I really should think up a title

"Total Eclipse of the Heart"

Una Chin-Riley sings the classic Klingon Power Ballad

Sorry, I can't see any singing in Klingon without also sharing this:

And the one that started it all

•18+ Adults Only

Watch Anya Live on Cam

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.

✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions

Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming

"Total Eclipse of the Heart"

Una Chin-Riley sings the classic Klingon Power Ballad

Sorry, I can't see any singing in Klingon without also sharing this:

#Youtube

onion-souls

So, question to readers: have you ever stopped reading a book because it didn't hook you in the first line/paragraph?

Because that hook is an obsession of writers, writing advicemongers, editors, and publishers, but I'm not actually sure readers are that intolerant of a slow burn?

The fastest a book has lost me is Robert Jordan's Eye of the World. There's a big portentous prologue that didn't feel earned, and then a first chapter that feels like a strictly worse version of Tolkien and I was immediately out. Didn't help that I wasn't far in enough to power through just for the sake of completing it.

You know how medieval villages near disused Roman aqueducts would just gradually dismantle the aqueduct for worked stone rather than quarry their own? I want to play a tabletop RPG with a classic shitty-little-village-with-ancient-ruins-under-it dungeon crawling setup that's basically that. You're not going down there to loot gold and magic swords: you're looking for pieces of sorcerous infrastructure you can pry loose and repurpose to meet the village's everyday needs. Give me the fantasy equivalent of those rural English taverns that don't have indoor plumbing but do have flatscreen TVs.

I know you said TTRPG, but I feel like this would work better as part of a city management video/board game. Like, you hire adventurers to clear out the dungeon (taking standard loot with them), then your own workers get a chance to go around the dungeon dismantling things. Or not: maybe some dungeons are better to keep intact as research sites or tourist traps, depending on the other resources your city has access to or how much damage the adventurers did to the dungeon clearing it out.

Regardless of the specifics, the resources the dungeon generates should develop your city enough to hire the tougher adventurers needed to clear the next dungeon and loot its resources. Lather and repeat until you hit a victory condition, like having enough resources to build a certain structure or adventurers powerful enough to kill a special NPC.

There are to my knowledge a few dungeon crawler CRPGs out there that make "the party got wiped on level Fuck but instead of there being a Game Over the player is now encouraged to make a new party that can then recover the corpses of the previous party for resurrection" a part of the gameplay. Same can apply for characters getting petrified and idk I guess in a theoretical example I just came up with a character could end up in Orc Jail (that's jail run by orcs, not jail for orcs) and be in need of breaking out.

And that's neat, but to me it also begs the question of: short of the game not allowing for loading back to a previous state and only having one save slot per run, what incentive is there for the player to pursue this? From a player's point of view "just reload the save and don't die this time" will always be preferable to this, especially since many dungeon crawler CRPGs assume an "everything is the dungeon" type of approach where you also kind of have to tackle the dungeon sequentially level by level. This is not like losing a single mission in XCOM where you can still probably recover and the campaign isn't entirely lost due to one loss: this is the equivalent of having to start with a fresh party who are probably squishy and will have to grind at least to some extent to be able to survive whatever it is that the previous party already had to survive to make it to level Fuck in the first place.

Anyway I don't design dungeon crawler CRPGs but I think there's some potential here for gameplay that embraces the fact that the player is unlikely to complete the dungeon on their first run and that makes this part of the gameplay. I am imagining something with roguelite elements where reaching certain objectives in the dungeon unlocks persistent upgrades for that save file that the player can make use of even when they need to replace party members. Honestly, maybe I should be designing shit like this.

imsobadatnicknames2

This is an interesting thing to think about. So and idea I got would be to have some kind of system similar to Wildermyth's relationship system, which in short works like this. Characters can have three types of relationship: Friends, Rivals, or Lovers, which confer certain bonuses in battle. Characters who are friends get a bonus to blocking when standing next to each other, characters who are lovers will get a bonus to damage against any enemy that attacks the other character, and when a character who has a rival performs a stunt (Wildermyth's equivalent of a critical) the other will get an increased stunt chance until they perform one too; with the exact magnitude of these bonuses depending on the strength of the relationship.

So in a CRPG with a similar system, a way to incentivize the player to go through this process instead of just reloading a save could be to have each recovery event strengthen or even develop new character relationships. So for example two characters become rivals or lovers after having spent time in Orc Jail together, or a character from the old party becomes friends with a character from the new party after being recovered and resurrected, stuff like that. That way it would feel like you're getting a long-term mechanical bonus AND a little nugget of emergent narrative out of playing through these events instead of just reloading.

Thanks for the reminder that I need to give Wildermyth another shot. Started playing it, but got distracted by other games.

Another idea: go the black comedy route and give buffs out for dying with ironic effects. Like if your party is wiped by a spike trap you all get the "Perforated" perk and can equip an extra item of the piercing subtype. Or everyone dying to a volley of arrows can net you "Then We Shall Fight In the Shade" which increases resistance to Light-based blinding effects and damage from Light spells.

Alternatively, adventuring party death could affect the dungeon's ecology. Like if you get wiped by a rare monster like a bulette, suddenly the bulette encounter rates increase as adventurers become a more popular menu item for bulettes. Getting wiped by more common monsters might net rare variants of those monsters in the future. This might sound bad, except the rare monsters or tougher variants of common monsters drop equally rare crafting materials. So deliberately taking a death on the first encounter with certain monsters so you have high enough encounter rates to farm them later can become part of the meta or routing.

