sunnypsychopath-blog

[sunnypsychopath-blog]

my utopia

[sunnypsychopath-blog]

Yes, but actually no.

At the same time, when you encourage people to question the science, you get people with no knowledge on the subject whatsoever questioning the peer-reviewed and strongly scrutinized papers, instead believing the YouTuber who used a couple Big Words™ dropped into a pile of wild misinterpretation that is meant to sound plausible for the average person. They are selling you their charismatic lies and they might sound better than a scientific paper that is 90% technical words and statistics that need context.

Ask questions and listen when an expert explains it to you. You might not understand everything. And that's okay. Some stuff is really complicated. Some things are so complicated people devote their entire lives to studying them.

"Do you own research", says the anti-vaxxer claiming vaccines change your DNA and kill people. "Question everything." says the person believing that 5G hurts your brain and turns you gay. "Question the science!" screams the person who hasn't thought of questioning a word from a preacher. They want to tell you not to trust science because they conflate science with lies.

Trust the science and question the science are not mutually exclusive. You just need to be aware that science isn't a stagnant monolith.

Question science, but don't think your questioning is better than an actual scientist's whose entire job is to question the science in their field of study.

Ask questions. Listen to answers. Science IS questioned already all the time.

Science responsibly.

[sunnypsychopath-blog]

So one thing that seems to get overlooked in a lot of the discussions around the current state state of D&D, the OGL changes, etc., is why it's D&D 5e that accrued such an mass following - not Pathfinder 2e, not previous versions of D&D, not any other OGL game.

Part of it is, of course, brand recognition. Part of it is "right place, right time" for the nostalgia cycle. But imo there's more to it than that.

At least to me, 5e seems to hit a surprisingly good sweet-spot between a bunch of conflicting trends in TTRPGs.

It's crunchy enough that you can optimise and build around cool combos and synergies if you want to, but also,

It's rules-light enough that it's very easy to pick up and learn for new players and GMs.

The balancing is robust enough that it mostly feels fair and yet flexible enough that it's easy to mod with homebrew content without breaking anything (as long as you understand the basics of bounded accuracy and action economy).

It's got enough of a default setting that you can just pick up and play without needing to build a whole world of your own, but also,

It's setting-agnostic and genre-agnostic enough that you can easily world build your own settings, as long as you're happy for it to be high magic and use the D&D-style magic system.

For all the "just try another system" posts I've seen - and for all the other RPGs I've played - I'm yet to find another system that works so damn well as both an entry point to the hobby and as a fairly robust "default", in the sense that while in many cases there will be some RPG that's better suited for a particular game, it's very rarely the case that there's any kind of game you simply cannot play in 5e without a little tinkering under the hood.

I adored playing Pathfinder 2e, but the simple truth is that I played in two campaigns for the better part of 2 years and I still don't feel like I have a strong grasp on all of the rules and tags and nuances of the system, and it's so thoroughly balanced that I never felt confident doing any homebrew for it because I was worried I would accidentally break something. (I also have more fundamental issues with the play feel of the game - I dislike action economies that punish movement, and I also dislike the way that a lot of the feats and magic items seem to amount to minor "number get bigger" rather than being able to do something new - but these are more personal judgment issues and there are also many points that I feel Pathfinder 2e gets more right than 5e, and you can actually see a lot of those in the bits that WotC is shamelessly stealing for OneD&D.) I would absolutely recommend PF2e to experienced players looking to try something different, but I would never put it in front of a new player who'd never touched TTRPGs before.

On the other end, there are plenty of systems that could work as good introductions to the hobby, even ones with a lot of brand recognition - your Call of Cthulhu, your Vampire: The Masquerade, etc. - but most of these are so thoroughly embedded in their setting and/or genre that they just do not have that capacity to work as a robust default, as a system you can pick up if you're not sure which system would be best for your game and you're feeling too lazy to check (or too broke to buy new books!). They're also fairly limited to being played by people who enjoy the particular genre they are designed for, and that can also just reduce their general mass appeal.

So it's not as simple as "try another game" - while it's very true that there are players and GMs who suffer unnecessarily trying to cram their game into D&D rules when another system would work better, and it's very true that you'll get more out of the hobby in the long run if your do diversify your systems, it's equally true that 5e serves a very particular niche which no other system has managed to satisfy to the same degree.

Which brings us back to the OGL

and one thing that I think a lot of people seem to be missing in the #OpenD&D campaign: any victory we get here is only a temporary concession.

