probablyevilrpgideas

[probablyevilrpgideas]

New rule: if youre rude to customer service workers you're not allowed to jerk off to my blog!!!

[probablyevilrpgideas]

There's also the time that Dahmer nearly got caught, save for the self-preservation instinct of a man who wandered into a park or something just hoping to do some making out with his date, literally stumbled over a body, and instead of investigating what his for hit, decided "hike's done, let's go home"

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Fantasy dwarfs who take on a cosmonaut aesthetic as they mine deeper. A subterranean realm that is more akin to solid space than dirt and rocks. Massive projects to build new rocket drills that can withstand the crushing pressure and sublimating heat of ever deeper delves.

Mining gear that looks more like sci fi cosmonaut equipment than anything real world miners use.

Autonomous constructs used for deep earth exploration, with names like Curiosity and Voyager, but in ancient formal dwarven, or named after legendary dwarven heroes.

Constructs *built around* the skeletons of those dwarven heroes to carry their souls into the vast unknown depths of earth.

[probablyevilrpgideas]

Great and now there's this. Theres truly no room for an ounce of complacency this is a direct attack on queer creatives.

Here's a link to the whole thread for more context

[probablyevilrpgideas]

There are actually a lot of rules to magic.

Like yes, there's no rules, but if your takeaway from that is that there's literally no rules, then I think you missed the larger conversation about the specific ways in which there are no rules.

What "there's no rules" means is that there is not one universal set of rules that applies to every practitioner.

It means that nobody gets to act as an authority on what the rules are for everyone else.

It means that if you show up on somebody else's post saying "the first rule of witchcraft is that you must only use magic for good" you will probably (and deservedly) be told to fuck off.

What "there's no rules" does NOT mean is that there are literally no rules. There are SO many rules. People just work within their own set of rules.

Some rules come with the territory of working within a specific tradition.

Some rules are set by entities that practitioners work with, and might be quite specific to each individual.

Some rules are like laws of physics. They define the mechanisms by which magic works within a paradigm, and what the limits are on what it can do. A magical practice consisting of "I can do literally anything," is typically a practice that hasn't had a lot of genuine thought put into it. I have yet to meet anybody who can literally turn invisible or fly.

Some rules are more like a personal code of ethics.

So, when you burst into someone else's post to announce that there are no rules, you might not be told to fuck off quite as quickly as if you turned up to impose your personal rules on other people, but you are essentially signaling that you do not understand the concept of rules within a magical practice.

Disclaimer: some people are going to be obnoxious and make their own posts about how everyone else should be following their rules, and while it might be tempting to correct them, in my experience these people tend to get 0 notes, and you're more likely to give them the exposure they desire by starting a flame war. When they find that followers don't come flocking to them, they eventually get bored and give up.

[probablyevilrpgideas]

The more I think on it, and I know this greatly differs from what people have come to expect in recent years, but to me a TTRPG with no adventure modules is like booting up a video game and finding out the devs didn’t make any levels. Like I wanted to play this but I guess we’ll have to wait until someone in the group, who may have never played the game before, spends a not-insignificant amount of their free time in the level-editor throwing something together for us to play.

[probablyevilrpgideas]

[probablyevilrpgideas]

infiltrating the castle treasury dressed as a maid and dramatically tearing off the uniform to reveal my scoundrels garb, and that I had somehow been wearing a hood and mask the whole time. they are not visible under my baggy pants and boots, but I am still wearing the stockings, despite having clearly torn them off with the rest of the uniform

[probablyevilrpgideas]

Demons and monsters that torture people because they feed on human suffering are so dumb. People are suffering everywhere my guy go literally any place and take a deep whiff.

[probablyevilrpgideas]

English added by me :)

[probablyevilrpgideas]

What's your opinion on FATE? I don't think I've seen that one from you yet. Any good/unique FATE recommendations?

Fate is ultimately a well-designed game that simply at the end of the day doesn't quite do what I want out of a game. I own a bunch of Fate books, I have spent a lot of time thinking about all kinds of cool campaigns I might want to run with it, and so on, but ultimately there's just something about it, which has very little to do with the actual design of Fate, that makes my brain not grab onto it.

I think part of it is simply to do with the level of abstraction Fate operates on. I love a wide variety of games, but I tend to prefer specificity. D&D has very specific rules for what happens when a dwarf hits a goblin with an axe. Rolemaster has extremely specific rules for what happens when a dwarf hits a goblin with an axe. Hell, even though Apocalypse World doesn't have goblins, even its mechanics are heavily tied to a specific type of fiction.