•18+ Adults Only

Watch Anya Live on Cam

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.

✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions

Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming

probablybadrpgideas

Fire dragon living inside a volcano who is unfortunately suffering from pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.

I am sad this doesn't scan to Supercalafragilisticespialidocious.

Dumbstruck, adjective derived from dumbstrike, my cool special attack

She hit me with her dumbstrike, and then I lost the ability to do basic math. She said she'd give me a million dollars to make up for it, but I can't count any more so I have no idea how much money she actually gave me. I'm pretty sure it's more than five, but no clue beyond that.

Degrees of secondhand fandom:

I don’t watch/read/listen to it, but I follow the summaries on the wiki

I rarely pursue information about it, but I have enough incidental contact with the core fandom that I’ve picked it up via osmosis

I strive to avoid it, but I’ve been indoctrinated against my will by the fucking memes

I can cite the canon chapter and verse, but I have no recollection of how or why I acquired this knowledge, and that concerns me

bornt-urnge

Amusingly, the first big boom in mainstream popularity for the YouTube video essay format happened circa 2018, so this post actually very slightly pre-dates the Video Essay Era.

Wasn't Nostalgia Critic like a decade before that, or do you just not consider him and Channel Awesome as the first volleys in the video essay era?

Anyway I'm also now the proud owner of a used but mostly complete boxed set for War Law, the mass combat rules for use with Rolemaster

talenlee

can it help me play a minotaur bard

talenlee

I wish I could remember the joke I was setting up

That's okay! As it turns out, there aren't playable stats for minotaurs in any edition of Rolemaster I've found, so while there aren't any racial limitations on profession in Rolemaster, there aren't any rules for playing a minotaur. :(

Now I'm imagining the ref from Air Bud, diligently digging through every Rolemaster book, just so he can go "Ain't no rule..."

binary-bird

me: hey dave, can i draw you in a maid outfit? him, dumping a pile of punk accessories on the table: on one condition

If he made conditions on the maid outfit, what conditions did he set for that time you turned him into an anchovy?

•18+ Adults Only

Watch Anya Live on Cam

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.

✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions

Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming

ihniwtr

my partner: "Batman: Caped Crusader is for the lesbians"

me: "what could you possibly mean by that"

my partner: /sends me a picture of the new season's Poison Ivy

me: "...oh".

espanolbot2

Not Poison Ivy, different character/s. :)

I wondered if it was going to be Talia (What with the Veronica Lake hairstyle which BTAS also gave Talia), but I believe your answer tells me who it is, which is good as it was such a thorny question

I like the way you phrased that. Really rose to the occasion.

When playtesting "The Clockwork City", one of the example scenarios included in Eat God's core rulebook, a playtester pointed out that one of the randomly encountered NPCs makes reference a specific type of item for which the playset contains no worked examples. Whoops! Here are three that will appear in the next revision.

ferrous-princess

...ok, but my partner is actually named Avery, and they do, in fact, alternate between child-like wonderment at the world, and old man grumpiness at their routine being disrupted.

Maybe Averies are just like that.

Y'all are out there complaining about your OC prompts getting blorbotagged with MCU characters. I'm over here having posts about shit that happened to me in real life getting blorbotagged with characters from Oscar Wilde.

You should replace your profile pic with an aged version of your profile pic. Just for the bit.

three-semicolons

Another day, another fight on an intergalactic on an alien planet:

Shirtless

With a Limb Injury

And Joey Is Also There

…something something nickels

It seems a definite choice how often his Tamaranean outfits reflected his Robin colours rather than his Nightwing colours.

When your outfit exposes half your chest, you're perhaps less likely to notice it when more of it goes missing in action.

But these were happy times... not for them obviously, but for the readers... SO much male gaze men material.

I love the fact that Dick's nipples don't show up when he's wearing the sash but do reappear when he's definitely stripped to the waist. It's like they know when they're supposed to be visible, and act accordingly.

Alternatively, I wonder if the lack of nipples in the Tamaranean outfit is an art error? I could totally imagine an inker getting the pages of this and just assuming Dick is supposed to be in a skin tight outfit and leaving the nipples off. Only to see the coloured pages later and be like..."Whoops."

filipinoizukuu

im so sad there aren't more romance anime out there with a masc fl that gets mistaken for a guy a lot. ESPECIALLY ones that don't treat the main female character's masculinity as a "flaw" or thing she has to get over in order to get with the guy (looking at you in the clear moonlit dusk).

it really is just ouran high school host club and tomo chan is a girl, huh. nozaki kun is close but doesnt quite count for me bc yuu isnt the main character.

Just going to recommend Shikimori Is Not Just A Cutie, and How I Attended An All Guy's Mixer.

•18+ Adults Only

Watch Anya Live on Cam

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.

✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions

Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming

I can't believe it took me until just now to put together that Ghidorah is called that because "hidora" is what "hydra" works out to when you spell it in katakana.

The Guydra.

This reminds me of when I found out that all of the monsters in early Power Rangers were riffs on Western creatures, and Rita Repulsa was supposed to be Pandora.

thejediexile

Anno is a machine that turns afternoons into