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I haven't used Tumblr in close to a decade but I have returned now and I kinda want to use this to talk about writing and the stories I am working on (and maybe my TTRPG). I basically just need an outlet to talk about my shit because no one in my life is invested enough

#writing #fantasy #ttrpg #sci-fi

pearwaldorf

Throughout her translation of the “Odyssey,” Wilson has made small but, it turns out, radical changes to the way many key scenes of the epic are presented — “radical” in that, in 400 years of versions of the poem, no translator has made the kinds of alterations Wilson has, changes that go to truing a text that, as she says, has through translation accumulated distortions that affect the way even scholars who read Greek discuss the original. These changes seem, at each turn, to ask us to appreciate the gravity of the events that are unfolding, the human cost of differences of mind.

The first of these changes is in the very first line. You might be inclined to suppose that, over the course of nearly half a millennium, we must have reached a consensus on the English equivalent for an old Greek word, polytropos. But to consult Wilson’s 60 some predecessors, living and dead, is to find that consensus has been hard to come by…

Of the 60 or so answers to the polytropos question to date, the 36 given above [which I cut because there were a lot] couldn’t be less uniform (the two dozen I omit repeat, with minor variations, earlier solutions); what unites them is that their translators largely ignore the ambiguity built into the word they’re translating. Most opt for straightforward assertions of Odysseus’s nature, descriptions running from the positive (crafty, sagacious, versatile) to the negative (shifty, restless, cunning). Only Norgate (“of many a turn”) and Cook (“of many turns”) preserve the Greek roots as Wilson describes them — poly(“many”), tropos (“turn”) — answers that, if you produced them as a student of classics, much of whose education is spent translating Greek and Latin and being marked correct or incorrect based on your knowledge of the dictionary definitions, would earn you an A. But to the modern English reader who does not know Greek, does “a man of many turns” suggest the doubleness of the original word — a man who is either supremely in control of his life or who has lost control of it? Of the existing translations, it seems to me that none get across to a reader without Greek the open question that, in fact, is the opening question of the “Odyssey,” one embedded in the fifth word in its first line: What sort of man is Odysseus?

“I wanted there to be a sense,” Wilson told me, that “maybe there is something wrong with this guy. You want to have a sense of anxiety about this character, and that there are going to be layers we see unfolded. We don’t quite know what the layers are yet. So I wanted the reader to be told: be on the lookout for a text that’s not going to be interpretively straightforward.”

Here is how Wilson’s “Odyssey” begins. Her fifth word is also her solution to the Greek poem’s fifth word — to polytropos:

Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy, and where he went, and who he met, the pain he suffered in the storms at sea, and how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools, they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old story for our modern times. Find the beginning.

When I first read these lines early this summer in The Paris Review, which published an excerpt, I was floored. I’d never read an “Odyssey” that sounded like this. It had such directness, the lines feeling not as if they were being fed into iambic pentameter because of some strategic decision but because the meter was a natural mode for its speaker. The subtle sewing through of the fittingly wavelike W-words in the first half (“wandered … wrecked … where … worked”) and the stormy S-words that knit together the second half, marrying the waves to the storm in which this man will suffer, made the terse injunctions to the muse that frame this prologue to the poem (“Tell me about …” and “Find the beginning”) seem as if they might actually answer the puzzle posed by Homer’s polytropos and Odysseus’s complicated nature.

Complicated: the brilliance of Wilson’s choice is, in part, its seeming straightforwardness. But no less than that of polytropos, the etymology of “complicated” is revealing. From the Latin verb complicare, it means “to fold together.” No, we don’t think of that root when we call someone complicated, but it’s what we mean: that they’re compound, several things folded into one, difficult to unravel, pull apart, understand.

“It feels,” I told Wilson, “with your choice of ‘complicated,’ that you planted a flag.”

“It is a flag,” she said.

“It says, ‘Guess what?’ — ”

“ ‘ — this is different.’ ”

The First Woman to Translate the Odyssey Into English, Wyatt Mason

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".

churchyardgrim

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.

prokopetz

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.)

jewishtransdyke

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)?

prokopetz

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!

rollforanalysis-blog

I'm sorry, but this is the most faux-intellectual sounding nothing answer of a post I've read in a long time. The original asker has laid out a question, using commonly established TTRPG shorthand to refer to the social pillar of games. This is a major aspect of some games and a lesser aspect of other games (as pointed out, PBTA games tend to at least pay lip service to the idea of putting the social pillar at the forefront, while D&D almost entirely handwaves it). The original asker wanted to know if it was even possible to make a game that puts the social pillar at the forefront in the way that D&D, Pathfinder or Lancer put combat at the forefront.

