Over the Hill Gaming

Formally "Unfamiliar Air" and now much the same nonsense.

[zybilna]

One thing that makes me kinda sad is seeing people who feel like TTRPGs just aren't for them because they bounced off of some element that is clearly just a symptom of them trying out D&D5e. Like people who have had a hard time with learning the rules would probably do well with any system where the rule formatting and play culture around learning them aren't a mess. One friend of mine didn't like waiting a long time for turns to come up in combat, not even knowing that many games don't even use a turn-based structure.

A lot of D&D5e defenders on here like to claim that asking someone to learn a new system is "gatekeeping" somehow, but I'd argue that acting like one game is emblematic of the entire medium to the exclusion of people who don't click with that one game is way more meaningfully a form of gatekeeping, even if it's fully unintentional.

I strongly believe that not all RPGs are gonna appeal to everyone, but there is an RPG out there for everyone, and I just hope that people who haven't clicked with the most common option to be introduced to can find something that works for them.

[depsidase]

[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.

[tyrannosaurus-trainwreck]

I'm probably never going to find it again, but there was a response to one of those "artworks we think we can make" posts that was like "Okay, go for it." Like, dead serious.

Are you going to come out of it with a Klein-level work? No. Dude was bonkers skilled. But I am here to tell you that if you've ever gone to Home Depot and shuffled through paint chips and been like "God, this is such a gorgeous color, I fucking love this color" and then immediately been like "...but I can't imagine painting a wall with it." and bought a can of soul-killing eggshell off-white or what the fuck ever, you absolutely can go pick up a $10 canvas from a craftstore and a $5 sample of that color and just hang 6 square feet of it on a wall and enjoy the fuck out of it.

For real, buds. If you see an artwork and you're like "Shit, I could have made that," that is a reminder that god can't stop you and probably neither can science.

[prokopetz]

Why weren't TTRPGs popularized centuries before video games? Large scale printing for complex rulebooks needed the printing press, but even then, it wouldn't justify taking off as late as the second half of the 20th century

A lot of it boils down to dumb luck. Hobbies resembling modern tabletop RPGs have come and gone before, but none of the ones that came before Dungeons & Dragons ever managed to blow up into a broader cultural phenomenon.

For example, tabletop American baseball simulators that use rules tech very similar to that of modern indie tabletop RPGs – complete with d66 rolls and Big Stupid Tables full of increasingly improbable random events – have been around since the 1880s, and by the mid 20th Century, dedicated players were using them to simulate entire virtual leagues in a way that would be instantly recognisable to modern indie RPG fans as a form of solo journalling RPG. Robert Coover's 1968 novel, The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop., dramatises the hobby in a way that strikingly pre-figures the later Satanic Panic's fearmongering about D&D players becoming so immersed in the game that they lose touch with reality – pre-dating D&D itself by over five years.

It never went anywhere from there. Such games still exist, but the hobby remains insular to this day; it just never stumbled into the right combination of time and place to grow beyond its roots. And it's not even the first time a niche hobby had approached something like modern tabletop RPGs and just never taken that final step. We can speculate about the whys and wherefores, but ultimately, a lot of it – ironically, given the subject matter – boils down to a cosmic roll of the dice.

(One of my favourite counterfactuals is speculating what the modern tabletop roleplaying hobby would look like in a world where it kicked off half a century early by growing out of tabletop American baseball simulators in the 1920s rather than historical wargames in the 1970s. Imagine!)

[writing-prompt-s]

You have been sentenced to death in a magical court. The court allows all prisoners to pick how they die and they will carry it out immediately. You have it all figured out until the prisoner before you picks old age and is instantly transformed into a dying old man. Your turn approaches.

[dycefic]

I think I’d have minded less if I’d committed a truly heinous crime. Something that warranted death. Or even if I was the kind of person who would enjoy flinging a last defiance at my execution.

It was all just a show, anyway. They did it every year. They brought out a selection of criminals, and the Sorcerer who ruled us showed his power by bringing about their deaths by magic. Just to show, every year, what happened to anyone who crossed him.