Hasbro is a big international company deeply embedded in neoliberal capitalism. It wants da money. It's primary prerogative is constant growth - a constant increase in profit. D&D - TTRPGs generally - are not good profit making machines. It is entirely possible with D&D for one person to buy three books and then run weekly sessions with a group of six people for four years without ever giving another penny to Hasbro.

From a corporate perspective, this is a Bad Thing™. From a player perspective, it is a Good Thing™.

We already knew before the OGL 1.1 announcement and leak that Hasbro were worrying about D&D being "under-monetized". The move to make D&D more "monetized" would partially mean expanding into new media forms - more books, more toys, more TV shows and movies - but it also means finding more ways to wring money out of the player base.

Given the company's clear focus on D&D Beyond, it seems likely to me that the main direction for this will be a move towards increasing amounts of subscription-only content, which everyone who wants to use the content will need to individually pay for (as they also see DMs being the main people who pay for content as a "problem" to be "solved"), likely associated with attempts to suppress alternatives - e.g. one of the OneD&D announcements seems to be an attempt to push their own VTT, which in part explains why VTTs are specifically targetted in the proposed OGL 1.1.

All that said, it seems very likely that OneD&D is being set up to be much more player-hostile than 5e was.

Through this lens, it's pretty clear that part of the point of the OGL 1.1 changes is to try and force a captive audience. The one thing which would absolutely sink WotC/Hasbro's plans for an increasingly hostile but increasingly profitable D&D space would be someone doing a Pathfinder to 5e - that is, creating an alternative system that has all of the merits of 5e, potentially with a number of improvements, but is provided without the constant profiteering and hostile environment created by WotC/Hasbro's monetization policies. The changes to the OGL are an attempt to pre-emptively prevent any such alternative.

As such,

even if we get the OGL 1.1 decision reversed in the short term, we should expect WotC/Hasbro to try and pull the exact same BS down the line.

It could be months - a revised OGL 1.1 that claims it fixes the complaints people had but doesn't. It could be a year. It could be several years. But they will try and pull this again, for one very simple reason: the popular backlash to this decision may prove that people hate it, but it also proves that for a lot of people, they don't have anywhere else to go.

If people felt like there was a viable alternative to 5e, they would've just jumped ship on mass the moment the OGL 1.1 was leaked - and sure, a lot of people did that, but a lot more people didn't. So while the player base are showing an excellent display of solidarity in face of WotC/Hasbro, they're also half-acknowledging that they do have us just a little bit cornered. We're stuck in this room together.

So what can we do?

Well, signing the #OpenDND open letter and making a fuss about the OGL 1.1 changes is a good start.

However, even if we win the fight over the OGL 1.1, this is only a temporary victory - and we need to start looking to build a serious alternative structure to take power back from WotC/Hasbro.

The smallest way to do this is to avoid using the OGL if you can - get proper legal advice on this, but from what I can tell, a lot more of the 5e system would fall under noncopyrightable material than the OGL/SRD lets on. One lawyer even went as far as to say the original OGL actually gives up rights to material you could've potentially used. If you're making third party content and it only uses noncopyrightable material from 5e, simply release it without the OGL, and then WotC will be unable to pull the rug out from under you.

Of course, the ideal would be for someone to do a Pathfinder and release an alternative to 5e - something which is largely compatible with 5e and third party 5e materiesl, which captures the main merits of 5e (as outlined above), but which is released under a Creative Commons or similar open license, something which irrevocably guarantees the rights of third party content creators far more robustly than the OGL ever did.

This would require walking a fine line - Pathfinder, after all, is an OGL system, so if you were hoping to circumvent the OGL entirely you'd have to work a lot harder to make sure your system only overlapped with 5e/OneD&D in its noncopyrightable material. And that's in addition to the actual difficulty of, y'know, building an entire new TTRPG system from the ground up (or at least from a little above the ground).

But in the long run, creating a really open alternative to D&D - one which was a genuinely community collaborative effort, and which was guaranteed for third party creators under a robust and reliable license... well, it would be an absolute game-changer. (Especially if you could get the content creators and third party authors who've really driven the 5e boom on board, though that in itself is a whole other issue!)

I am aware that Kobold Press are already talking about creating a new system which they describe as "available, open, and subscription-free" (see here), and that could be one direction to keep an eye on in this regard. That said, while I will be keeping my fungal feelers pointed at that project, I would warn that any D&D alternative developed by a corporation and not released under a sufficiently robust open license could easily run into the exact same problems a decade down the line - or worse, be bought out by WotC/Hasbro and folded into the same hellscape that D&D is becoming.