To actually attempt to answer Asker's question, I unfortunately think it's difficult to mechanise that aspect in the same way. PBTA games are the closest I've found (specifically the main one I've played is World Wide Wrestling) and Daggerheart does it's best to balance the social and the combat. The issue with mechanising something like a conversation is that there will always be some amount of rule checking. No human can effectively memorise every rule, even for just one character, and we are used to conversations flowing naturally which can't happen if you are checking rules. It's an aspect of gaming that many have tried to prioritise, and unfortunately very few have completely succeeded at. As mentioned though, I would look into more PBTA games, like Monsterhearts, Thirsty Sword Lesbians, or World Wide Wrestling as they handle the "roleplay" aspect of the hobby better than most

beardedmrbean

captain-price-returns

its truly unfortunate but the 4chan “>be me” format is the greatest advancement in comedic storytelling since the invention of the slide show

godlessondheimite

In 2026, the chicest thing a gay actor can do is never explicitly come out as gay but also make it abundantly clear that he is. Coming out is too modern. Staying closeted is too old fashioned. But this method merges contemporary freedom with Old Hollywood glamour and allure, and it weeds out the dumbest people who truly don’t get it. I call it the Pascal Method.

nobodys-odyssey

Taylor Swift does this

godlessondheimite

no she doesn’t

nobodys-odyssey

You clearly don't go here or to queer history and signaling, or both, enough to have this conversation and I'm not going to explain it to you. You could have asked questions, you could have done even a modicum of research. You didn't and you made yourself look ignorant. Goodbye.

dancinbutterfly

#I'm fucking crying#this is an instant classic#this is the next meme#i can't believe I'm here to see a baby copypasta nary two hours old#I can't#lol#i laughed way too hard#iconic

angelsaxis

i went to queer history and signaling and i didnt see taylor swift

herecomesthementalmeltdown

life goals

boyblogdog

happy pride month to those in the closet. to those who went back into the closet. to those who have unsupportive families, friends and relationships. those who were bullied and harassed because of their identity. those who were killed because of who they truly were and loved.

you are loved and appreciated.

latenights

Choose people that choose you. The end.

zombblehh

Shout out to the autistic who’s abilities have regressed as they’ve gotten older.

“You didn’t used to be like this when you were a kid.” I know please don’t remind me

theconcealedweapon

"This never bothered you when you were a kid."

Yes it did. I just let it slide because I was taught that I'm "too sensitive" anytime something bothered me. But now I'm finally standing up for myself.

"You never struggled with this when you were a kid."

Yes I did. I just burned myself out in order to do it so I wouldn't be punished. But now I'm accepting myself enough to not force myself to do what I was never meant to do.

countessravengrey

"You didn't have these problems when you were younger."

Yes, I did. I just spent my child/teen years with structured institutions like school while not having to worry about whether I had a roof over my head or food to eat and spent my early adult years using up every bit of adrenaline I will ever have to ignore the fact that I've been chronically burnt out my whole life.

jvlianbashir

my friend's discord server has a "proof of touch grass" channel where they post pics of them doing regular activities outdoors/in public. i think many online spaces could benefit from such a thing

weaselle

when i was super depressed - like struggling to eat anything barely able to get out of bed to pee depressed - my good friend asked me every day to send her a picture of me holding a leaf and a picture of a meal i was eating and it helped me significantly

(also, she was never judgey - if my meal was a single potato chip she would simply say good job eating a potato chip today <3 )

which is to say, i agree proof of touch grass is a good idea for online spaces

yadelah

This kinda required my brain a bit

beholdingslut

in absolute tears about the pride module at my work

dikdikpronouncedxylophone

bigfoots-biggest-fan

HOLY SHIT GUYS, I WAS INSPIRED BY THIS POST TO TRY MAKE THE SONG AND YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE THE SCREAM I SCRUMPT WHEN I DRAGGED THE TRAINING AUDIO OVER THE BACKING TRACK AND IT LINED UP PERFECTLY