There was a time, probably, when the people he executed really were rebels or assassins. In latter days he had to take what the dungeons offered. I was dragged up in chains between a pickpocket, sobbing in terror, and a man who’d killed another man in a brawl. There were few criminals of any note, by then. So instead of choosing the wickedest criminals, they chose based on appearance. The man who’d been in the brawl had a face like a clenched fist, and looked like a ruffian. The pickpocket, aging and with hands beginning to tremble, was a different kind of example. As was I.

“There aren’t many pretty ones, this year,” the man who chose me had said, examining me. “But this one will do. Not young, but not old, a woman, well-favoured enough for the gallows… what was her crime?”

The warder shrugged. “She tried to kill one of the sheriffs.”

The man looked down at me and I shrugged. “I hit him with a washing stick, because he tried to extort money from me, and he was a baby about it.” I refused to treat this as anything but pathetic, even after my sentencing. “I didn’t even break any bones.”

“Treason, then,” the man said, nodding. “Attacking the servants of the law. That will look well on the list. Send her.”

I had been debating ever since what to choose. Something quick? Something painless? I considered demanding that I suffer the attack I supposedly made on the sheriff, but then I realized the Sorcerer would only give me what the man had said I was going to do, and that was not a pleasant way to die. I had all but decided on something swift and relatively painless. Beheading with the sharpest of blades sounded good. It would be quick. 

Keep reading

[apricops]

that post about “you get bandits when you cut soldiers loose without pay” reminds me of the Thirty Years War, because one could say that beneath all the religious schisms and diplomatic jockeying, the heart of the thirty years war was “what happens when you have a state with just enough capacity to raise massive armies but without enough financial capacity to actually pay those armies” and the answer is that the line between professional armies and roving gangs of bandits disappears and every time you try to raise an army it just becomes another independently acting wildfire devouring the countryside. No matter how bad things get, every day I wake up and thank my lucky stars that I do not live in 17th century Europe. Or 17th century China. Or the 17th century Americas. Or basically anywhere in the 17th century.

[probabilitydirigible]

One of my favorite little anecdotes about ancient mercenaries is that it was tradition for most of history to give your mercenaries two wages- "Bread" and "Gravy." Both were set at a daily value, but where "Bread" was intended to cover regular maintenance and life stuff and therefore paid out frequently (Here's your week's meal and gear repair budget!) the "Gravy" wage was paid out exclusively at the end of the contract as one lump sum. So like, your gravy wage and bread wage might be one silver coin per day each, so you're getting a handful of coins every week to cover food, and then at the end of an 800 day campaign, you get a wheelbarrow with 800 coins.

Employers liked offering this structure because then they didn't have to like, try to guess how long the invasion of spain will take and then carry 800 coins per soldier around the battlefield where it could be captured. It also gives them the chance to budget around the assumption that they take an enemy city and *find* vast sums of treasure even if they don't have the full value at the beginning of the war.

The main flaw of this system is that it's very easy to end up in a scenario where if you have, say, 50,000 guys that have been fighting for 800 days, you now owe 40 million silver to your army, and if the budget has not worked out to a 40 million surplus, you literally can't afford to end the war, but you can probably afford to pay them for a couple more weeks. So then you have to start thinking creatively.

Anyway across all time and history a lot of generals were ultimately beaten to death by men chanting gravy.

[totallycirclek]

Trying to prove a point to my transphobic parents

Reblog if trans men are REAL, VALID AND HANDSOME MEN, NO MATTER HOW THEY CHOOSE TO PASS

Reblog if trans women are REAL, VALID, AND BEAUTIFUL WOMEN, NO MATTER HOW THEY CHOOSE TO PASS

And finally, because it's a part of my argument for this point, and also because they are,

Reblog if nonbinary and genderqueer people in general, are REAL, VALID, AND GORGEOUS PEOPLE, NO MATTER HOW THEY PASS

[markrosewater]

Could you explain why Secret Lair moved from print-to-demand to a limited-print-run model? I thought it was so that the cards could be preprinted to reduce time between ordering and shipping, but a decent number of recent Secret Lairs have had their distribution delayed due to "production issues", which implies that they're no longer being printed in advance of sale. Why are we using a worse sales model if it's not even solving the problem it was intended to solve?

I did a podcast with Lindsey Bartell, the senior director for Secret Lair where we talked about this.

