Mike Driver
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Today's Document
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@sparksbet
when people defend the “Cis white guy is default” thing like “He’s meant to be an everyman we can all relate to and project on!” kindly remind them the largest ethnic group in the WORLD is Han Chinese and the highest gender percentage fluctuates so if you want an ACTUAL “default” you want a 40 year old chinese person whose gender changes from year to year.
#give us the middle-aged gender fluid Chinese protagonist that we can all relate to and project on (via @mr-and-mr-pavus)
i like who's lila because the main mechanic of changing your facial expression is explained by a main character possessing some kid's body and she's also not a human and doesn't understand emotions
but also the kid's autistic so you have to change his facial expressions too when you play as him
I think an important part of the "D&D is easy to learn" argument is that a lot of those people don't actually know how to play D&D. They know they need to roll a d20 and add some numbers and sometimes they need to roll another type of die for damage. A part of it is the culture of basically fucking around and letting the GM sort it out. Players don't actually feel the need to learn the rules.
Now I don't think the above actually counts as knowing the rules. D&D is a relatively crunchy game that actually rewards system mastery and actually learning how to play D&D well, as in to make mechanically informed tactical decisions and utilizing the mechanics to your advantage, is actually a skill that needs to be learned and cultivated. None of that is to say that you need to be a perfectly tuned CharOp machine to know how to play D&D. But to actually start to make the sorts of decisions D&D as a game rewards you kind of need to know the rules.
And like, a lot of people don't seem to know the rules. They know how to play D&D in the most abstract sense of knowing that they need to say things and sometimes the person scowling at them from behind the screen will ask them to roll a die. But that's hardly engaging with the mechanics of the game, like the actual game part.
And to paraphrase @prokopetz this also contributes to the impression that other games are hard to learn: because a lot of other games don't have the same culture of play of D&D so like instead of letting new players coast by with a shallow understanding of the rules and letting the GM do all the work, they ask players to start making mechanically informed decisions right away. Sure, it can suck for onboarding, but learning from your mistakes can often be a great way to learn.
I think this also hurts group dynamics as well.
When you have people that have actually done some reading on the rules vs. people that just coast and foist the majority of the game onto the GM, it makes it appear like the more knowledgeable players are sweaty power-gamers or rules-laywers.
Best example I've got with asking players to make informed decisions was when I ran the Wilderfeast Quick Start. The GM has the info about what ingredients can be gathered in any of the regions, but the party then has to cook it. They know what the ingredient does and just have to make the decision on how they want to combine their ingredients as a party.
#i just wanna play a silly game#i feel like. gatekept. while reading this#i don’t have the drive to read a several hundred pg game manual i just wanna play a game w my friends#like. it’s a game. play it how u want#jeeze
My point is not to say that people who don't want to learn the rules shouldn't play, only that people who don't actually know the rules aren't necessarily engaging with the game to its fullest, especially in the case of a relatively rules-heavy game like D&D, and that as the previous poster mentioned it can actually result in a bad rules dynamic where the DM needs to do more work due to player unwillingness to learn the rules as well as casting players who actually know the rules and can engage with them in unfavorable light. All of these are negative elements of the culture of play surrounding.
Like, there isn't anything meaningfully gatekeepy about saying "players who don't know the rules of the game aren't as good at playing the game as the people who know the rules of the game." Because playing games is a skill that can be cultivated and knowledge of the rules is an important part of that skill.
And respectfully, if the idea of learning the rules of D&D seems like an insurmountable task, you don't have to learn them, but you might actually gain something out of actually making an effort because it can make engaging with the game more rewarding for you. Or if the idea of learning the rules of a game that has hundreds of pages is an insurmountable obstacle, there are lots of games with much more modest page counts! D&D is actually relatively heavy as far as RPGs go but it's not the only RPG, and you can get rewarding mechanical engagement combined with cool stories for a much smaller time investment.
