Math, Manga, Magic the Gathering

One of my favourite reading comprehension failures I bump into on this blog is when I criticise a game and I get folks coming to me like "well actually [thing] cannot possibly be true of [game] because [game] has one sentence in its introduction that says [other thing]". Like, y'all are aware that it's possible for a text to make claims about itself which are not true, right? Hell, if tabletop RPGs were people, claiming to possess features which they do not in fact possess would be one of their favourite pastimes!

More pertinently to recent discussion, the explicit claims a game's text makes about the roles of the players and the GM need not be in any way consistent with the understanding of those roles articulated by the structure of the mechanics – and I'd argue that inconsistency is more the rule than the exception there.

#writing “have fun!” as my tongue-in-cheek rule zero #then using that to say that anyone who didn't have fun was simply not following the rules properly (via @fjordojustice)

"comparing apples and oranges" has always been funny to me as an expression because people's go to exampe of two things so radically different that they defy any useful comparison are apples. and oranges. like you would struggle to find a more comparable pair of objects than that. theyre literally sold right next to each other in most stores.

Hi it's me, nightmare DM from the worst pits of ttrpg forums. So I'm running D&D 5E and I banned rolling a d20, because it seemed overpowered. I'm running an original campaign set in my own world, where the elemental firmament oscillates in a way determined by the motion of the outer planets, and my question is this: how do I prevent my fiancée from hitting on the other players in real life, purely through in-game methods?

Hi it's me, nightmare player from the above DM's campaign. since the DM has banned classes, just in general, do you have any advice on building a completely overpowered character who breaks the game? My backstory is that I am literally Batman. Not like a guy who's inspired by Batman, but the DC comics character Batman, who's decided to show up in the DM's setting. His fiancée is really into it.

Hi it's me. The fiancée. Since my useless partner still hasn't realized I'm angling for a threesome, I have some questions: There's a weird continuity issue where the lore of the Ancient Orzoks seems to be unclear on whether it happened a hundred years ago, or ten thousand. This makes it really hard to figure out if my character, who's an orc, should have been born yet. Also, any advice on building an orc when the DM has banned orcs?

Hi it's me. Pathfinder 2nd edition Remastered, personified. I'm currently having a severe mental health crisis because some of you keep suggesting that I fix these people and their horrible, horrible problems, in particular that none of them seem to have any interest in reading a single piece of rules text. The DM's lore has a bizarrely thorough and politically concerning exposition dump about the gnomes' secret influence on all major historical events, and I have to ask: Do you know about any good couples' therapists?

“I don’t do math because I’m gay” “the gays can’t do math” “If I explain math on tumblr I’ll lose my gay card” all of you apologize to Alan Turing right now 

The “+” in LGBTQ+ is for math.

It’s literally been years since anyone added something slightly clever or original to this post, so I would like to congratulate you and maybe even bestow some kind of award. I don’t have anything to give you though

It was simple addition, really.

"Adopt don't shop" and "that's a 10 year commitment" style PSAs except instead of being aimed at would-be irresponsible pet owners it's for people who want to start yet another long-term ttrpg campaign

would be fun if language acquisition echoed language evolution a la recapitulation theory. kids going through an indo european phase.

fuuuuuck there really is an xkcd for everything

hybrid beastgirls escaped from top secret catgirl government labs on the run, immortal, twelve feet tall, armor-plated, many-armed, venom-glanded, jacked and stacked, pedipalpiferous, bioelectric, bigger, louder, better, telekinetic, and absolutely down for it. eat people’s organs too

Cows are great for making a vector space because they're usually over a field.

Someone needs to make a game that seems like an optimization/puzzle game about shipping little blob guys which can combine with each other but actually secretly teaches you homological algebra. You could start off having several “nests” of blob guys corresponding to different species of blob guys, the blob guys in a nest could stick together into blob guy balls and these blob guy balls would be subject to different relations depending on the species. Then you would have to ship blob guys between nests in such a way that preserves blob balls. There would be various puzzles and such around this which would secretly introduce basic concepts about abelian groups. Then you could also introduce rings by allowing some species of blob guys to “breed” (note that this would make the fact that multiplication distributes over addition simple because it would amount to saying that breeding two blob guy balls amounts to breeding each blob guy in the first ball with each blob guy in the second) I feel like you could get to the point where your dealing with chain complexes tans homology and all that jazz articulated purely in terms of blob guys. It’d be awesome. But unfortunately the only coding knowledge I have is like a small amount of html so I can’t make it :(

oh you can go the fuck to jail that’s what you can do, where you’ll be shackled to a chain gang hitting the blockchain with a pickaxe