thy dungeon gal (non US citizen mode)

New post, gonna use this to document my journey as a trans woman

Going to the store

persbaderse

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.

a-wa-c

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.

filipfatalattractionrblog

#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.

cavegirlpoems

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.

theinstagrahame

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.

cavegirlpoems

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.

valtharr

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.

simpleimple

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.

lovelysmell

how it feels to be anything at all

Why did you (an indie rpg) reblog an image of a catgirl undoing her bra ?

Eureka (an indie rpg) has catgirls with big boobs (usually wear bras).

A comical expansion for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.

Dire Straights

I really really really really didn’t want to go back to doing this as regularly, but A.N.I.M. really needs money. The past few months for us have been pretty bad, and I’ve been making less than minimum wage with my cut of the profits for a while.

We make sure not to paywall the majority of our project so as not to bar them from people who can’t afford them, but that means we’re reliant on the good will of those who can afford them to choose to pay.

If you like what we do, want us to keep doing it, an want to keep a disabled game designer who can’t do other work able to pay their medical and food bills, please consider paying for one of our games on itchio, and/or subscribing to our patreon for more regularly updated versions of all our projects.

Patreon is empowering a new generation of creators. Support and engage with artists and creators as they live out their passions!

If you can’t do that, rating them 5-stars on itchio, downloading them, and playing them/talking about them/sharing them is a huge help too. Like, it really can’t be overstated how reliant we are on word-of-mouth.

I am going to have to reinstate the Income Goals to make sure we make an income of at least $2,000 every month across both itchio and patreon, gradually increasing that goal probably until we are making at least $3,000 every month.

I am personally biased in favor of A.N.I.M. on account of liking their games, including Eureka, Silk and Dagger, and Death Bed, but their RPG work is also the primary source of income for one of them and they have bills to pay.

Staying at my gorgon friend’s place and she is walking around the house completely bare-eye naked (full length ruffled skirt that matches her scales, modest pastel blouse, no fucking eyewear)

She ate a guy

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.

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.

smilepre

I don’t know what’s more detrimental to the health of TTRPGs as a medium, D&D5e players who think that TTRPGs are “collaborative storytelling” and that D&D5e does this great if you just ignore all the rules that make it not do that, or non-D&D players who realize that no edition of D&D5e is good for “collaborative storytelling” but still think that the primary purpose of all TTRPGs is to be “collaborative storytelling” and that not being good for “collaborative storytelling” a satisfying narrative is what makes D&D bad. D&D5e is bad for other reasons but you’re complaining that a cheap toothbrush doesn’t keep you warm at night.

An expectation is being placed on all pieces in this artform to do something that the majority of them were never meant to do in the first place.

ace-disgrace-on-the-case

Ok. Genuinely, though. What would you say the purpose of D&D5e is? What are the majority of TTRPGs made for?

Because like, a dungeon crawl is a story. So is a complex political negotiation. So is a heist. So is playing out a battle tactically. All of these things are stories, and insofar as each player contributes the actions of their characters and (in a good group) an equal stake in the enjoyment of everyone in the group, it is collaborative.

I don’t see how it isn’t for “collaborative storytelling”, and I don’t even play D&D5e. The relationship between the GM and the players isn’t adversarial. All of them are players trying to have fun, and crucially in a healthy group that doesn’t come at the cost of someone else’s fun.

Collaboratively telling a story, in some form playing make believe with rules to simulate and constrain the ways we are playing, that’s. Just what a TTRPG is. Like. Categorically.

First of all thanks for the good faith response.

The thing is you’re pretty much right, but I think it would be more accurate to say all of those things are collaborative, and they produce stories, which I’ll explain in a minute. This is a case of the two of us agreeing about 90% but defining terms differently and in different context. What you’re saying is true, but isn’t what most people mean when they say “TTRPGs are collaborative storytelling.”

The issue is that when people begin to define all TTRPGs as the buzzword “collaborate storytelling,” particularly coming into the hobby from watching big budget “actual play” podcasts that are more invested in producing an entertaining story for an audience than playing the game by its rules, they begin to consider the purpose of TTRPGs to be the telling of a conventionally satisfying narrative story by the standards of a book or movie, rather than the playing of a game which produces (as a byproduct) a series of actions and events which can be strung together and told as a story ad-hoc. Such a story may or may not fit marks of “good storytelling” by the standards of other mediums such as books or movies by having things like “a good plot” or “character arcs.”

