one random card i really love from MOM is wary thespian
i love the creepy, dawning wrongness of it, the way all the performers are forming phyrexian phis... it's like that one scene in there is no antimemetics division... incredible piece, and i love that the surveil being a death trigger foreshadows this poor thespian's demise
TBH all of the “Phyrexian symbol foreshadowing” cards in March of the Machine are really cool. IMO if instead of Aftermath they did a small set BEFORE March of the Machine that was mainly these kinds of foreshadowing / setup cards it would have been way better.
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thinking all the time about a dnd campaign i played years and years ago. i wanted to play dnd for the first time but had no one to play with so i got on some reddit for people putting campaigns together and there was a DM who specifically wanted to do a campaign for exclusively first-time players bc they thought it would be exciting to introduce us all to the game. it was actually a super rigorous process to make the cut bc the DM wanted a group of adults with consistent availability who would commit to making the game a weekly priority (fair) so i filled out like an application and then met with the dm on-call to talk about potential characters and hash everything out. it ended up being an outrageously fun game and i learned as we went that most of the world, classes, etc. were homebrew and i was like the lore this DM has created is cuckoo bananas tbh like it's so deeply involved. anyway in the end the DM told us they're actually a best-selling published author and they'd always wanted to create a storyworld for an rpg. they wouldn't tell us their name and tbh they were right to tell us at the end bc if they'd told us at the beginning i'd have suspected they were full of it and lying to sound cool but after playing their game i do believe them. anyway afterward they didn't keep contact with any of us. they were like "here's a beautiful world and story thanks for coming now i'll disappear forever." who were you...............................
Life must be a rollercoaster for the D class. You live in a shitty prison cell for the remainder of your probably extremely short life. One day some security guards show up and take you to a big room where a scientist tells you to copy an image onto some paper. You do. The scientist shrugs and writes something down and you're taken back.
One day a scientist hands you a poptart and says "eat this". You say "is it full of some kind of fucked up interdimensional poison". The scientist says "eat it or that security guard will tase you and tie you down and make you eat it". You eat the poptart. It is not full of fucked up interdimensional poison, but it is kind of stale. You describe the taste to the scientist and he shrugs and writes something down and you go back to your shitty cell.
One day a security guard takes you to a big room and there's a flute sitting on a table. A scientist tells you "play Hot Cross Buns on that". You explain that you do not know how to play the flute. You are instructed to try. You play the flute and get immediately get dragged into some incomprehensible shadow dimension and torn to pieces for no reason that makes any sense to you. You are very lucky to have survived so long and died so quickly.
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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.
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.
I think the rub here with the term "collaborative storytelling" is that it's coming across at odd angles. Like you said, almost everything can lead to a story. And there are multiple people there inputting into the machine and so clearly it's collaboration. But the same can be said of nearly anything, let alone just games.
What a TTRPG is for is, as what amounts to an analog computer, to take a series of inputs and give you an output combined with imaginative interpretations and creative narrative decisions in order to create the emergent property that is roleplay. In much the same that you can roleplay someone specific in a video game, games with immersive sim properties are much better at it because they give you the tools by which to more deeply express the internal agency you're applying to the game world. And even then you will be constrained by the game and its intents if what you are attempting to roleplay is not supported by the game. Deus Ex is much more conducive to roleplay than, say, DOOM. But even then Deus Ex still expects you to be Some Guy Caught Up In Conspiracy Nonsense. Meanwhile horizontal growth games like Ultima Online allow you to express a wide variety of permutations, the only game where my favorite class fantasy can be "real estate scammer" and the game and the way both the world and other players interact with it supports this.
The important part about the commentary on ANIM's discussion of collaborative storytelling, which describes a specific attitude about how those stories are produced and not about their presence, is thus:
In a game where the primary analog input-output is the emergent property of semi-randomized mechanical interactions, it is very difficult to even attempt to generate the storybeats of, say, Lord of the Rings naturalistically. So you come expecting that every game produces A Fantasy Novel sort of storytelling and not something more in line with the often chaotic, often hamfisted, and meandering storytelling of, say, a weekly print comic that might have a roadmap or be partially planned but often just kind of jams in whatever needs to happen to keep things moving and ramp the drama. And even that isn't an adequate equivalent to this, as a comic can still successfully have internal rules like "The MC and his crush are not allowed to die", a thing which a ttrpg which has a mechanic about death can only do by rewriting the rules, one of the principal complaints in the entire essay.