And I know an important part of the equation with Fate is that it provides a combination of creative freedom and a strict mechanical structure. It's just that in my theory of roleplaying games as "engines for turning words into numbers and those numbers back into words," while I feel Fate is a really good game when it comes to the numbers, I feel it could do more when it comes to the words, y'know?

Having said all of that, I still think it's a great game for studying. It is mechanically solid and I think as far as toolkit systems go it is one of the best ones, and I think there are many principles that could be taken from it into other games. But I think I'm also just not the target audience for Fate as is.

[probablyevilrpgideas]

Neanderthal tools might look relatively simple, but new research shows that Homo neanderthalensis devised a method of generating a glue derived from birch tar to hold them together about  200,000 years ago—and it was tough. This ancient superglue made bone and stone adhere to wood, was waterproof, and didn’t decompose. The tar was also used a hundred thousand years before modern humans came up with anything synthetic. After studying ancient tools that carry residue from this glue, a team of researchers from the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen and other institutions in Germany found evidence that this glue wasn’t just the original tar; it had been transformed in some way. This raises the question of what was involved in that transformation. To see how Neanderthals could have converted birch tar into glue, the research team tried several different processing methods. Any suspicion that the tar came directly from birch trees didn’t hold up because birch trees do not secrete anything that worked as an adhesive. So what kind of processing was needed? Each technique that was tested used only materials that Neanderthals would have been able to access. Condensation methods, which involve burning birch bark on cobblestones so the tar can condense on the stones, were the simplest techniques used—allowing bark to burn above ground doesn’t really involve much thought beyond lighting a fire. The other methods involved a recipe where the bark was not actually burned but heated after being placed underground. Two of these methods involved burying rolls of bark in embers that would heat them and produce tar. The third method would distill the tar. Because there were no ceramics during the Stone Age, sediment was shaped into upper and lower structures to hold the bark, which was then heated by fire. Distilled tar would slowly drip from the upper structure into the lower one. The resulting tars were all put through chemical and molecular analysis, as well as micro-CT scans, to determine which came closest to the residue on actual Neanderthal tools. Tars synthesized underground were closest to the residue on the original artifacts. “[Neanderthals] distilled tar in an intentionally created underground environment that restricted oxygen flow and remained invisible during the process,” the researchers wrote. “This degree of complexity is unlikely to have been invented spontaneously.”

[probablyevilrpgideas]

So, what im gathering is that all the theater people who only got into dnd because of Critical Role should play Fate instead?

Hmmm, I'm not sure if I would put it like that because I think it might have implications that would actually do a disservice both to those people and the game itself. Fate is a good game for those who want a game that has systems for effectively turning the fiction into mechanically relevant keywords on the fly and it has a very solid rules base for this, but this comes at the cost of specificity. I think the game would best serve a group who wants an extremely tight and rigorous framework for their mechanics but is okay with coloring in the fiction themselves. To me the issue is that the specific way Fate achieves this is by ultimately making many elements of the fiction interchangeable, but that is sort of the price we pay for having that degree of abstraction.

[probablyevilrpgideas]

is it fair to say that many people use "roleplaying" exclusively to mean "doing improv"?

It is, yeah. Like, a lot of people essentially use the word “roleplaying” to mean “the improv stuff that happens between rules interactions.” And for stated reasons I tend to think it’s a bit silly, because like the rules still played a role (heh).

Like, when I put on my extremely funny goblin voice and say “Check it out, I’m Goblin Steve,” that’s of course roleplaying, and really good roleplaying. But sometimes that above interaction leads to the GM saying “So is Steve trying to distract the guards? Yeah, he should make a Bluff check.” And that’s also roleplaying.

In fact, a lot of what people call “roleplaying” in the context of RPGs isn’t just improv, but it’s what we call “the fiction.” The fiction is the fake stuff that happens in the fictional reality of the game that the mechanics are there to arbitrate. But even that isn’t extricable from the mechanics.

Anyway, my personal opinion is that it’s best described as a feedback loop of mechanics and fiction, not mechanics and roleplaying. Mechanics and fiction are both part of roleplaying and both facilitate it.

[probablyevilrpgideas]

Personally, as a player, I would take that as a challenge. I'm sure I could pick a race that allows me to raise uncomfortable questions about what counts as cannibalism.

...So no Cannibalism?

[Check out the trailer and wishlist Mandrake on Steam!]