catherinekal

[catherinekal]

Game of the year

[catherinekal]

@fayeastria me when I've recovered from bottom surgery

bunny yuri. Spread the news

[catherinekal]

Some more hobby progress. built the new vespids and some terrain.

[catherinekal]

Some ActiRanger Pink doodles

[catherinekal]

yawn

[catherinekal]

Yukari get the fuck out of the bookcase

[catherinekal]

Yumykon, the Fearstalker 🐰🪓🩸

[catherinekal]

by Kirill Uyutnov

[catherinekal]

Translation: “I am fucking tired of the soviet car industry” *the standard effect of touching a soviet car* *laughs in russian*

[catherinekal]

@fayeastria

(scary dom voice) call the restaurant, slut. im too shy

[catherinekal]

It occurs to me that in fiction, our protagonists often have act on instinct, hunches and guesswork, and turn out to have been correct all along. It's incredibly common for the protagonist of an adventure story to 'follow their gut' and for that to work out in their favour. Our heroes make lucky assumptions that move the plot along all the time.

In tabletop rpgs, you can in fact do the same thing. It is, in fact, entirely reasonable for a player character to make a lucky guess about what's going on or what they need to do, and for that to be right.

You hear the question "but how would they know that?" come up all the time, often with the implicit "if you can't justify knowing that, you're metagaming, which is always bad". This is a stupid line of discussion. When you know what you want to do, because of your own out-of-game knowledge, you can simply have your PC make a lucky guess. Their hunch turned out to be correct.

A character like (say) Leuitenant Columbo, Monkey D Luffy, Doctor Van Helsing or Bilbo Baggins does this sort of thing - following a hunch with little hard evidence, that turns out to be correct - all the time. There's no reason why your ttrpg character shouldn't do the same thing.

[catherinekal]

I hope I can find people and time to play new ttrpgs someday

you know what? I'm nailing my colours to the mast:

The default rpg that's used as a yardstick, in my view, is not D&D. It's Vampire The Masquerade 20th Aniversary Edition.

It has everything: Action! Melodrama! Politics! Intrigue! Horror! Romance! Bleak Social Realism!

Still want a fantasy game with swords and dragons? We got that, it's called Dark Ages Vampire!

When pitching me a game, the big hurdle you need to overcome is "why am I not running this in Vampire?" Call of Cthulhu? Vampire has plenty of cosmic-horror tentacle monster cults, just throw a hidden baali cell into your setting. D&D? Play a dark ages game and all be members of a vampiric order. Monsterhearts? That's just standard Camarilla Toreador behaviour! Paranoia? The prince is a malkavian, have fun. Rolemaster? That's just dark ages again, and trust me our mechanics are fiddly and pedantic too.

Being picky and don't want to play a vampire? No problem, there's a splat-book for playing as regular mortals, who may or may not have psychic powers.

Seriously, Vampire: The Masquerade has so much range as a game. Even more if you throw in bits of other WoD gamelines or elements from v5. Mage even has sci-fi space explorers fighting tentacle monsters on the surface of jupiter and I am not joking.

This is not a bit or a funny joke. I genuinely, 100% believe that Vampire is a better Default Game that can Do Everything than D&D and its imitators.

[catherinekal]

I hope the "What if Disco Elysium was about a witch finding her cat in the mountains" post never leaves the gaming discourse vernacular. It will never not be funny to me bc it's got all the Gamer Entitlement™ levels of CoD bros throwing hissy fits about "woke" shit but instead of being couched in far right reactionism it's the exact kind of "Kingdom of Conscience" style liberal outrage at anything with conviction and beliefs that DE waxed on about. Like even chuds who get mad that the game calls you out for being racist interact with the themes of DE better and understand them more than Cat Lady did.

[catherinekal]

why is your cat green?

She’s built different 😌

[catherinekal]

Summer dusk