In order to create the kind of fantasy novel-esque story structure, an enormous amount of effort must go into bending, warping, and changing the rules so much that what you get at the end is at best a facsimile of the thing you went in to create, and if the efforts prove fruitless this is not the fault of either the game or of the expectations put on it to demand those efforts, but of the GM who failed to produce a game design degree via first principles.
And so the way that DnD is treated is often more like modding Deus Ex so that there is either no way to fail or die regardless of which path you take or else to mod it so that there is only one preconceived path which the game must take. When it became an increasing norm of the culture of play to demand that the GM ask permission for characters to be killed (a mechanic which the game has specific rules for for which there are not alternatives) rather than accepting that death is something both mechanically implemented and a story beat which will be generated by the semi-random output of the machine, enormous pressure came down to completely rework the machine from the ground up rather than exit the walled garden and engage with a machine which does not produce outputs which the players do not desire.
The purpose of a machine is what it does, and what this machine does in its design does not produce conventional satisfying, novel-like stories. It creates a lot of emergent situations which must be handled, for good or ill, by semi-random, dice based mechanics. Unfortunately, people believe that that is not the purpose of the machine in spite of all evidence from the text due to their folkloric understanding of it and so view it as broken and anyone not able to fix it as having failed.
I think my biggest problem with the arguments A.N.I.M & simpleimple brought up here is how they are simultaneously too specific and too general.
You're talking about really broad stuff like people's expectations of games, wider trends in the TTRPG culture of play while arguing that those are mostly happening because people miunderstand the rules?
You seperate the text of the game from the folkloric understanding of the game.
The text is not the game.
What is happening during play is the game, which is heavily influenced by the folklore.
People can play this game very differently depending on experience and preferences with TTRPGs or games IN GENERAL.
Can you Imagine walking up to a group of people having fun and going "Pals, you are doing this all wrong, you could be having so much MORE fun" is madness to me ... MADNESS.
Im sorry but I feel like these arguments are really a gross misunderstanding on what playing TTRPGs is about for most people.
If you wanna try out different TTRPGs on the regular you need people in your group that find that exciting!
I dont wanna be antagonistic, I just feel these arguments are going nowhere really.
NOW if you wanna talk about how capitalism is turning TTRPGs into a commodity to own instead of play I am ALL EARS and sopping wet with guilt!
The folkloric understanding of what TTRPGs are and what they are supposed to do has, especially in the specific context of D&D and other very traditional challenge-focused RPGs, largely emerged from a culture of play that treats the text of these games as incidental. These games do exist as texts as well and when the culture of play around these games exists largely as divorced from these texts and it is effortless to also demonstrate that playing these games while adhering to the text does not result in gameplay that is inherently undesirable, it is in fact good to remind people that these texts should not be treated as incidental.
In fact, to your capitalism point, the ones who have the most to gain from an understanding of tabletop RPGs as just a set of folklore and vibes where the text doesn't matter are, in fact, the folks at Wizards of the Coast. Arguably a very large part of the marketing (not just from WotC but also from the industry that has sprung up around D&D) of D&D the game relies on the notion that D&D is good for collaborative storytelling (something it, as a text, doesn't actually primarily support) and that the rules ultimately don't matter. And when the rules of a game can be reduced to nothing but a set of vibes that are completely divorced from the game as a text this in fact mostly benefits the game that has already captured a large part of the hobby and industry.
And I don't think this should be taken to some extreme like "by actually taking RPG rules as texts worth engaging with instead of just sets of vibes that may or may not result in good gameplay you are actually doing an epic anti-capitalism," but tabletop RPGs do exist as books with rules not as an accident.
And to quote a much more eloquent person than I, the designer of Cairn: "Playing rules-as-written isn't obedience. It's literacy."
