Interesting Posts, Shitposts, and My Dogshit Opinions

[wiserodin032402]

The WiserOdin Tags Masterlist

I have decided to up the quality of my blog. Shocker.

Here’s my tag masterlist and explanation please feel free to filter them at your leisure. I will be tagging my posts as I go forward with these.

#booba - For general porn n’ stuff

#impractical gatcha clothing - for specific gatcha porn in case you don’t like that

#furry - monsterfucker and furry shit. You know the drill.

#my ramblings - This is probably going to be me screaming into the void about TTRPGs or Videogames but I might just vent a frustration or two via this.

#banal politics - for politics that I care for that you might not. Recommended filter.

#the world around you - Not quite politics, but political in nature and probably mentally distressing. Also filter if you feel it.

#interesting posts - Posts with stuff I find interesting. Please don’t filter this.

#not my memes - memes and shitposts from other people

#content aggregation - because I’m an unoriginal fucker and aggregate content I like 

#media discourse - screaming about media from myself or others, including bitching about overuse of CGI, hating the state of modern mainstream media, and shitty live action adaptations of anime (you know which one I’m talking about). Recommended filter.

#fun meta and analysis - all those cool fiction and meta posts that come from people I like

#the wiserodin masterpost of tags - so I can link back to this in case I add new tags

[nondelphic]

writing isn’t hard. i just have to extract 80,000 words from my brain using sheer psychic force

[anim-ttrpgs]

New Age people just lying about the history of everything makes it so fucking difficult to research what people actually believed in historical folklore

[wayneradiotv]

[wayneradiotv]

Breaking news

[anim-ttrpgs]

i must stress that eureka is not 700 pages long, it just has big font

[galileo156]

It's really more like 200 pages. Same with Fabula Ultima (Counted the actually needed pages to read/learn like yesterday)

So if you were intimidated; no worries. You got this <3

[bebs-art-gallery]

Albert Square, Manchester (1910) by Adolphe Valette | Contemporary Art (2015) by Emily Allchurch

[bread-making-vikings]

the top is an original, from 1910, the bottom is a new version painted in 2015

[spacedouterri]

THE BOTTOM IS A PAINTING????

[open-sketchbook]

also does a really good job reminding the view just how much air quality has improved since we stopped burning coal in every building lol

[thydungeongal]

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.

[thydungeongal]

#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.

[filipfatalattractionrblog]

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".

[thydungeongal]

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.

[keru-the-green]

Tamamo Vitch Koyanskaya - bodysuit

bodysuit design by Ebora/youngmanisdown

[literary-sparks]

“Why don’t you use ai” idk man beyond the obvious environmental and “this machine causes psychosis and encourages people to kill themselves” thing I think asking the equivalent of a solid D student who is also a pathological liar if they can answer my question/do the work for me seems pretty fucking stupid

[jburneko]

I’m not going to reblog the source because I don’t want to bring negative attention to someone but I just read that “the most important skill of a GM is pretending what happens is what you were planning all along.”

Absolutely not. This pressure to “be in control”, “‘maintain the illusion” and “be a magician” style advice is precisely why people are terrified to GM.

You have one job as a GM at the table. ONE. Play your NPCs and other situation elements with the same earnestness as the players play their PCs. That’s it.

The “plot” is what happens when your toys and their toys meet and uncertainties between them are resolved via the game at hand.

You are not responsible for anyone’s fun.

You are not responsible for anyone’s entertainment.

You are not there to stroke the players egos or service their fantasies or “story beats” or whatever self-insert wish fulfillment BS they have projected onto their characters.

Stop making GMing harder than it needs to be. Just play the damn game.

[agentnoun]

Also, purely anecdotally, my players really get a kick out of it if they can tell I didn't expect something. That's a bonus for them (and, frankly, the unexpected is a bonus for me, too).

[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.

[queerbluesky]

I had the strangest conversation ever with a deeply clever friend who is 5e-pilled to hell. I like to have people over to play new one or two shots of different rpgs in the home I share with my partner; I cook dinner and we enjoy a cool new game and tell a complete story with a beginning and an end. One of my buddies pitched a 5e two-shot to me recently, and I turned it down; "Sorry, but I'm done with that game. There are other tables to run 5e on, but my table runs everything else." The results were SO STRANGE. Demands were made that I share why I dislike it, and when I expressed problems with the system (slow-as-balls turn-based-initiative, a generic fantasyland setting that is full of lowest-common-denominator bullshit that is hard to meaningfully connect with, attrition-based resource management in a system that begs you to play it like superhero fantasy) and I got the same reply "An experienced GM just homerules that. Playing it the way it is in the book is a rookie mistake." Eventually we settled on the truth; this guy was so exhausted becoming an expert in the hideous minutiae of Dungeons and Dragons 5e that he has full-on stockholm syndrome; he will never "Move to another system" (whatever that means) because he thinks that getting into any other game would require the same effort to "master" in order to not have a dogshit time. He doesn't know that there are games where you can read the rules once and run them and have a good time. He doesn't know that game design exists. I love telling stories with my friends. I don't know what he loves.

