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"Is macready or childs The Thing at the end?" theorists are idiots. The answer is John Carpenter. It's in the poster. John Carpenter's The Thing. Dumbass
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You and several others I follow have written extensively on how actually reading and developing a firm understanding of a game's rules is fundamental, especially in the current ttrpg landscape where the biggest games on the market rely on deceptive advertising, second-to-thirdhand fandom folklore and the voluntary labor of GMs to paper over its flawed design.
I was wondering if you have any suggestions or advice on how to approach and digest a dense rules text to better internalize it. I'm very used to just treating the game like an open-book test, referencing it to find specific rules as they become relevant, but I feel like if I want to GM (if only because that may be the only way I can play some of these games AT ALL), that isn't gonna cut it.
Thank you for your work, regardless! I appreciate RPGs as an art form much more thanks to your posts. :)
No, you’ve pretty much got it, and if anyone thinks that makes you a bad GM, they’re the wrong ones.
Whenever I play any TTRPG, even ones I wrote myself and am therefore intimately familiar with, I also treat it like an “open book test.” I read the material all the way through beforehand, then keep the book open and reference it any time I am not absolutely 100% sure of a ruling. Not only does this make sure I get the rulings right in the moment, but it helps me memorize the rulings better too (this is why open book tests are actually better for learning than convention school tests too) and so the more I play the less I need to look things up.
The only reason this would be considered a bad thing is if you’re poisoned by toxic D&D5e and “actual play” play culture and expect the GM to be what @jburneko would call a “magician,” an entertainer more than a player or referee who is taking it upon themselves to be the game more than the game itself, and “keep the story moving” even at the expense of the gameplay. The magician never lets you see the strings, never pauses the “act,” and performs for an audience more so than plays a game with friends. The magician never expects the audience to commit to any participation beyond standing there and being amazed. The term A.N.I.M. usually uses for this kind of GM is “servitor GMing.”
“Well won’t that slow the game down and make it boring if you have to stop and look something up every five minutes?”
I have several answers to this question.
1: Imagine you’re playing a video game instead of a TTRPG for a minute. Would you rather have 15-30 seconds of loading screens every once in a while for a game that works perfectly, or would you rather have no loading screens but every time you pass a point that would normally be a loading screen, nothing is loaded and the textures are blurry and the collision bugs out and items despawn and so on? The game might even crash (this is your GM burning out and not being able to continue). Rulings made on the fly just because you don’t want to look something up (I’m not talking about when the rulebook doesn’t account for an edge case or something) can really screw the game up and lead to outcomes that really shouldn’t have gone that way, and makes it harder for players and GM to develop the ability to make informed decisions in play because the rules will not be consistent.
2: The more you look things up, the faster you are at looking things up, and often the more concretely you memorize the things you have looked up a bunch of times. So yeah maybe the first few sessions will have some stumbles and long pauses, but it won’t be like that forever.
3: Here’s the real secret. That thing I said about how I always keep the book open during a session and reference it constantly? I don’t GM that often. That’s me as a player. I know that the toxic play culture of the magician/servitor GM has deeply ingrained that only the GM needs to know the rules, but that’s not true. Players should know the rules, players should know the rulebook, and players should look up the rules. This spreads the burden of knowing the rules out around the entire table rather than relying on just the GM (who is already usually doing the most work out of the whole group).
If your players are adverse to learning the rules, try to convince them with the following arguments:
1: It’s just courteous. Like, the GM is already doing the most work, and the GM is presumably your friend, if reading a few chapters of a book would make it significantly easier for your friend to do something they’re doing for you, why wouldn’t you do that for them?
2: Even if they’re so selfish as to not want to read like 10-100 pages of text to make it easier for a friend to do something for them, in the vast majority of TTRPGs, players knowing the rules gives them much greater agency in the game. When a monster attacks, knowing the rules can save their PC’s life! If the PC is likely to get shot at, and the player knows how to identify “Cover” and being in Cover makes their PC less likely to die, they can position their PC in Cover before the bullets even start flying.
Of course both of these arguments rely on the players understanding that rules matter and make a difference to the play experience in the first place, and that the GM will actually enforce the rules rather than always bending them last minute to stop PCs from dying, both of which are counter to the zeitgeist of much of the hobby right now, but if you’ve got them to the point where they’re even going to consider another game at all, you probably already have a foothold there.