We only did print to demand for the very early days of Secret Lair (like six months), and it was untenable from a business standpoint. We are now reserving printing time a year ahead of time. That’s far different than a product being delayed a month or two.

Most of the time you think of as “print to demand” actually wasn’t. We just printed way more than we needed to guarantee we had enough to mail out. And that resulted in us destroying a *lot* of product. It was also untenable from a business standpoint.

We are working to improve our ability to forecast, but the huge increase in players plus the experimental nature of Secret Lair makes it difficult. We are getting better at it, but slowly.

[rlford]

I'm reblogging this here, partly for my own reference, since everybody's up in arms about Secret Lair. Again.

[markrosewater]

I know this is out of your area and you've probably already gotten a few comments, but it does come across to me as odd that the only proposed solutions for dealing with unsold cards such as secret lair is 'store them forever' or 'destroy them'. I imagine there's a myriad of solutions with them such as distributing them to be event prizes, giving them out to local game stores, or any other number of things. It feels extreme to me to treat it like a two option scenario.

Part of the promise with Secret Lair is this is the only place you can get the cards. So, no we don’t really have other options.

[rlford]

I can't help but feel that the ship has sailed with "the only place to get Secret Lair cards is WotC" promise. Secondhand Secret Lair product isn't hard to find, usually at a hefty markup. The Goblin Storm deck is a recent example. It was sold out in under an hour, but scalpers were taking orders the same day for far more than the $150 USD WotC sold them for.

[prokopetz]

The really funny thing about folks dutifully trotting out the old "well ACTUALLY Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition commercially underperformed because it's just tabletop World of Warcraft" line every single time I discuss the economic realities of 4E's publication is the cyclical nature of those complaints.

When 4E came out in 2008, people complained it was trying to turn D&D into tabletop World of Warcraft because it has explicit class roles.

When 3E came out in 2000, people complained it was trying to turn D&D into tabletop Diablo because it has feat trees and magic item affixes.

When 1E came out in 1977, people unfavourably compared it to the then-nascent medium of computer games because the Dungeon Master's Guide contains too many tables; they probably would have called it a tabletop roguelike if not for the fact that the term "roguelike" did not yet exist, the publication of Rogue being three years in the future.

We have been doing the "[edition of D&D] in some respect vaguely resembles [computer game], and that's bad" thing for fifty goddamn years. We've been doing it since practically the very moment computer games existed for comparison to them to be made.

(For the folks about to well-actually that Rogue was technically only one year in the future on account of the fact that 1E's Dungeon Master's Guide was delayed until 1979: I see you.)

[rlford]

I formed the impression that the "too much like a video game" argument was a smokescreen. It's an attempt to reframe "I don't like this edition" into something more objective sounding. Because simply stating "this isn't to my taste" doesn't fit if one has built their identity around being rational and having a logical reason for everything they say and do.

[prokopetz]

Could you elaborate on the kind of game DnD is? Like, what is it ideally supposed to be played as?

Dungeons & Dragons is half-a-dozen different games in a trenchcoat, with relatively little continuity between editions beyond some shared terminology and the presence of a twenty-sided die, so it's tough to make sweeping statements which apply to all versions of the game.

Broadly speaking, however, Dungeons & Dragons in most of its iterations is a genre emulation piece aimed at sword and sorcery fantasy, a specific subgenre of fantasy fiction which had its heyday in American popular culture from roughly the 1930s through the 1980s (and somewhat later elsewhere); Dungeons & Dragons in particular focuses on the 1960s and 1970s strands of sword and sorcery media.

Sometimes described as the creative descendant of Robert Howard's Conan the Barbarian, sword and sorcery revolves around mercenary heroes getting into and out of trouble largely for personal gain, spending most of their time skulking about, breaking and entering, and stabbing people in the back, punctuated by elaborately staged set-piece battles which frequently end with half the party dead. Common features include asshole wizards, whimsically cursed magic items, armour which shows a lot more buttock than is strictly practical, and talkative monsters willing to engage the protagonists in long-winded debates about incredibly stupid shit. It's here that the narrative device of the dungeon crawl – often erroneously characterised as an original invention of tabletop RPGs by folks unversed in the genre – is codified in its modern form.