I actually want to dial in on the phrasing here, which seems - insidious isn't quite the right word - but really weasely to me. There's this reflexive attempt to position the writer as the victim, from the way things are phrased to the actual sentiment. "I feel gatekept" (note that its not "I have been gatekept") is a pretty transparent attempt to claim victimhood, and gain the reader's sympathies. Likewise "I just wanna" and such. But then you have the sentiment of "I just want to play a silly game" and this carries this, like, baggage that game design is *not worth* taking seriously. Same with 'play it how u want', it's working to undermine the idea that you could *care* about this stuff, and it positions taking the artform seriously as an act of aggression against the poor victim who just wants to *not think about things.* Which is to say its classic anti-intillectualism. "It's just a [song/tv show/book/game] don't take it seriously" is like classic anti-intellectualism, and generally comes from a fairly regressive infantalised place.
Which is a long way of saying fuck this person and fuck their slimy lowest-common-denominator bullshit.
D&D is easy to learn because people expect the GM to know all the rules. They don't need to learn anything, just let one person be the sacrificial scapegoat who heads into the DMG and figures out how fall damage works and whether encumbrance would be annoying.
They can set up the scenarios and build the maps and run the world. They already know the rest of the rules, so why not? They also know the stats for all the NPCs too, so might as well let them play everyone else
It's kinda their world and their game, too. So they can handle scheduling. My schedule is crazy, but they can figure it out.
What do you mean "learn a new game?" I don't have the time to learn a new game. I'm busy and D&D is so easy. We can play it how we want to.
I really don't have patience to the whole way of thinking the whole argument is based on. I'm just going to leave here this video by Matt Colville about the book Ellusive Shift
The gits of it is - no one EVER knew how to play this fucking game, people had arguments before the official first edition, the white booklets era. Most people played based on their own interpretation, then arguet about it in zines. All the crunch in the AD&D onward was Gary Gygax's attempt to make the rule for everything because he grew greedy and wished to kill the competition that built careers on explaining his crappy rules better than he did (also, he made AD&D to screw Dave Arneson of his due money).
In any other context I would agree with the proposed argument, but in D&D calling in question anyone's merit as conversation participant because they didn't memorize the useless numbers for useless rule that is only in this game to appease people waxing nostalgic over Gary's horrible, spite and greed-fueled design, is not only anti-intelelctual, it is openly spitting i nthe face of the history of the hobby to declare yourself as only one who knows better. Fuck that.
LBB D&D is only like that because it isn't a complete game: it assumes you already have and know Chainmail and Outdoor Survival at a bare minimum. Spiders LBB is an statistical outlier adn should not have been counted.
The first complete game - the Greyhawk supplement - is entirely straightforward and easy to pick up, and significantly simpler than modern D&D.
None of the early editions of D&D are hard to learn or obscure like you seem to think, so I assume you either have pudding for brains or are going entirely on hearsay rather than direct experience.
it is also fucking ridiculous for your argument to be "expecting people to read the source material is anti-intellectual".
Yeah, that response is a mess. Like, the initial thesis of this post was "people don't engage meaningfully with the rules of D&D and thus fail to cultivate important player skills," and people have since elaborated on how this is an issue with D&D's culture of play, and even articulated that framing this conversation as "gatekeeping" not only lets that culture fester but it's also extremely anti-intellectual. To try and frame the conversation that says "engaging with game texts is good and not bad actually" as anti-intellectual is such a clumsy rhetorical trick it's baffling.
Magic the Gathering is a game whose comprehensive rulebook is far, far, faaaaaaarrrrrrr bigger and more complex than the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Player's Handbook.
I'd wager nobody in the entire world has ever read the full comprehensive rules of MtG as they exist today.
And nobody expects you to! If you go to a Friday Night Magic with a random deck you bought in a toy store, no idea what the rules are like, I'm sure you'll find people willing to teach you, even explain how to properly play your deck in particular.