Oh and finally, for anyone who doesn't already know, there is a "tick" for more quickly navigating PDFs (that is not just CTRL+F).
💬 1 🔁 164 ❤️ 84 · How to Navigate the Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy Rulebook (or any large PDF) More Efficiently · It came to my att
had a long discussion at our compliance committee meeting this morning about the growing use of AI "resources" like chatGPT in medicine and medical documentation, and may I just say, from the bottom of my heart ... yikes
our VP of clinical: I mean, I don't see what's wrong with the providers using those resources to ask questions about diagnoses/interventions/et c
me: except for the fact that chatGPT doesn't actually look for a real answer, just makes up what sounds good based on what's been fed into it, and will give an incorrect answer 10% of the time?
our VP of IT: I don't agree with that percentage
me: okay, well -
cannot believe that the latest incident in this ongoing saga is our fucking CMO (chief medical officer) trying to argue with half of senior management on this in a way that went like this
CMO: I was concerned about [billing issue] and I asked chatGPT and it said we were billing wrong because of [reasons]
COO [chief operating officer]: we're ...... not. none of what you just said is true.
CMO: well chatGPT seems very sure
our VP of IT, his soul visibly leaving his body: //explains how LLMs work for the fourth time//
COO: we're billing correctly.
meeting: //adjourns//
CMO: //FUCKING EMAILS OUR VP OF QUALITY AND COMPLIANCE TO TELL HER WE'RE BILLING INCORRECTLY BECAUSE CHATGPT 'SEEMS VERY SURE'//
VP of QC: //emails me, the god damned billing director// uh. what is he talking about?
Me, resisting with all my might to use that Samuel L Jackson 'stares motherfuckerly' gif in an official email: //emails back explaining how chatGPT is wrong and WHY chatGPT is wrong, inasmuch as I can without saying outright that chatGPT just fucking makes shit up, caps off email with a polite 'someone should address with CMO the fact that chatGPT is not a reliable source'//
Me: //blind copies our VP of IT and my boss for CYA purposes//
VP of IT, almost immediately: oh we talked about it at the meeting this morning, it was explained to him
Me: Check the timestamps. This was after the meeting. Love ya.
This is why the liberal arts and information literacy are important even if you're planning to work in business all your life. I don't know what degree the chief marketing officer has, but clearly whatever education they had did not prepare them adequately to engage their critical thinking *especially when they don't think they need to.*
There’s an asymmetry underneath all of this, and it frustrates me. I can think of plenty of changes I’d like to see in trans people’s favor beyond just undoing the attacks against trans people that have taken place since Trump retook office. If I wanted them, the work of making the case would be mine. I’d have to show why the current rule is unfair, make the argument for a better one, and expect a real fight along the way. That’s what it’s supposed to cost to change the rules on people, and I’d consider it fair.
The other side never pays it. They never had to show that trans women were wrecking women’s sports. They never had to show that Becky’s medicine had hurt a single person, or that the letter on my license put anyone in danger. They just said the word “protect” and pointed at us.
And the press treats that as an argument. It runs the restriction as news, quotes the sponsor calling us a threat, books the segment, and never once asks him to name a person we’ve endangered. The bar for taking something from us turns out to be lower than the bar I’d face for asking to keep it.
That machine only runs because enough people who think of themselves as reasonable decided that staying quiet kept their hands clean. It didn’t.
The wedge on trans people moved exactly where we said it would. The people who gave it cover are still quiet.
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I think people need to understand that everyone has to unlearn misogynistic behaviors and thinking patterns. Cis women and trans women and cis men and trans men and anyone who doesn’t fall under those categories are all completely capable of being misogynistic and actively hurtful to women. Trans men are included in this, obviously, but when you only call for trans men to unlearn this mindset, you are no longer being progressive and fair. You are singling out a minority.
it pisses me off to see cis women saying 'trans women are misogynistic because they were raised as men' and trans women replying 'no we aren't because no we weren't!' and i'm sitting there staring at the camera like it's the office. because like women are ALL raised to be just as misogynistic as men. it's a notable goddamn feature of the patriarchy.
like if you are marginalized it is in your own self-interest to interrogate and deconstruct the cultural narratives that position you as subnormal. this is what starts a lot of queer people on wanting to reform the world into something more compassionate and egalitarian.
but it's not the marginalization that makes you any more or less ethical than anyone else. it's the work. you gotta do the actual work.