You don't really see a lot of sword and sorcery fantasy these days, which can be a source of confusion for newcomers to the game, though a surprising amount of modern YA media draws heavy inspiration from the genre. Cartoons like Adventure Time or She-Ra and the Princesses of Power have a lot of sword and sorcery DNA in them.

(D&D is sometimes mistaken for emulating Lord of the Rings style epic fantasy, since that's the only genre of fantasy fiction most casual readers are familiar with, but in practice high fantasy tends to clash badly with a lot of the game's baked-in assumptions.)

Concurrently, Dungeons & Dragons is a game about resource management. Most traditional tabletop RPGs are "challenge games" in the sense that they frame each scenario as a series of set-piece obstacles to be overcome; in D&D, the challenge is one of figuring out how to travel from point A to point B while expending as few resources as possible in the process. If you're coming from a video game background, it has much in common with survival horror games, albeit generally without the overriding fatalism of that genre. This resource management focus is both a legacy of D&D's origins as a fantasy roleplaying add-on for a popular wargame, and a reflection of the specific genre of fantasy it's emulating; sword and sorcery has a lot of tropes in common with survival horror if you know where to look.

(This is something a lot of contemporary groups struggle with; they either mistake the resource management elements for pointless bookkeeping and thoughtlessly discard them, or consciously decide to ignore them because it's not relevant to the kind of story they want their game to tell, then wonder why the system keeps messily falling apart on them!)

[prokopetz]

I think one of the problems with the way we talk about media in fandom is that we often say "canon" when we really mean "the text". What is and is not canon is at least partly a question of authority and merit, and will inevitably be litigated as such, but you're going to arrive at some very strange conclusions if you try to use the same tools to litigate what is and is not present in the text.

[prokopetz]

Sometimes you've gotta take a step back from questions of canonicity as such and ask more fundamental questions like "okay, that's a fascinating interpretation, but what actual words that physically appear on the page* do we have to support it?"

* or whatever the equivalent for the media at hand is

[scifiseries]

[rlford]

I'd like less dystopia in my present, please.

[madnessofmen]

game where you play as a medieval knight but it's peacetime so it's mostly about estate administration and property law

[jewishtransdyke]

I think Pendragon is a bit like this? Like, not exclusively; there are times when the PCs go on adventures or fight in wars or whatever, but iirc, most of a Pendragon PC's time is spent governing their fief, and a significant chunk of the rules are about that.

I've never actually played Pendragon, though; this is just based on vague memories of skimming the rulebook and thinking that was an interesting approach.

[rlford]

The guy you hired to provide a steady supply of wild game to your kitchen reports that somebody else is using your hunting grounds. Your neighbors to the west and south are raiding livestock and your farmers are wondering what you're going to do about it. Your neighbor to the east - the one who would make a useful ally to your ambitions - hates you for a slight your father delivered to his father over something nobody remembers anything about. You need to solve a murder mystery brewing in one of your villages by way of being judge, jury, and executioner. The guilds in the town to the north are playing hardball about letting your farmers have access to their markets. And the guy your grandfather swore an oath to is coming by with his entire court to eat all your food and drink all your wine next month. Welcome to medieval domain management!

[epidaleacalamita]

in the mission control room hearing my veteran pilot snarl "I won't go down to some nobody!" into the comms and putting my head in my hands because now that he said that he's absolutely going to die to this oddly skilled random upstart in a standard issue infantry mech

[jadeharleyinc]

OP it is absolutely vital that you open comms with your pilot and say his name. maybe mention something about the ace up his sleeve or whatever. that should buy him enough time to set his mech to self-destruct or launch his signature weapon. if he can time it right he'll be able to eject just as the explosion covers his escape.

he might survive with an evil-looking scar and a new thirst for revenge. better than nothing.

[curlicuecal]

[al5asa]

This will always be the funniest Dick and Damian dynamic as Batman and Robin:

Gordon getting a call that Robin was in a room alone with Joker and fearing for the kid's life, meanwhile Dick's there panicking for Joker because he's alone with Damian.

Meanwhile Damian is:

[rlford]

Damian's always going to be a little too feral for his peers. Being raised as an assassin since birth will do that to a guy.