Nerds love taxonomy; it gives order to the world, and provides a meaningful sense of control. Of course, it's all an illusion. At best taxon
This also applies to analyzing games and the cultures of play surrounding them. For a culture of play that treats the text as secondary or incidental to gameplay and where the desired gameplay is actually orthogonal to the text, saying that the culture of play would actually benefit from engaging with the text as is or engaging with a different game altogether is the most charitable interpretation of what is going on.
So the just of the argument from Thydungeongal, simplesimple, and animm-trpg's is that the Text is written by an individual with the intent of giving a certain type of experience and that experience might run counter or against what you want from collaborative story telling.
i.e. if you are playing a game like Mothership and a players character dies and they don't want their character to die you could ignore some of the death choice rules of the game orrrr you can acknowledge that the tone and intent of a game like Mothership is to cause or have many PC characters die and thus going against that rule completely ignores the text of the work.
I also think an important part of all of this, which if I am ungenerous I could take as disingenuous but even if I am being generous is at best ignorant, is the fun police accusation. I'm going to be real, learning to actually play a game, even if you continue to add in homebrew and additional rules, a thing which has always been a part of ttrpgs since the get go. Even with the white book you were expected to just go find rules somewhere to handle whatever issues you needed handled.
Even if I don't bring up that you can have funny doing basically anything with your friends, the entire discussion hinges on that fact that, actually, quite a lot of people aren't having fun. At least half of this entire discourse arises from the fact that D&D is an analog Omelas that burns down GMs for everyone else's fun. That if you need to basically remake the game from scratch or pretend it doesn't exist as a text than clearly you're not having fun with it. That you are advised to treat the asymmetric player as the devil and the asymmetric player is advised to treat the others as petty pain constructs there to make things harder and worse. That effort must be put in to create story arcs, to manage character arcs, to not kill, to this, to that all to the satisfaction of the potential agency of the players to play out the story they came to the conclusion should, if not perhaps must, happen or the game was bad.
Even if one accepts the kayfabe paradigm as engaging in good faith, it is very clear that an enormous amount of the friction created in the play space if from wanting to play checkers, not knowing checkers exists, and modifying chess on your way to recreating it. This isn't a "misunderstanding of the rules", a thing which would require you to have done something other than pass the buck off to your DM until they burn out, but an at-best contemptuous disengagement from the text in a manner that makes all of the folkloric "misunderstandings of the rules" of, say, Monopoly, look like nothing.
The effort that goes into making D&D as it is under its own culture of play is enormous. You generally don't create what amounts to an effectively different game on top of the bones of the game you're claiming to play if you're having fun with the rules of the game and so the question, at its kindest, arises to ask "why are you playing it in the first place? Why put all this effort in?"
I imagine if someone claimed to love a certain kind of cake but then told you that first you had to remove all the frosting, swap out two of the layers for different flavors, hollowed it out to fill with jam, and then reassemble it, refrost it, and then create fondant decorations on top and it was the baker's fault because they should have known that's what you just do with that recipe to make it good, others would probably not be in the wrong to say you don't actually enjoy that kind of cake.
And I would honestly call "the text is not the game" one of the most absolutely disingenuous statements to ever be made. Though I suppose given D&D's evangelical background is fully in line with the sorts of beliefs the author may have had about the interpretation of texts.
The cherry-pick and embrace the cultural folklore approach is what creates the confusion. Especially since the approach creates so much strife. It burns out GMs, it causes people to quit the game over the expectations they have been told they should have not being met, it causes enormous amounts of efforts to be put in in order to force it to meet those expectations, and if it didn't create an enormous amount of friction, both between the large number of people who do read the text (even amongst the people whom I engage with who are not deep in the reeds like this, maybe half of them are locked in the 5e culture of play) but also with each other.
And on the anti-capitalism, the only people this benefits, for the same reason that copyright does, that remaking the same works over and over does, that walling the garden and putting all the inmates in the same asylum does, is that it only benefits the people who keep restarting the attempts to make every other ttrpg be D&D whether it's Gygax before his ousting, the WotC board with the original OGL, or now with the movement of D&D from being a game at all to being a lifestyle brand in the fashion of Disney (and that brand, worth more than everything else Hasbro controls combined, is the real reason) so that anyone and everyone can be included under the umbrella of what D&D is without question and with a minimum of options.
