The Entire Sona Fandom

i think for pride month some trans person should get a little ambitious and change their pronouns to you/your... just to stir the pot

that little spin was so cunty

If you'd asked me a decade ago which contemporary tabletop RPG was most likely to do the AD&D-versus-BD&D "two versions of the same game being published simultaneously, one of which is ostensibly a stripped down version of the other, but in practice they're really two separate forks of the same core system that fundamentally disagree with each other about what kind of game that system should be" thing, I definitely wouldn't have guessed "Exalted", but in retrospect it seems almost inevitable.

Ok, I have not been paying attention to new Exalted after 2.5 stopped - what in the world is happening over there?

In brief, there are currently two separate versions of Exalted in active publication: Exalted 3rd Edition, and Exalted: Essence. The latter's marketing kind of positions it as a lightweight or introductory version of the former, but in practice the two are just totally incompatible visions of what the game is supposed to be, and familiarity with one isn't necessarily transferable to the other. They even disagree with one another on the level of basic setting worldbuilding that has no implications for the game mechanics, which is actually kind of remarkable.

In theory, Exalted: Essence sort of positions itself as "Exalted, but friendlier." So, lighter rules, all the Exalt types are (in theory) mechanically balanced instead of Solars having a huge power advantage over everyone else (this is supposed to be a non-diegetic concession to play experience), but also the Essence setting has kind of... had a bunch of its edges sanded off. You are far less likely to encounter something that makes it clear that plagues happen in an Essence book, or that gender-based bigotry is normative in Creation even though it takes different form than it does on Earth. And this is confusing because it is ostensibly the same setting to the point where most of the setting books are written for Exalted 3rd Edition and Essence points you at the 3rd Edition books for more setting info.

I wouldn't even necessarily agree that Essence has lighter rules. Some of its individual subsystems are lighter than their 3E counterparts, yes, but other subsystems are substantially elaborated upon where Essence's authors seem to have felt 3E's are lacking – and some of those subsystems which have received greater elaboration are sitting right in the middle of core components, like action declaration timing.

You're right, but also, no, because Exalted: Essence lets you do full charm sets for every Exalt type out of one book. Next to cutting out six or seven extra hardcovers' worth of custom charm systems (several of which are at this point still hypothetical, I believe), more fiddly action declaration is not, on balance, more rules-heavy.

I've never found the argument from page count terribly persuasive. It feels like arguing that playing a wizard in Dungeons & Dragons is more complicated than playing a wizard in Ars Magica because if you include every published supplement, the D&D wizard has a longer spell list. Certainly, having a Charm list with less needless verbosity and more willingness to collapse obvious redundancies makes character creation much quicker, but I'm not convinced its impact on active play is sufficient to overwhelm every other factor put together.

dogs are always putting their ass next to your ass while you sleep

It's actually a bit surprising to me that we haven't seen contemporary meta brainfuck indie games do more than they have with 1990s point and click adventure games' penchant for developer-intended softlocks. That feels like something you could very easily spin as Saying Something.

Honestly, having grown up with this bullshit is probably a big part of the reason I'm fascinated with player-hostile game design. Giving a puzzle three different solutions with fully voiced and animated reactions to each, except two of those solutions render the game unwinnable in ways that won't become apparent until hours later is a level of "fuck you" that most modern games with pretensions of player-hostility can only dream of!

A critical piece of context that a lot of modern gamers completely miss is that Douglas Adams' adventure games are works of parody not only in terms of their narratives, but also in the sense that they're rather vicious parodies of adventure games as a genre. Each of their absurdly obtuse puzzles is lampooning some puzzle design trope or set of tropes that was legitimately commonplace at the time they were made, and many of the really nasty bits are crafted specifically to piss off experienced adventure game fans who otherwise wouldn't get caught out by that sort of thing. They're outliers in the genre only in the sense that they're putting forth extra effort to be annoying about it – most games of the type pull the exact same shit entirely without remark!

(Honestly, the player-hostility of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy tends to be tremendously overstated owing to a combination of effective marketing and the fact that it's the only adventure game from that era that any significant number of current-gen gamers have ever actually played. In terms of sheer fuckery it's considerably friendlier than stuff like, say, Codename: ICEMAN.)

It helps to understand that point and click adventure games are one of the first genres the Git Gud crowd really fixated on, and a lot of these early design trends revolved around catering to that crowd. It only got reframed as a genre for filthy casuals in the wake of a demographic shift in the mid 1990s that saw the genre's player base skewing strongly female; it's practically the only example of a video game genre's reputation flipping directly from "hardcore" to "casual", and one of the most striking illustrations of the fact that which kinds of games are considered "real" games is more about identity politics than mechanics.

if your animal is lying on the floor, furniture etc, it’s important to take a picture of them. then, if they move or shift in any way, it’s important to take another picture. with this technique, you can take many pictures of your animal

yes I love playing WOD TTRPGs like VtM (vampire-to-male) and HtR (hormone: the replacement)

a more pressing question is whether you were playing WTF when you wrote this post and if not what the heck you thought you were doing using its rules

Are you intending to imply that "the will of the people" is itself legible? If so, how? To whom? Via what method?

probably the simplest way is a Knowledge + People roll, but one could also look for which character creation efforts are legitimate and work backwards

people needdddd to wear headphones in public because while on an otherwise very lovely walk in the park today i saw a guy sitting under a tree watching a porn parody of the star wars prequels

if nothing else trying to tune out the sounds of anakin and padme going to town as i contemplate the babbling brook gave me a brief but vivid window into what it’s like to be obi wan kenobi

a more pressing question is whether you were playing WTF when you wrote this post and if not what the heck you thought you were doing using its rules

a more pressing question is whether you were playing WTF when you wrote this post and if not what the heck you thought you were doing using its rules