🪼
Keni
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Andulka
Cosmic Funnies
Kiana Khansmith
tumblr dot com
i don't do bad sauce passes
Acquired Stardust
Today's Document
taylor price
YOU ARE THE REASON
Discoholic 🪩
@theartofmadeline
d e v o n
$LAYYYTER
AnasAbdin
we're not kids anymore.
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
cherry valley forever
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Netherlands
seen from Oman
seen from Oman
seen from Oman
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Malaysia
@i-am-rano
Fromsoftware characters are so wild. You'll see all this fanart and fanfiction of a character, making you think that they play some major role in the game, but then you actually play it and find out that the character has like 4 lines of dialogue and dies the second time you encounter them.
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.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Something you gotta know about me is that, along with the TTRPG system I'm writing (WIP name - RUINS system), I'm cooking up a semi-generic fantasy world to go with it as like some optional content.
This worldbuilding process has obviously included conjuring up some fantasy races, and I started thinking about orcs - namely how they're depicted in many popular TTRPGs and in fantasy in general. Now, I'm heavily against the way they are often depicted in WotC content particularly, for obvious reasons, but I've been thinking - if we divorce the generic orcs from their (most often VERY racially coded) esthetic, what are we left with?
A species of inherently evil humanoids.
Now before I start asking the important questions, let's establish a couple things:
1. Since "evil" does not exist in a vacuum, let's assume they're "evil" in the sense that they kill and destroy, and do so without a clear emotional reason.
2. We also assume they're evil genetically - as in, they can't become not evil and they're born evil and must do evil as if they were compelled.
3. Orcs have basically no culture. They're a species oriented around killing, consuming and destroying.
Notice how, with these assumptions, we've just basically created Tyranids from WH40k? Every time I try to imagine orcs with the assumptions I just presented, Tyranids just pop up instead.
And in my opinion (bear with me) it's the culture that separates Tyranids from your basic fantasy orcs, SO now comes the big question:
Could one write a species of SENTIENT creatures that are entirely "evil" (according to the selected arbitrary standards) but DO have a unique, realistic culture?
It perhaps feels narrow minded to say, but I don't believe it's possible. At least I could never find a way to write any type of sentient beings in a way that their culture doesn't also encompass some other aspects of reality. Even limiting these cultural aspects to the oldest examples of culture in real world history, like places of worship or various items of artistic expression, I find it impossible to create a culture that is both realistic and allows for inherent evil as defined above.
Really makes you think what them writers at WotC and of other fantasy media were smoking back in the day,huh? (spoiler - it's unexamined racism and xenophobia).
"who said that" is a powerful spell that casts a defensive bubble around your most vulnerable thoughts
It's not possible for mechanics to "get in the way of the story" in a TTRPG. Whatever outcome the mechanics natively produce *is* the story. There can be a mismatch between the story you want the game to produce and the story the mechanics naturally gravitate towards producing, in which case you should consider playing a different game that actually wants to produce the story you want to experience, but "mechanics getting in the way of the story" is not a thing.
I think mechanics can get in the way of story sometimes, but this isn't the fault of the game or the mechanic, it's the fault of the GM. A good GM should know when it's necessary to hash something out with a dice roll and when it's okay to just... tell the story.
No but this is the exact mentality I'm fighting against here.
"The Mechanics can get in the way of the story but when it happens it's the GM's fault for not knowing when to bypass the mechanics in service of the story" is an idea that implicitly relies on a very specific set of assumptions:
That the purpose of a TTRPG is to produce a traditionally-structured narrative akin to those of non-game media
That when the mechanics are not conductive to producing this kind of narrative they're "getting in the way of the story" (and not simply steering the story in a different direction)
That in order to avoid this outcome the GM needs to take it upon themself to babysit the system, strategically bypassing the mechanics to make sure they don't mess with the groups preconceived idea of what a narrative looks like
That failure to do this is reflective of a lack of "Good GM" skills on their part.
If a table's experience is that producing a story that they find fun and engaging can frequently only be achieved by selectively ignoring mechanics to resolve the contradiction between the story they want and where the mechanics want the story to go, I think this is indicative of a mismatch between the system they're using and the kind of story they're trying to use it for (either because they made a bad choice of system, or because the makers of the system are marketing it and promoting it as something it's not).
I find the idea that it's a GM's responsibility to Git Gud at resolving this contradiction kinda ludicrous. Developing a sense for when override the mechanics to prevent them from messing up the story should NOT be treated as a fundamental skill to be a "Good GM", because needing to override the mechanics this way frequently enough for it to become a problem when the GM doesn't know how to do it is simply not something that happens unless the group is trying to use a system that's not in sync with what they want out of the story.
If using the mechanics the game provides them with and following the instructions the game tells them to follow results in someone's GMing being bad, this is to me a sign that they're simply not using the right system for what they want, because with the right system the mechanics don't require constant course-correction from the GM to produce a story the group is happy with.
Used to be Italian but now I’m just ian because she took it al in the divorce
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.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
the postal service names their shit exactly like how a 16 y.o. names angsty fanfic
Explain.
try and tell me literally any one of these would not fit above a short story about two wholly random men from the MCU fingering each other, or possibly 12 chapters of one or more characters from a CW show being in high school while having a photogenic but terminal kind of cancer. try.
ok so i want to say in hindsight i think i could probably have been clearer
Just learned about recency bias, coolest thing ive ever learned about lol
reverse suicide note where everyone you write on it dies
and we could call it something like... murder note.. or something.. Kill note.. die note... we can workshop it later
Tumblr being the "piss on the poor" reading comprehension site makes sense when you realize that 79% of adults in the US are functionally illiterate. Same goes for Twitter and TikTok.
that's a real high number, sport. where'd you get it?
hey anon
please tell me you didn't google "US literacy rates" and then make the funniest possible mistake one could make in that situation
chat dont ever fuck a goth tgirl i just woke up and my dick was locked in a tiny bloodborne mensis cage
average sized bloodborne mensis cage
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.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
im generally not a very jealous person so i am feeling lots of brand new emotions right now
i'm an expert on being jealous you can ask me anything you're confused about
how do i kill everything thats ever lived
a lot of people keep tagging this post as fictional men even though its a factual interaction between me and miss emily here. are they stupid?
Patting all my mutuals and juggle buddies
get swarmed idiot
sorry guys. I wanted to post more, but my jugglers have unionized.
juggle them instead
ouch ouch ouch ouch guys stop hitting mee
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.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Court of the Sun, Silvermoon City (64,34)