In a manner of speaking, I'm here to play chess but half the people I run into are using the chess pieces to play quarters and are unhappy that the pieces aren't well sized or aerodynamic enough to land in a shot glass.
I think a good way to summarize it somewhat succinctly is:
TTRPGs are games (that's actually what the G stands for, random obscure fun fact!), and there are loads of people who like to try different RPGs because they like playing different games. Or hell, there are people who only play one RPG because they like playing that one game. And by "playing a game", I mean "engaging with a set of rules and mechanics". That's what's fun for them. If by doing so, they also tell a fun story, that's a bonus.
But then there are people who just want to tell fun stories, and often that also means telling stories that adhere to a specific structure. And then, for some reason, they choose a game with thousands of words worth of rules and mechanics to tell that story, and ignore or change every rule and mechanic that hinders the specific story they want to tell.
The first group plays a game to play a game, and is okay with that resulting in a story. The second group plays a game to tell a story and gets mad when the game tries to be a game.
Okay, real talk now. People love to tag male characters in posts about women, but this post is gonna take this seriously. Is there actually a canonically male character you believe is a trans woman? Or at least has made into a trans woman for a fanart or a fanfic? Excluding the ones canonically implied.
Sound off in the tags! Link to the fanart or fic if available. Do it. Give me the girls. Make more women.
I have a chart for this ("estrogen would fix him" is the stuff that qualifies here. I could write a short blurb about all of these but I'm too tired to do that right now so y'all get the chart).
(Description below the readmore rather than in alt text since it's long.)
A venn diagram with three circles, labeled "estrogen would fix him," "estrogen would make him worse," and "estrogen could not save him (but it'd be really funny)."
In the "estrogen would fix him" section are:
Kirito from Sword Art Online.
Mister Priest from Make the Exorcist Fall in Love.
Cloud from Final Fantasy 7.
Don Quixote.
In the overlap between "estrogen would fix him" and "estrogen would make him worse" are:
Enciodes Silverash from Arknights.
Denji from Chainsaw Man
In the "estrogen would make him worse" section are:
Light Yagami from Death Note.
Izuku Midoriya from My Hero Academia.
In the overlap between "estrogen would fix him" and "estrogen could not save him" are:
Seto Kaiba from Yu-Gi-Oh.
Sanji from One Piece.
In the "estrogen could not save him" section are:
Shinji from Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Char Aznable from Gundam.
Quatro Bajeena from Gundam.
In the overlap between "estrogen would make him worse" and "estrogen could not save him" are:
Zenos from Final Fantasy 14.
Laios Touden from Dungeon Meshi.
Lazurite Roy from Arknights.
And finally, in the dead center of the venn diagram, are Shirou Emiya from Fate/Stay Night and Kim Dokja from Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint.
In a far corner of the image, away from the venn diagram, is Saber from Fate/Stay Night, labeled with her name and overlaid on a circular trans flag.
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From an RPG perspective, I've been struggling for years to explain that "playing a character in a myth" and "treating a mythic world as if it were real" are two fundamentally different things. A part of this frustration is that I want a whole lot more of the former and a whole lot less of the later.
So, I'm sure scholars probably have a more technical definition of "myth" than I'm using. I'm primarily talking about when elements of a story are meant to be received and processed emotionally rather than logically.
For example, we might have a character that wears jade armor and sits on a throne of ruby. Now if your mind starts thinking things like what the implications are for the culture and economy of a society that uses jade for armor and ruby for furniture design then you're thinking in the wrong direction. Same if you start thinking about the actual real world properties of jade and ruby and what you could possibly make with such a large and plentiful supply of it.
No. Just. Stop. Don't do that.
Instead, be *emotional*. What *feelings* does such an image/character invoke you. Disgust at their opulence? Awe at their power? Respect for their commanding presence? Fear? Now have your character react *to that feeling*. What emotion do YOU want your character to reflect back.
