Renée's Fox Den @reneesfoxden - Tumblr Blog

Live-action comedy short film about a wildlife researcher's repeated, increasingly cartoonish failed attempts to tag members of a particular rare species for study, and their burgeoning paranoia that it's the same specific bird every time. There is no explicit textual confirmation whether they're correct.

prokopetz

You can really tell which people in the notes have worked with birds.

pfdiva

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".

beardedmrbean

krystal-prisms

Fun fact, the Hibiscus Harlequin Bug (Tectocoris diophthalmus) has been described as a new species 16 separate times due to the wide colour variation among the adults and nymphs

These bugs are all the same species

beardedmrbean

silverbridge-harbor

A juvenile bug isn't called a larva until it reaches the surface. While it's still underground it's called a margma

sexhaver

i refuse to read or learn anything about Worm because im having fun trying to piece together a plot based on the disconnected posts i see on my dash about it like an illiterate medieval peasant piecing together the story of creation via stained glass windows. as far as i can tell it's Homestuck for leftists with superpowers instead of trolls

theothin

#from what I can tell their Vriska is still bug-themed

I can see how you would get that impression but she is not the vriska

#worm #parahumans #wildbow #homestuck

splendidcitrus-arts

with silksong as context, i can understand why the weavers didnt like the pale king so much

#hollow knight #hollow knight spoilers #silksong #silksong spoilers

mollybeenoel

jumping spiders and their babies

#spider #bugs

redstonedust

problem with tv shows today is i think a lot of them want to be movies. 90 minute episodes with full cgi and a plot so streamlined theres no time for filler is not a tv show to me. tv shows need a low budget so they can afford to send the characters on weird detours to flesh out the universe. its healthy. its good for the ecosystem. you need a show wiki writers and tv tropes cataloguers can sink their teeth into.

dukeofriven

Star Trek: The Next Generation has a lot of crappy episodes. The first two seasons are almost exclusively terrible episodes. In that somewhat unhinged demand that they crank out 24 episodes a season, however, there's a lot of space to just live with these characters and learn to love and care about them, even if what they're doing that week is goofy and stupid in a way that a tighter show with a more structured story would never bother to do. In fact a tighter, shorter show makes the bad episodes stand out more. There's that truly awful episode in the second season of Stranger Things that may or may not have been a backdoor pilot where Eleven's goes off, gets a fairly lousy punk outfit that's trying way too hard, and does incoherent crime with some other ex-lab babies who are crap characters. On a 24-episode-a-season show you'd barely remember it, a story cul-de-sac that tried something new, failed, we move on. But on a tightly scripted show where you've only got a handful of episodes and each one is enormously load bearing, an episode that's shit is really shit because its wasting your limited time and taking up valuable air. Not every show needs to go back to the 24-episode model — its not a model that's inherently better, and there's plenty of shows that ran multiple seasons with giant episode orders that have archive two or three times the size of modern brilliant shows and every episode is bad (I see you, Earth: Final Conflict). In killing off he form entirely, however, we've held back shows where that looser structure would have let them flourish.

that-butch-archivist

source: That's Ms. Bulldyke to You, Charlie! by Jane Caminos

shortandsadandstupid

An attempt

#ward #parahumans #wildbow

fishtherifk

ah...dungeon meshi. oh, dungeon meshi

#dungeon meshi #dungeon meshi spoilers

teaboot

My mom likes to tell me about how when I was a little kid riding public transport with her I'd always smile and giggle and chat with weird old ladies who smelled like cat pee and homeless folks and strangers dressed in bizarre outfits but any time a tidy and respectable businessman in a suit and tie waved at me I'd immediately clam up, and she takes a great deal of pride in my supposed inherentability to clock personalities but the truth is I do vaguely remember those bus rides, and it was never about the clothes or the hair or the smell, but more because everyone "strange" asked interesting questions and listened to what I had to say and seemed to think about what I said while the neat and tidy and rigid folks only ever acted like they were going through the motions, which was boring as hell and also pretty annoying

teaboot

Well-to-do finance manager with tidy shoes: "Why hello, sweetheart. Can you say 'hi'? Aren't you cute. Are you on a trip with your mom?"

4 year old me: why must we do this

Fantastic old woman in the leopard print coat: "Why yes, my tooth IS real silver! Nobody ever asks me that. Do you like cats?"

4 year old me, suddenly paying attention: Finally, A Person Of Intellect