By only valuing the stories produced, and by grading those stories by the storytelling standards of a different medium, you get to a mindset where a dungeon crawl is not “a good story,” nor is playing out a fight tactically, because those things, by the rules of most TTRPGs that involve them, do not produce conventionally satisfying narratives and character arcs, and often actively resist them. If you think that the only point of a TTRPG is to “collaboratively tell a good story,” then TTRPGs where characters can just make a mistake and die randomly and unceremoniously to a trap or goblin before they finish the plot or their character arc are therefore fundamentally broken and bad TTRPGs. This leads to the player base writing off like 80% of TTRPGs as complete failures, and either never touching them, or trying to “fix” them by making the GM responsible for overriding the rules every time something is about to happen that wouldn’t fit the mold of a good story by the standard of a novel or movie. I won’t get too into it here because I’ve made a million posts about it but putting this responsibility on a GM burns them out. At best, assuming the GM doesn’t burn out from this misplaced responsibility, it results in a group completely missing out on the kind of fun experiences they could be having by going with the game instead of against it. They never experience a TTRPG, they experience an improv storytelling session while the TTRPG itself constantly gets in the way like a housecat trying to climb on the table at supper time. They experience “the rules getting in the way of the story,” because the story they came for is not one the rules were ever meant to produce.

The kind of events/situations-that-become-stories produced by TTRPGs that have any D&D DNA in them(which is the majority of TTRPGs, even if the designers don’t realize it) is kinda similar to the kind of events/situations-that-become-stories in a match of Team Fortress 2, even if they do not necessarily involve violence (though of course most D&D DNA games do involve violence).

Here’s a short TF2 clip where I sneak behind a Sniper as Spy and kill him, then get scared by a ghost which renders me helpless to another Sniper who comes around the corner to kill me, but he also gets scared by the same ghost just in time for me to come out of the scared stun and kill him.

Here’s a TF2 clip where I’m playing Medic and me and a bunch of other Medics are healing one Heavy, but then he and one of the Medics get killed by a Spy right when we run into the enemy. Through a little luck and seizing the initiative in the fight though, I, as Medic with only a crappy melee weapon, overcome the odds to kill all three enemies.

Here’s a short TF2 clip why I’m playing as Spy and sneak behind a Sniper to backstab him, but he keeps moving even though he doesn’t know I’m there so I keep comedicly missing.

Here’s a short TF2 clip where I join a match to play Spy and turn invisible to sneak behind the enemy team only to get immediately killed in one hit by an enemy rocket that hit me completely by accident.

All of these are fun little stories, but they don’t have a plot or character arcs or anything like that, and all the other events of the matches they took place in, while very fun in the moment, aren’t really anything worth telling a story about after the fact, so I didn’t save the footage.

This is the kind of story that most TTRPGs produce. Here’s a similar one that’s actually from a TTRPG, where the party had to somehow get a dog down a sheer cliff at the top of a mountain.

(And TF2 players are collaborating, even if they’re on different teams. Cooperating or competing, they’ve all agreed to participate in a game where the rules of TF2 apply.)

This kind of TTRPG also can natively produce plots and character arcs and stuff that are very satisfying in the same way a well-written book or movie would be, I can think of several that happened over the course of AD&D and Eureka adventures, but this isn’t the norm nor the point. It’s a rare occurrence and not something they should be expected to do because it isn’t what they’re built for. If I logged on to TF2 with the expectation that I would experience the plot and character arcs of an action war movie on Upward, or even for the sole purpose of getting those clips to show my friends, I would come away very disappointed from most matches and probably tell you that TF2 is a bad game. This is the situation with TTRPGs and the phrase “collaborative storytelling.”

glypt0don

So you are saying, in order to get the best experience, we should view TTRPGs as mechanics-driven games. Even though most adventures are built up the same way a story would.

Yes, TTRPGs are mechanics-driven games, even the ones where the mechanics are actually intended and properly geared towards producing a conventionally satisfying narrative. But most TTRPGs which take after D&D in any capacity at all do not have mechanics geared towards conventional storytelling.

The reason "most adventures are built up the same way a story would" is because of the rise of the treating TTRPGs as "collaborative storytelling" foremost instead of being games which may produce a story has increasingly encouraged a playerbase who does what I described above, and that playerbase is making the adventures that are plots rather than situations, and having the "linear story with a plot" style of adventure marketed to them by WotC, whose marketing pervades every inch of the space even outside of D&D itself. When you play the kind of adventure that a particular game's rules are in sync with, it will click and you will have a fun time going with the flow of the rules. In D&D's case, its -and all descendants of it - rules are most geared towards "sandbox" adventure modules* with preset environments and situations not plots.

"The PCs will defeat the evil wizard by going to the six temples and having specific interactions with NPCs at certain times and places in a certain order and develop particular planned relationships with them" is a plot. "The PCs are in the town of Bumbleshire. There are two abandoned castles to the north and south, and some NPCs who can give XYZ information are located here, here, and here. The layout of each castle is this and this and the traps and monsters can be found in these rooms" is a situation.

*and I always have to clarify, an "adventure module" does not necessarily mean "linear scripted plot," WotC has just been putting out linear scripted plot adventure modules for 20 years because they want to keep tricking the "collaborative storytelling" people into playing their game even though it does nothing that they desire, which has unfortunately tanked the reputation of "adventure modules" because these kind of adventure modules just do not work with D&D.

I have a couple of posts where I explain these concepts further.