I feel like part of the problem is a really popular misunderstanding of bigotry.
Misogyny is not just prejudice experienced by a woman. It is not simply something that happens TO a woman. It has nothing to do with the woman. It’s about the misogynist.
Bigotry is not determined or defined by the target of that bigotry. The bigotry is stored in the bigot.
Misogynists will be misogynistic towards any person they associate with femininity, including cisgender men.
When a misogynist cis man tears another man down for liking something he thinks is girly, he is still being misogynistic.
A cis male coach telling his cis male student he runs like a girl is being misogynistic.
A cis woman punishing her son for wanting a “girl” toy or policing her boyfriend’s hygiene habits and interests for anything she considers emasculating, is being misogynistic!
When a woman gets in a car accident and is injured more severely because the safety testing on that car was only done using crash test dummies and models based on men, she’s experiencing misogyny.
When the medication she takes for her injuries doesn’t work right or has unexpected side effects because it was only tested on men, she’s experiencing misogyny.
When the tools she uses at work that are the wrong shape for her hands, and the jumpsuit that’s part of her uniform which she has to take off completely to use the bathroom, and all the spaces she moves through and everything within them are designed with the assumption that an average male body is the only body that matters— she is experiencing misogyny.
Misogyny is the belief that women are inherently inferior, and the systems and institutions built around that belief. It can be experienced by anyone, and anyone is capable of having misogynistic beliefs and doing misogynistic things.
Bigotry is not about the target. It’s about the bigot, and what the bigot believes, and the way those bigoted beliefs have shaped our world.
I don’t care what race gender or sexuality you are, you were raised with racist, sexist, homophobic beliefs. Because it’s literally impossible not to be.
And the harder you try to cling to the idea that misogyny is something that happens TO women, rather than something coming FROM misogynists, the more blind you’ll be to your own misogynistic beliefs, and all the ways everything in our society is a product of or directly reinforces those beliefs.
I have gotten into the habit of when interacting with a patient, interrogating myself about what traits I am assigning them, and how its affecting my care. It doesn't matter that I'm a woman, the world has taught me to believe a woman is over emotional and exaggerates her pain. On the flip side, a lifetime of jokes about "manflu" make cause me to underestimate a man's experience of illness. Its not about either gender, its about me and my own expectations. I have caught myself on occasions dismissing what my patients are telling me as "not that bad" and it is always linked to some trait they have. Men are whiny about illness, women exaggerate pain (to be believed), old people are confused, people whose first language isn't English are too hard to understand, whatever. I know full well that all of these things are wrong, but kneejerk responses are built from assumptions, and the assumptions we have most commonly been exposed to are the easiest thing to base those responses on.
I dont think I have ever let it affect my care. I hope I never have, and its my responsibility to keep interrogating my judgements and decisions towards my patients to make sure I never do.
I dont think I'm sexist or racist or ageist or homophobic or any other-ist, but the potential to be exists within me, so its my responsibility to keep checking myself, to interrogate my thoughts. The thoughts come from me. Having those thoughts doesn't make me a bigot, not recognising those thoughts as incorrect and working to dismantle them, or acting on them would do.
Feels like a good time to remind certain people that this is coming from Judith Butler, who is not just a leading feminist philosopher, but also THE COFOUNDER OF QUEER THEORY
The literal cofounder of queer theory as an academic field says that abandoning trans people is fascist logic.
The voices in our community trying to exclude us may be loud, but they are not right, and they do not speak for the community as a whole or our history or anything at all.
Trans people belong here. We always have, and we always will.
god that adhd struggle where you are so motivated to do something but there is just like. A Blockage In Your Body that stops the motivation from turning into anything. so you just like. vibrate. sitting there like yeah, man, i totally want to do that right now. (doesn’t)
i think this captures the defining pathology of the collective social media psyche right now. we are in the thrall of people who are wantonly cruel but who also demand to be coddled at all times in every way
"You were supposed to find my bigoted insult charming, and a little sexy! HOW DARE YOU!"
It's a population of people who see smart and funny folk charm others and can't work out how they do it. But they feel owed positive reactions when they say something insulting.
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Squinting grumpily at the latest "system-neutral fantasy sourcebook" trying to puzzle out which specific version of Dungeons & Dragons the author is picturing when they imagine a perfectly generic RPG.
@crackerjackalope exactly my immediate thought as well that I went to the tags first just to see is someone else was on the same page. Why did the do That.
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