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Don’t worry, Sam! It’s going to end…well, not well. But not with everyone in Hell for eternity, so that’s a plus. This comic is, as is usual for Wednesday’s comics, chosen by my Patrons. Speaking of…

Check my Patreon out if you’d like to support the comic, even a little bit helps. Or just to check out the reward tiers, there’s some neat bonus stuff and I tried to make them fun: https://www.patreon.com/waitingforthet

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this person gets it

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Also why is it always "D&D was always for the freaks and outsiders" and never Rolemaster (a game whose contributors included a gay man), or Cyberpunk (a game created by a pioneering black game designer) or Vampire: the Masquerade (made from the outset as open for non cishet guys) or Fudge (published and promoted by a company founded by a woman whose contributions made it as popular as it is) or Monsterhearts (gay gay homosexual gay) or Nobilis (women)? Why do we have to keep trying to revise a history where D&D was always woke when there are almost five decades' worth of roleplaying games actually made by marginalized people and for other marginalized people?

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>farcille confirmed but only in arknights collab event

huh?

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herohood of the traveling white pants.

prodigy, patriot

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you have received a lizard message

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I like how this one is glowing like a powerful magic tome

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As further proof, some people will tag two characters with wildly different levels of popularity. #Banshee #Forearm

Being deeply into the X-Men skews what you consider a minor character. Like normal people will ask me who my favorite character is and I’ll have the minimum amount of self-awareness to be like “I can’t say Tarot, the student from Emma Frost’s evil team in the 80s who died” but then I look for a better answer and I say “Blink”

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Now, I do think that there is nothing intrinsic to D&D as a game that contributes to its popularity: otherwise so much of D&D culture would not be so disconnected from the game as a text. The current popularity of the game is almost entirely due to name recognition and it having a monolithic position in TTRPGs.

Now having said that, there is one thing where the game is actually kind of cooking that most games fail to consider: the fact that it kind of rules to roll a d20 and a natural 20 looks cool as hell. Your cool indie RPG that is trying to draw away people from D&D probably can't compete with D&D on that level, but you should still try to figure out some way to make the act of play kinesthetically satisfying.

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she's so cool, I wish lesbians were real 😔

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I wonder if any Big 2 comic character will ever come out as a trans woman? Like not a "Emma Frost was stealth the whole time" type deal, but a "male" character who actually comes out and transitions?

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Xuân Cao Mạnh, Karma (39/x)

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Pro Puzzle Design Tip: If you’re writing a narrative puzzle game and don’t want to bother having the puzzles make sense in the world or plot of the game, you can always make one of your characters a Puzzle Pervert.

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My name is Helga Sinclair. I’m acting on behalf of my employer, who has a most intriguing proposition for you. Are you interested?

ATLANTIS: THE LOST EMPIRE (2001)

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Here’s how Fishblade can still win

The thing about the popularity of Dungeons & Dragons is that this isn't the first time we've been here. There was a stretch of several years in the 1980s where it was practically mainstream. There was a syndicated Saturday morning cartoon that dominated its timeslot in viewership, merch on every shelf, and D&D manuals were hot Christmas items that could be purchased in regular bookstores. (It also sparked a nationwide moral panic in the US, but that's a whole other thing!)

When D&D subsequently fell off a cliff due to gross mismanagement, it nearly took the the entire tabletop roleplaying hobby with it, and probably would have if games about sexy vampires hadn't stepped in to fill the void. The transformation was so rapid and complete that by the mid 1990s, the popular stereotype of the roleplayer had shifted from a bunch of highschoolers rolling dice in the GM's mom's basement to a bunch of oddly dressed weirdos hanging around shopping mall food courts pretending they were in Interview With the Vampire.

And that's the thing I wonder about. If or when D&D trips over its own dick again, unless it manages to tank the entire hobby this time around it's almost certainly not going to result in the flowering of diversity in game design that many folks in the indie sphere are hoping for; more likely, we'll simply shift from one weirdly specific dominant paradigm of What Tabletop Roeplaying Is to another, equally weirdly specific dominant paradigm. What's it going to be next time?

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Have you played DIE : The Roleplaying Game?

By Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans

OUR 600th POLL!

DIE, as seen in the comic by the same name, is about normal people getting transported into a TTRPG. Each character class (called paragon) uses one of the standard polyhedral dice: The DICTATOR: a bard with teeth, plucking heartstrings as often as they snap them. The FOOL: rushing into battle with a smile on their face. As long as they don't think too hard, it'll all go well. Probably. The EMOTION KNIGHT: fueled by a sacred emotion, they lose themselves in it. If they feel it strong enough, they can kill gods, and even ideas. The NEO: a cyberpunk rogue, most adventurers want gold, but they need it. The GODBINDER: clerics and demonologists, using favours and making deals with the gods of this world. The MASTER: the world is a game, and every game has rules. It's up to them to bend it. The landscape of the ttrpg gets shaped by the characters' psyches, and the ultimate choice has to be made unanimously: stay in the game forever, or return to the real world. Dead players get no vote.

(God I wish i played this, it's been on my list to play for too long)

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