If, however, you keep coming to FNM for weeks, if not months, and you keep asking basic questions, like what "Flying" means, or what a "+1/+1 counter" does, or how any of the cards in the deck you've been playing for months does, if you call someone who tells you you can't block with that creature because it's already tapped that they're a "rules lawyer" who's "gatekeeping your fun", if it becomes apparent that you're not making any effort to actually learn the rules of the game... nobody will want to play with you anymore. You'll be labeled annoying at best, an asshole at worst.
And that's the case in any dedicated gaming space. As an avid board gamer, there's nothing more infuriating to me than having to re-explain basic rules because someone doesn't listen, or explaining what certain cards/characters/units/items/whatever do because someone is too lazy to simply read.
And yet, somehow, in D&D, behavior like this is apparently not just accepted, but expected, nay, encouraged(!) by the player base!
And people wonder why we make fun of D&D players.
It's also deeply disingenuous to present the argument of "not having read the rules and foisting it onto other people to guide you through it" as equivical to "no one knew how to play it, they were arguing about it in zines" as the same thing. There is a vast, vast difference between the way that the current D&D culture of play articulates its relationship with the text, which is to contemptuously dismiss it without often ever even attempting to read let alone understand its contents, and arguing over unclear rulings in order to inform the manner in which a game is run. And even by the argument presented, and it is a fair and true argument, that the treatment implied with regards to Gygax's own attempts to own the medium are in fact identical to WotC's and the same arguments with regards to *playing literally anything else in order to get out of the walled garden* still stand as well. Games, especially complex ones, always have ambiguities. Even chess spent centuries getting what amount to bug fixes rather than springing free formed from some genius premodern game designer's head. Arguing over game text, game rules, how they function, how to interpret them is a long and storied history of literally all games. But it has a particularly unique texture amongst the D&D culture of play in particular because it exists not to illuminate the rules and understanding of the game so play is clear and focused but rather exists primarily to avoid both learning and playing the game because they desperately wish to be playing a different game which does not exist and so must be made by someone at the table in order to facilitate it.
It is, rather than a series of discussions and ongoing conversations about a text and its implications and what it does, a massive divide between people who are attempting to have the latter and a second group who look at the text as a suggestion and are, in effect, expecting a sort of Calvinball where the ball is a d20 and it is a social faux pas to have done anything other than swear on the book unless you're the ref.
Even then if we are to talk about those rules as merely the result of waxing nostalgic over a bygone era, then again and again comes up the question of "Why are you playing *this* game then?"
The argument that ttrpgs have somehow evolved beyond the text never has meat. The idea that it's fine to use it and change it as you please Because Capitalism never involves ceasing to give money or homage to these people and corporations who, out of greed and a desire for control of the medium. Arguments over the meaning of the text are equated to arguments *about not caring about the text at all*. And any questions about why an inordinate amount of effort is put into continuining to interact with it with regards to any and all of these points are met with accusations of gatekeeping and being the fun police. When discussing an activity which, ostensibly, involves a large series of rules being expected to at least *attempt* to know them is a very basic expectation. And if anyone is spitting in the history of the hobby, it is coming to the defense of the continued legacy of a game that exists solely to deprive the rest of the medium of any amount of diversity and which does this by reproducing purposeful ignorance so that no understanding of the game or even of the medium around them in order to sell, as Gygax did less considerably and with far less success than WotC continues to do now, more books to marks.
Babe, you okay? you reblogged “and we were nice to each other” like 12 times again
this is what job hunting feels like
there’s just something about the word cock that makes me think of penis
STOP!!!!
this is acgually a symptom of ADHD
some pages from my 2024 zine 'neurodivergent pop-ups'
turned pangur into geothermal energy btw
oh okay
this must be what people in china and new zealand feel like looking at american news. solved the problem here but totally helpless to stop it elsewhere
Human Pet Guy does not only believe that wood was a material completely unknown to the Romans, he also believes that every single Roman lived in varying levels of mini-Colosseums.
...I. I. I cannot...
...what does he think the Colosseum is????
