magicturtle

[magicturtle]

All that AND a bag of chips.

not even JRR Tolkien, who famously developed the concept of the Secondary World and firmly believed that no trace of the Real World should be evoked in the fictional world, was able to remove potatoes from his literature. this is a man who developed whole languages and mythologies for his literary world, who justified its existence in English as a translation* simply because he was so miffed he couldn't get away with making the story fully alien to the real world. and not even he, in extremis, was so cruel as to deny his characters the heavenly potato. could not even conceive a universe devoid of the potato. such is its impact. everyone please take a moment to say thank you to South Americans for developing and cultivating one of earth's finest vegetables. the potato IS all that. literally world-changing food. bless.

[magicturtle]

I think they would be mystified by the floating-head idol who is always slipping on slippery floors, diving into shallow pools, and crossing streets. Especially because the only time he’s not in danger is when he and his wife are calmly showing you where the bathroom is.

Imagine alien archaeologists in the distant future trying to make sense of the fact that our culture has a specific, highly distinctive visual symbol which is principally found on a. containers of radioactive material, and b. the doors of children's bedrooms.

[magicturtle]

Orbital Utility Ship by Edouard Groult

[magicturtle]

Dude, you guys know someone got a tattoo of that!?

I just wanted to say thank you to @magicturtle for the Void Saga campaign. I was not ready to finally reach the end after listening since 2011 as I packed to move away to college, and I was not prepared for your touching sendoff as you closed the final session of the final season, which I fell drastically behind on as my adult life got very complicated. I must have listened to the first few seasons at least a dozen times, the anchor that got me through some of the hardest moments of my life. I'm very much looking forward to exploring the rest of the catalogue, but for now I have to dry my eyes after a very ugly cry.

I was sold on the show after just the first minute of episode #110; a microcosm of the chemistry of the cast and the promised scale of the story. How could this not be one of the most important pieces of media in my life.

[magicturtle]

Thank you for this. Always great to hear that Critical Hit has made a difference in someone's life. I'm glad you enjoyed the end of the Void Saga, and I hope you enjoy the other stories we have played since then, and the ones we're about to play (hello, future people!).

Thanks for listening!

I just wanted to say thank you to @magicturtle for the Void Saga campaign. I was not ready to finally reach the end after listening since 2011 as I packed to move away to college, and I was not prepared for your touching sendoff as you closed the final session of the final season, which I fell drastically behind on as my adult life got very complicated. I must have listened to the first few seasons at least a dozen times, the anchor that got me through some of the hardest moments of my life. I'm very much looking forward to exploring the rest of the catalogue, but for now I have to dry my eyes after a very ugly cry.

I was sold on the show after just the first minute of episode #110; a microcosm of the chemistry of the cast and the promised scale of the story. How could this not be one of the most important pieces of media in my life.

[magicturtle]

Encumbrance, Exhaustion, Diseases and Individual Material Components moving on to the next edition unanalyzed.

It's often remarked how D&D 5e's play culture has this sort of disinterest bordering on contempt for actually knowing the rules, often even extending to the DM themselves. I've seen a lot of different ideas for why this is, but one reason I rarely see discussed is that actually, a lot of 5e's rules are not meant to be used.

Encumbrance is a great example of this. 5e contains granular weights for all the items that you might have in your inventory, and rules for how much you can carry based on your strength score, and they've set these carry capacities high enough that you should never actually need to think about them. And that's deliberate, the designers have explicitly said that they've set carrying capacity high enough that it shouldn't come up in normal play. So for a starting DM, you see all these weights, you see all the rules for how much people can carry or drag, and you've played Fallout, you know how this works. And then if you try to actually enforce that, you find that it's insanely tedious, and it basically never actually matters, so you drop it.

Foraging is the example of this that bothers me most. There's a whole system for this! A table of foraging DCs, and math for how much food you can find, and how long you can go without food, etc. But the math is set up so that a person with no survival proficiency and a +0 to WIS, in a hostile environment, will still forage enough food to be fine, and the starvation rules are so generous that even a run of bad luck is unlikely to matter. So a DM who actually tries to use these rules will quickly find that they add nothing but bookkeeping. You're rolling a bunch of checks every day of travel for something that is purpose built not to matter. And that's before you add in all the ways to trivialize or circumvent this.

These rules don't exist to be used, that is not their purpose. These rules exist because the designers were scared of the backlash to 4e, and wanted to make sure that the game had all the rules that D&D "should" have. But they didn't actually want these mechanics. They didn't want the bookkeeping, they didn't care about that style of play, but they couldn't just say, "this game isn't about that" for fear of angering traditionalists. And unfortunately the way they handled this was by putting in rules that are bad, that actively fight anyone who wants to use that style of play and act as a trap to people who take the rules in good faith.

And this means that knowing what rules are not supposed to be used is an actual skill 5e DMs develop. Part of being a good 5e DM is being able to tell the real rules that will improve your game from the fake rules that are there to placate angry forum posters. And that's just an awful position to put DMs in (especially new DMs), but it's pretty unsurprising that it creates a certain contempt for knowing the rules as written.

You should have contempt for some of the rules as written. The designers did.

[magicturtle]

My dog when he hears me open a bag.

[magicturtle]

Favour Jonathan

Has made documenting her hairstyles an art form all its own. Her ongoing series A Statement of Pride juxtaposes the formality of photo identification with striking and intricate braided hair styles in honour of her Nigerian heritage.

[magicturtle]

Vagrant Story pushed to its logical end.

Inadvisable framing device for a Disco Elysium style skill system #137: you're a robot and each of your components is both individually sapient and monomaniacally focused on solving problems using it, like your left arm thinks everything can be solved by doing left arm things.

[magicturtle]

The one thing I enjoyed about working retail was meeting so many people who were younger and older than me, and getting a chance to talk to them, especially other latines. Things are different, things are the same, that’s he point.

[magicturtle]

“Liberating women from islam” is how liberals channel their islamophobia. “Left wing” grifters know they can use (a shitty version of) feminism to play their audiences, this is why so many TERFs are liberals otherwise. Islamophobia and transphobia are forms of bigotry the left allows themselves to have.

US conservatives think knecapping and disrespecting 51% of the population is a viable plan. Skyrocketing poverty and plummeting birth rates, be damn.

[magicturtle]

New Lancer video out now, License Level 6: https://youtu.be/OMWWqFISbIY?si=wruFsHIHLS0yjhXd

[magicturtle]

[magicturtle]

Youtube Thumbnail: a guy looking idiotically confused by a vhs tape

Video title: A Problem Like Maria SOLVED!

imagine being a film director and constantly meeting people who say "oh i love movies! i watch the sound of music every day. i hate julie andrews and musical numbers though so i just mute the movie whenever she's talking or there's a song and invent my own dialogue about the italian mob"

[magicturtle]

PRISMAXIA, My setting book for Pirate Gonzalez's BEACON game is now available for purchase. This is my first ever pro supplement! This is a great buy if you want to support latinos in RPGs! pirategonzalezgames.itch.io/prismaxia

[magicturtle]

The next Wilds returning monster needs to be a guardian so I can get a little more value from my nourishing extract runs. I’m new to the franchise, but I vote for this guy.

[magicturtle]

all the nice old ladies in the office that time I wore a suit to work.