💬 7 🔁 241 ❤️ 275 · Different Design Frameworks of TTRPGs · A lot of the ineffective discourse surrounding TTRPGs, and way more importantly

💬 29 🔁 2230 ❤️ 2900 · Yeah many people just plain do not know that an adventure module can be something other than a completely linear scr

and just as a disclaimer, in the second post, because I didn't expect it to go anywhere, I made the mistake of saying "TTRPGs" when I should have said specifically "traditional challenge-based TTRPGs which share any DNA* with D&D."

*sharing DNA with D&D here doesn't just mean being a fantasy dungeon crawler, as will be explained in the first post I linked. Call of Cthulhu, Cyberpunk, Delta Green, Shadowrun, Mothership, Eureka, Laner, etc. just off the top of my head all have huge amounts of D&D DNA in them even though none of them are fantasy dungeon crawlers (though Call of Cthuhlu is still pretty dungeon-crawler-y).

snommelp

My followers will probably remember me complaining about the time my character died in my most recent D&D game (which was a while ago now). The thing is, the way that my character died (getting comboed by unfortunate monster synergy) was frustrating, but not to the point that I should still be thinking about it over a year later. What actually made the character death so hard to stomach was that the DM had set my character up as the primary protagonist of the story he wanted to tell, about an ancient sorcerer king who was reborn to the opposing faction. If we were just playing D&D as a fun game that happened to generate a story, then that session would have been a story about a dragon-man who got in over his head and paid for it. But because the DM wanted the story to come first instead of the game, it meant we had a major problem and needed to figure out how to resolve it so that the story could continue.

my doctor told me i have to do PT this fucking sucks

these exercises are sooo monotonous like i keep walking down the same hallway over and over 🙄

who was that.

the fucking fetus in the sink won't accept my insurance

yossyislandd

shoots you with my cupid arrow but you lowkey die

molabuddy

its good when band names are things that are nice to think about. 'imagine dragons' well i am & its awesome. 'owl city' awww cute. 'barenaked ladies' hell yeah

kevytmaitohorsma

Reblog this photo of a käpylehmä to have a käpylehmä in your blog

It's a trick! If you reblog you get TWO käpylehmäs in your blog!

kevytmaitohorsma

They're traditional Finnish toys, little cows made out of spruce cones, on their way to see the world from one tumblr blog to another

mortalityplays

whether they're Good Media™ or whatever aside, I think mainstream liveplay ttrpg shows have been a fucking disaster for the hobby. it's hard to imagine anything that could have fucked the expectations:results differential for people more than having celebrities do college improv with dice (and an entire media production team behind them) and telling a generation of new players that's what tabletop gaming is like

mortalityplays

liveplay ttrpg shows are not 'professional gaming', that's the whole problem I'm talking about. they're entertainment products which make format, content and form choices that would be nonsensical or obstructive at an ordinary table. it's not just "oh if only 'hobbyist' gaming groups (🤮) could pay for all that kit and lighting and professional writers and voice actors".

liveplay production involves story meetings aimed at making the narrative maximally entertaining to a watching audience (not the players, who are also professionals who are there to entertain that audience!). It involves editing (trimming out downtime, uninteresting mistakes, technical issues, moments where the vibe is wrong or there's friction in the room). it involves a room full of production crew watching every move the GM and players make, sensitive to wastage of their time and effort if things don't go to plan. and not for nothing, it involves an entire team of people who need to keep game publishers happy by playing and displaying their products correctly and certainly never criticising them or openly adapting around their shortcomings for the sake of the group's enjoyment.

I've played at tables where we've been lucky enough to have fun props and miniatures and printed maps and sound systems and even a bit of lighting, and where everyone in the group was a seasoned player with writing and performance backgrounds, and the experience was still full of normal natural constructive frictions that are largely if not completely absent from entertainment liveplay shows. player disagreement is normal. stopping mid flow to argue about a rule and look it up and help each other with system technicalities is normal. the music just not working today is normal. the party choosing a direction the GM didn't prepare for and having to adjust their in-character choices a little and tolerate some hastily cobbled together fluff to meet them halfway is so normal it's a running joke. someone finding a scene a little too much and asking for a break or redirection is normal. someone saying something a little ill judged in the moment and having to walk it back with as much grace as possible is normal. storylines not going to plan and petering out without major dramatic resolution, or npcs being ignored and cast off with a shrug is normal. all this shit and more is normal because a normal table is structured around the organic decision-making of a bunch of players who are primarily in it for their own fun and sense of transport, not for an invisible imaginary fandom slash consumer market. which are all the things that make ttrpg play inherently a pretty bad vehicle for storytelling, incidentally!

someone else in the tags expressed their frustration at these shows 'professionalising' the hobby, and while I do recognise and sympathise with the feeling that these shows normalise a level of polish and commercial buy-in that's destructive to the diy culture of tabletop gaming, I still have to push back on the idea that these shows are representative of 'professionalised gaming'. they're not. they're sports anime.

White person who doesn't like most rap: I don't like most rap so when I say this is good you know it's gotta be real good

#Youtube