@madgastronomer, obviously, that’s where Romulus lived. He was very large, which is why he needed the largest Colosseum to live in. Obviously.
Western cultures are absolutely obsessed with the idea of the "necessary evil" which is why a lot of rhetoric in politics operates on the idea "it's morally abhorrent, but it's The Only Way."
That's why it's important to emphasize when a given policy does not fucking work to achieve the intended outcome and why diverting attention back to the moral abhorrence is rhetorically weak.
Like why are you arguing the badness of the thing against people who are fully sipping the "but it's The Only Way" kool-aid when you can instead note that it literally isn't the only way, and in fact isn't a way at all?
stockholm syndrome is so funny to me. 'oh you're critical of how incompetently the police handle hostage situations? you think they're being reckless? you must have Stupid Moron Loves Criminals disease'
authority only has one way of handling dissent and it's 'if you are critical of us then you must be brainwashed' and it's wild to me that the term is so prominent in casual conversation
people love to point to Patty Hearst as the posterchild for stockholm syndrome as if she wasn't the victim of intense abuse and torture. as if that didn't heavily influence what she did to survive the situation she was put in. like 'nah it was brainwashing actually. brainwashing is real and it's when women are tricked into denouncing authority and capital, haven't you heard?'
there is something meaningful to be taken from this kind of pop psychology when you're living in a political climate where donald trump will say something like 'laziness is a trait in blacks' and if you say 'hey man the president of the united states said this thing. it's in print. he published it' you have sycophants claiming you have 'trump derangement syndrome'
'soy is poisoning men and making them leftist'
'women are too emotional/hysterical to be taken seriously as rational actors. it's science'
this trick has been around awhile. pathologizing dissent by any other name
Grace realizing he defaulted to he/him for an alien from another planet:
so many misguided metaphors around violence and desire. if the open maw of a panting beast fills you with the want to be devoured, that does not make you prey. while the rabbit trembles in fear, its deepest desire is to run. evolution demands it. in fact, the desire to be eaten does not make you any small animal at all.
it makes you a fruit.
Happy Anniversary. This is the original post. On this day in 2011 I was doing a charity drive for the natural disasters in Tōhoku and drew this. A few hours later I turned it into a gif and posted it here.
Here’s the original doodle before I drew it into a GIF
Happy 14th birthday Nyan Cat! The original post originated here on Tumblr
A lot has changed these past 15 years but it’s delightful to see this little cat continuing to zip past every corner of the internet. Happy 15th birthday to Nyan Cat!
Thank you to everybody who has kept it going all this time. Drew a special cake version today to celebrate 🎂✨
White boy ALARMS Chinese restaurant staff by bursting into PERFECT Tears instead of ordering
me core
An abandoned theater in Rochester, New York. Formerly a pornographic theater, then just a facade after the Walgreens next door gutted it to use as a warehouse. The Walgreens with it's shampoo and baby formula and half of the store locked in cages; the contradictions stare into you. You go because it is the nearest pharmacy, close in walking distance for you and your disabled loved ones.
The Walgreens shuts down and it too, is now just a vacant facade, next to a vacant facade. You stare into the large windows meant to advertise it's contents, now only showcasing absence. A wide open space with torn up floors. You think about how perfect the location could be for low income housing, for squatting, for anything other than standing as a constant reminder of the city's failures to her people. The parking lot is empty, save for the occasional cop car, to ensure no one uses the lot or the building for anything at all. The cop ensures the space will stay as useless as himself.
They add letters to the theater's marquee; a reminder and encouragement of surveillance. "If you see something, say something. In progress call 911, over and done call 311." They board up the doors, ensuring that the space will stay in it's intended form: empty, useless, an eyesore that reminds everyone of their place. The freshly boarded up door has been emblazoned with a message from those who lack.
"A man would shelter, if he could / in the nook behind this new plywood / the building, abandoned / the man is too / how I wish you'd imagine / that it were you."