[forgottenbones]

[mangonetics]

Daily affirmations. There is no such thing as an involuntary bodily function. I have complete and total control of my internal organs. I can stop and start my heart at will. My blood flows of my own volition.

[mangonetics]

[markovchaingang]

you guys do realise walking doesn't actually move you anywhere right? it just destroys you entirely and places a perfect copy of you right in front of where you were standing

[larkandkatydid]

It’s cool how we found the secret elixir that cures all human disease and it’s in this guy’s bitey little mouth

[larkandkatydid]

What this guy’s bitey little mouth has been recently up to:

[sauriansolutions]

This is why scientists study everything.

[mikkeneko]

Put this picture in your pocket, next time you get into an argument with someone about 'useless' scientific studies, ask them "Do you think that we should give funding to study the mating habits of endangered iguanas in the Sonoran desert, or should we be funding cures for alzheimer's and diabetes?" and then when they say "Of course we should be using that money to fund cures!" you can whip out this picture and say "trick question, it's the same thing"

[prokopetz]

The funniest thing in superhero comics is not, in fact, when an outgoing writer on a title decides to break their toys by killing off the lead, and the next writer has to figure out how to bring them back.

The actual funniest thing in superhero comics is when a new writer decides to kill off the lead's entire supporting cast because they wanted to "go in a different direction", and the writer after that has to resurrect like half a dozen random people because that new direction sucked.

[prokopetz]

@pomrania replied:

And like, seriously, "the lead decides to ditch everything and travel the world, only to eventually come back home hat-in-hand because it turns out they canNOT do everything on their own" is WAY funnier and also easier for the next writer to pick up after, so they should be doing THAT instead.

It's my understanding that many writers for the Big Two have developed the habit of killing off established supporting characters they're uninterested in including in their storylines as a sort of pre-emptive defence against potential editorial interference. It's not unheard-of for the editor to stick their oar in and demand that you put more focus on a supporting character who's currently dead, but it's historically rare.

[lcatala]

It's interesting to compare this with French-language comics where often the rights to the series are tied to a publisher who will have different authors work on it over the years, but the rights for secondary characters created by that author remain with the author, which if no agreement is reached can result in an entire roster of secondary characters dropping out of existence with no explanation between two stories as the previous author leaves and takes their characters with them. Thus the series Spirou and Fantasio's most iconic run was that of Franquin (from 1948 to 1968) (the character of Spirou was first created in 1938), who created most of the series's iconic secondary characters, including the marsupilami, their weird monkey-marsupial-like animal companion. Then when Franquin was succeeded by Fournier, none of the secondary characters created by the former could be used, so they just stopped appearing. There was no explanation or even mention of them, the comic was now effectively taking place in a different reality with an entirely new cast of secondary characters that everyone acted as if they were already established. Then after Fournier left in 1980, this happened again with his characters, and so the new authors Nic & Cauvin had to create again a set of secondary characters from scratch and act as if they had been there all along with no acknowledgement of previous characters. However, when Nic & Cauvin left in 1984 and Tome & Janry took over, Dupuis managed to negotiate with Franquin (who was still alive and doing his own stuff) for the right to re-use most of his secondary characters, so at that point the comic reverted, again with no explanation, to the "classic" cast — except for the marsupilami who Franquin wanted to keep the rights of because he had his own standalone series, and would not appear in another Spirou story again except for a one-off in 2016.

[anim-ttrpgs]

This might be odd to say but I feel like being an active member of your book club has made me a better person. You've cultivated an amazing community.

This is incredibly nice and uplifting to hear, especially since, like, that’s part of the entire point of the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club. If I may speak frankly, TTRPG spaces are almost all incredibly fucking toxic and hostile. If it’s not “why is there even a single black guy in this game, and women should have -2 Strength.” then it’s “Hm it’s really yikes that you say your PC isn’t just a 1:1 avatar of you and therefore doesn’t reflect your own values and that their actions aren’t your own idealist fantasy. We’re going to have to remove you for the safety of the community.”

I had a bunch more examples but I cut them short, maybe you’ll see them as their own posts later. Anyway we run the server very differently from the standard discord server rules for this reason. The server rules are designed to let conflict and disagreements just happen instead of always favoring the most polite and well-spoken person in the room and punishing the one who says the most swears. That sounds bad on the surface but when you instantly shut down anything at the first sign of somebody getting upset or speaking impolitely, it’s very easy for a certain type of well-spoken person who knows the right social justice language to aggressively cry-bully, dogpile, and sealion anyone they don’t like, and get them punished if they get mad about it. Ask any autistic tumblr trans woman about this.

That and a lot of talks about, and safeguards against, relational violence keep the general population resistant to callout posts shit like that.

[anim-ttrpgs]

Yeah "no conflict" or "no politics" really just means "nothing allowed except for the very most popular in-group"