#table talk

[tableofleg]

I think El would've gotten into dnd if it was Dustin that showed it to her tbh

[casinokitty75]

Hey. Anyone who is perma-regressed, needs a CG 24/7, IRL, or even just most of the time, here's some positivity for you. I hope you're doing okay. Life is big and scary and you're so strong for getting through it ♡

[mantis-lizbian]

perhaps spiritually piggy-backing off of @anim-ttrpgs' post here, but i'm feeling a sort of way about the number of games i've seen in recent years that seem to just... refuse to have (or perhaps more likely, acknowledge that they have) a pre-made default setting.

now, a couple of caveats i'll open with to differentiate from the cited post: i don't think every game necessarily needs to have a defined default setting. Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, for example, makes creating and filling in the nature and specifics of the game's setting part of the character creation process, which makes sense considering the way that one of your two playbooks in that game is an established faction/settlement, and something that big and influential you kinda have to let the players have more control over the world in order to be able to flesh out as their own unique "character" if you want them to be any less restrictive than fully pre-built factions you pick between. it also helps that in making world creation part of the first session's gameplay, this becomes a fun part of the game done collaboratively.

there are also plenty of games that don't want to have a specific setting (which doesn't automatically make them universal, by the way! and well-designed games know and understand this!) like Old-School Essentials or Fabula Ultima. games like this just want to be rules engines for a collection of well-worn tropes and/or modular toolboxes that can be mixed-and-matched or reflavoured for whatever setting you and your friends are most excited to use to engage in that game's mechanics with. these games will often have supplements that introduce optional mechanics or character options that

but then we come to something like Armour Astir: Advent, a game with a lot of pretty specific assumptions about its setting, and several original terms and concepts. and yet...

The very first part, and arguably one of the most important parts of playing Armour Astir, is setting up the world in which your game will take place. Other than the existence of a few things, like Astirs and other magical devices (which you and your group are free to re fluff to suit your personal tastes, of course), this game doesn’t assume much of your setting—meaning as a group you have a lot of freedom when coming up with the setting you’d like to play in. There are a few important things to iron out, however.

like... hate to break it to you, but players always have the freedom to refluff things to suit their personal tastes. i've been playing Pathfinder for over a decade, and you know how much of that time's been spent playing in the world of Golarion the game ships with? not even half. i've reworked Lancer to take place in the setting of Heaven Will Be Mine before. i'm currently working on adapting Legend of the Five Rings to be in a Chinese xianxia setting (which it honestly feels more suited for to me, than its original fantasy Japan-inspired setting).

the players do not need your permission to adapt your game for their own setting, if they want. but especially if you clearly have such a specific idea for what the setting should look like, much like shipping your game with a sample module to essentially function as a tutorial level both for how to play the game as well as for how to prep your own adventures for it, shipping with a sample setting both helps a new group start playing your game faster since they don't have to stop to homebrew all their own lore, but also helps give a better idea of what a setting for this game is expected to look like.

it doesn't need to be exhaustively fleshed out, you don't need a three-page timeline followed by dozens of pages of minute lore details including itemization of what each city's major exports are. it doesn't even necessarily need to be something that gets its own section in your book. D&D4e actually makes for a solid case example here. officially, there wasn't even supposed to be a "default" setting in the core books, just a generic "Points of Light". and yet, we still get plenty of proper names, geographical and historical references, and blurbs about, for example, dwarven society and how paladins fit into the world, all to help new players orient themselves and provide a framework that they can fill in rather than have to create from whole cloth.

note: a lot of this also applies, i think, to some of the apparent outrage in anim-ttrpgs' original post. "shipping with a pre-written module" does not need to mean a whole 200-page Curse of Strahd. the original Eberron Campaign Setting had a less than 10-page module at the back to use to jumpstart an Eberron campaign. the WotC website back during 3e had dozens of free adventures for nearly every level range that were sometimes as short as 3 or 4 pages. granted, these are all examples of an approach to adventure design that anim-ttrpg and i both consider flawed, but it's also a much more page-hungry format than the kind of module design we would advocate for!

[corrupteddoodles]

DIGITAL VERSION HERE

CLICK to apologize! CLICK to be saved! CLICK to forgive! CLICK to forget! CLICK to be pure!

[applysome]

Miles Kane – Table Talk with Vernon Kay

for Marks and Spencer 🤍

[uselessbiscuitsoul]

feel free to add more lmao

[punkitt-is-here]

Just wanted to say that I finally cracked open Astral Guard and this one Astra face took me out

HELL YEAH I'm so glad!!! Astra's faces were my FAVORITE to do bc she can just be so absurdly silly. I was consistently laughing at myself while drawing her face sprites. JJ's writing provided me with so many opportunities to go wacky with her.

[hemochromevtm]

Now that elders can turn thinbloods full vampires (temporarily) I wonder how my ST will treat Beetlejuice's blood bond.

Technically, Maria is an elder by the book's standards. If we were playing with rules as written, poor BJ would be a full-blooded toreador at the moment.

I'll have to ask them next time we hang, because I'd rather not have Beej going full vamp... yet

But the possibility is intriguing 🤔