hi i'm ghost

When your DM forget that one of you have Call Lightning, and provide a very nice storm, how can we not use it?

suddenly a lot of people think they got the next Lord of the Rings in their head but they were never able to turn their stories into anything tangible because the evil elitist artists are hogging all the talent and skill and they need a bajilion years of training or something as if one of the most popular manga and anime of the past decade wasn't made by a guy that draws like this

You do not have to be Michaelangelo to make art, just make it. Also, obligatory quote from my good man Bob Ross:

Sorry to pull this out of the tags also but I absolutely agree and wanted to elaborate further, bcs like another reason I genuinely think anyone who is interested in art but feels like they suck too much to make it should really just stay away from AI and actually just give drawing a chance is because AI cannot create new art styles. It can only make copies of what you put into it, so much so that if you want something in a specific style you have to tell it the name of the artist you want it to mimic because it cannot make something that doesn't already exist. If all you ever fed it were drawings of stick figures that's all it would ever know how to do.

But humans can make new art styles, every person's art is unique. And when it comes to ONE(author/artist behind Mob Psycho 100 and One Punch Man) and Rich Berlew(author and artist of Order of the Stick), if these guys never just started making their comics we wouldn't have ever been able to see these expressive, funny, strange, and just all around captivating pieces of art!

The image I used of Order of the Stick isn't actually exactly what it looked like at this start, this is:

And THIS is what Order of the Stick looks like now:

And while it does still look similar, it's clear how much Burlew has improved and grown comfortable in his unique artstyle, how far he's come in the last 21 years. The lighting, the line art, the panel layout, all of it has improved while still essentially just being stick figures. And I cannot even begin to describe how much I fucking LOVE the way this comic looks.

Switching to ONE, his art started out super rough

And while One Punch Man did get a new artist...I genuinely think the "better" art has lost a lot of the charm the original had. I'm so glad that ONE did Mob Psycho 100 himself and that the anime mimicked his style rather than trying to make it look more standard like OPM did, because my god, this guy's stuff conveys humor in a way that is as brilliant as it is unique. It's rough, but the roughness doesn't take away from the impact or emotions, it honestly adds to them, and overall it's incredible to see how much ONE has improved, but also how much it still looks like his art:

I do not want to live in a world where ONE and Rich Burlew didn't make their comics because they were too scared of their art looking bad. I don't want to live in a world without these stories and these dynamic and original art styles. Burlew's art legit has given me confidence, I always felt bad that when I finished and colored my art all my lines were so thick and smooth and coloring-book-esque, it's why most of what I post is like, sketches, colored or not. But after reading Order of the Stick I legit cried a little because for the first time I didn't feel bad about just doing the kind of line art that feels right to me, which looks like this:

D&D writing, by and large, encourages a lack of questions. The surface runs deep. "Go into a cave and chop up goblins." Why are we doing this? "Goblins are bad." All goblins? "Yes."

I think the question of "why are there players comfortable siding with fascist factions and wondering why they're called 'lawful evil'" is pretty easily answered with... because D&D itself is inherently kind of fascist. And it's the most insidious kind of fascist, too- its villains are fascists, so how could you point fingers at the book?

Fire Giants are dwarf slavers. Drow are a megalomaniacal theocracy who hate men. Orcs are violent tribes of marauding killers. Illithids want to destroy all life and keep an entire civilization to scrub their floors. But these narratives still push the idea that "evil" is a racial trait. The players are not only justified in their campaign to destroy these cultures, they're encouraged to do it.

I had an intro to my campaign that involved a mad scientist kidnapping someone and turning them into a wererat. I didn't think much of it and I spent way more time fleshing out the other NPCs, I just wanted to use that wererat as a boss fight.

Once the party encountered him though they immediately saw what I totally missed: the guy who became the wererat was absolutely the victim of this story. I did my best at thinking on my feet and made the wererat this defeated guy who only followed the mad scientist because he felt like his life was ruined. So they, through good rolls, convinced him to help them fight the mad scientist and it made for such a better story.

anyone interested in the subject should definitely also check out the whole Three Black Halflings podcast, which talks about being black in nerdy spaces. a lot of times they’ll have on guests talking about their intersections and experiences in nerdy spaces. they have an episode with the author of the articles above.

they’ve also played a ttrpg based on african mythologies rather than mostly european ones like most mainstream fantasy.

A Tumblr comment from "smudge-goblin" that reads: "Why not a political theory class. I wanna war crime accurately".