In an RPG, your character TOO is a pile of evocative aesthetics in both image and action. Do a thing that will evoke a feeling IN ME as a fellow player at the table. You can't control WHAT feeling I have, but you can do something evocative, "logic" of the situation be damned.
i kinda see what you are getting at, hopefully. i think it's really mostly about being impressionistic, isn't it? my mind immediately drifts to pulp fantasy, to which such "loose" imagery seems to be very important. i personally don't get much from it mostly because i'm not that great at visualizing. i could never really get into howard because of it, for example. would you say this generally applies outside of fantasy roleplaying, though?
Pulp fantasy (and actual mythology) is where you see it at its boldest. But I'm not talking *purely* about visuals it can apply to "entities" whose only "logic" is their symbolic/metaphorical place in the narrative.
You see this a lot in standalone horror novels that don't get caught up in their own "lore." My absolute favorite example of this is "The Library Policeman" by Stephen King. The creature in that book and how it "works" is wholly defined by the scope of the protagonist's personal trauma. It does not "exist" nor has "logic" independent of the protagonist's emotional journey. Sure, it all makes "sense" in that story but trying to tease out the creature as an independent entity with a consequential "existence" simply falls apart.
I would also point to something like Frank Miller's Sin City stories. The characters are BOLD archetypes with no substance behind their evocative presence. Senator Rourk is a complete tautology. He is a Senator because he's rich and powerful and is rich and powerful because he is a Senator. Things happen because Rourk wants them to happen. By what means? What's the power structure propping him up? Who are his allies? Who are enemies? What is the network composing his wealth? These things are not only unanswered, I would suggest they are UNASKED. It simply doesn't matter. Rourk might as well be Zeus.
It is that element of UNASKING, I am focusing on.
This is one of the reasons film franchises begin to lose their luster because later films are often built by asking questions the earlier films not only didn't ask, but were never designed to answer. "Fandom" may be clamoring all the time for "answers" but they're always disappointed when they get them and for good reason. The questions never should have been asked in the first place.
I'm usually a huge fan of fantasy/sci-fi logistics, groundedness, biology, etc., but this is also how you get people constantly trying to "solve" vampires by saying "well they drink blood so that means they are scientifically hematophages and there is no problem with them drinking blood of any animal because other hematophages can drink the blood of any animal" and "if it's transmissible by bite that means it's a virus or bacteria that causes a mutation."
No, this was never a legend meant to operate on a 21st century biology, the blood is blood but it's also life, and so on.
Sometimes the answer isn't "it's magic" because the author hasn't thought about it, sometimes the answer is "it's magic" because the author has thought about it.
Exactly. You can pick and choose. In fact, supernatural things become MORE scary when they operate spiritually when everything else operates realistically.
Yup, the world works exactly the way we believe it to, oh except this *thing*. This thing is unbounded by reality. It has uncomfortable existential implications or reaches into questions that have no answers. That's scary.
Pokemon has never had a generation where all three starter pokemon are mammals. Two generations- gens 1 and 3- have had zero mammals, and from gens 5-8 there've been two mammals to pick from, but none have had three mammals. I think this is an important part of the franchise's brand.
Back when gen 8 got leaked someone pointed out that you can generally tell a real GameFreak Pokedex from a fakemon dex by the amount of "ugly" pokemon and the number of invertebrates and inanimate objects, and I think there's a similar thing going on here- Pokemon genuinely makes an effort to make its monsters varied.
The last 15ish years have seen so much ink spilled on the Vanillish line, on gen 1 designs, etc etc, but I think it bears repeating how easy it is for a Mons game to stick to charismatic animals like mammals and birds and dinosaurs and pets. And pokemon does have that (we have, what, six cat lines? more if you count regional meowths) but it also makes sure to add, like. A crinoid. A bagworm. A bell. Creepy humanoid mushrooms, a sand castle, a big iceberg.
Something would be lost if every single pokemon was as cool as Haxorus or as cute as Snom or as furrybait as Goodra. Pokemon succeeds because it lets you be best friends with shit that's just weird.
It's funny when Tumblr screenshots circulate other websites or you show one to someone who's not super online and they think they're supposed to pay attention to the usernames as a part of it so they get really hung up on the fact that a comment comes from a handle like "SloppyMuppetBalls" or "werewolf-smegma-collector." No not that part. That's the normal part. Don't laugh at our dear friend ClownHoleSlurper I'm trying to show you their insightful takes on economics
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