aren't about things anywhere!)
despite everything the discover feed bsky libs are really, really funny sometimes
I think it's kind of a shame that asoiaf is seen as such a realistic depiction of the middle ages when it completely omits how religion dominated absolutely all aspects of medieval people's life and thought and worldview
see, I don't think it's like... obligated to depict that, as a character drama. it's a shame that people hold it to standards of realism (whether or not they believe it meets them as a series that is preoccupied with creating a believable world), but I don't think it was striving to, for example, provide even a fictionalised teaching example of how people in the late middle ages and early modern period actually saw the world
to draw the comparison, it's a fair knock against tolkien's work that he was racist and couldn't ever satisfactorily square this with the contradiction of his sincerely-held faith (being seeing to its logical conclusion) denying a fundamental evil in mortal beings. it caused him trouble and he was bothered by it, as evidenced in his later writing and repeated revisitings of his Villainous Races. it's not a knock that he didn't accurately depict plate tectonics, which he did not try to depict
This shit reads like a tumblr post
the beach that. makes you dead
You are an unreliable narrator because your coping mechanisms for your deep-seated trauma forbid you from acknowledging the reality of the situation. I am an unreliable narrator because I sincerely have no idea what the fuck is going on.