All told, the response of the wider D&D and TTRPG community to these proposed OGL 1.1 changes has been very encouraging, but I feel like our sights are still too narrow - and if we want to avoid this becoming a perpetual war of attrition between WotC/Hasbro and the fans, we really need to be willing to think bigger, and consider more drastic measures to guarantee the future of our favourite game.

[sunnypsychopath-blog]

[sunnypsychopath-blog]

The chair metaphor

It's not mine, I've just heard it, but I wanted to share, because it's splendid.

So, imagine that the goal of your life in society is to build a chair. Everyone's building one.

Some get parts for ye ol' standard IKEA chairs with full instructions. Some have some luxury chairs passed down from generations. Some get nothing and have to scrape for stools and bits and pieces. Some get non-standard chairs, like a car chair or an armchair, and they are looked at weirdly, but a chair's a chair, right?

So imagine you're getting parts, you're building that chair that everyone expects of you... when you start to realise that the parts you have are not parts of a chair at all.

Faced with that, you have some choices. You can bend and break those parts, like a horrible display of DIWhy worthy of 5minutescrafts, making it a chair against what it is. You'll be unhappy, trapped in that rigid contraption you've made a chair, sitting in a throne of bleeding wood, but at least it'll be a chair. Sitting there might kill you, like a death by a thousand cuts, and you might find that whatever appliance it was supposed to be, now it can't do its job. You have a chair, yes. It's killing you with every second, but at least you have one. You're just like everybody else.

Others don't - or can't - adhere to these rules and instead, sneakily, slowly build whatever they have. Maybe they don't know how to cut wood, or they've missed some of the instructions on how a chair is supposed to look, but they're stubbornly building whatever they got, hoping that in the end it'll turn out to be a chair.

Imagine you're working on this "chair", but with each part it's more and more clear it's not a chair at all. You're putting final touches on it, and get comments at how weird your chair is. Everyone's supposed to have a chair, so you can't have anything else, right?

So you're faced with a choice again. You look at your table, or bookshelf, or computer, or treasure chest, or whatever that is, and you can either pretend it's a chair or come clean.

And it's hard, since there's the pressure. Everyone expects a chair from you. So you grit your teeth, and you smile, and you say "Look at my chair! Isn't it awesome?" while sitting on an aquarium. "Can't you see I'm a person just like you, I have my chair here, everything's fine!" as you bounce on an inflatable ball. "Sure, my chair is kinda weird, but you can accept me, right?" you're trying to hide the desperation in your voice, because they might realise at any moment that it's not a chair at all. But they don't. They're so used to their chairs that they never thought that anyone could have anything else.

And there's the well-meaning people, who nod and say "that looks uncomfortable... Maybe you should change your armrests to better ones?" and they think they understand - after all their armrests were uncomfortable also before they switched theirs. But what they cannot comprehend is that you can't switch armrests on a bookshelf. "If you don't like it, maybe you can add a couple pillows?" "thanks," you say, "I'll get to it." you say, while knowing that no pillows will work on a bouncy ball.

And there comes a moment in your life when you've got enough pretending. When you start to understand that others don't understand you. Maybe you've met some people who unapologetically have their picture frames on display on their shelves. Maybe you've met people who ride around wildly on a skateboard or you can see someone just like you - a person with an aquarium, feeding the fish with a smile while your tank stands empty, and you start to understand that the "chair" is not the only thing that exists. There's more out there.

At this point you climb down that uncomfortable perch, look at your furniture and start using it the way it was supposed to be. You start to understand what it means.

You start to understand yourself.

And when a person with an actual chair comes along, takes a good, long look at your bookshelf that has filled with your favourite novels or your bed with freshly washed sheets, or your aquarium full of fish and asks "are you sure you're doing this right?"

You just smile, and say: "Of course. Just look at my chair."

It's perfect.

I got a bookshelf. What do you guys have?

[sunnypsychopath-blog]

Ever watched "The New Guy"? I was like, ok, a stupid comedy. Never before watched past 40 seconds. Now I'm like...GARTH?!

Did anyone else notice Garth in Big bang theory orrr…..

[sunnypsychopath-blog]

THIS IS SO AMAZING I WANT ONE!

Meanwhile in Calais, France. #steampunktendencies Thanks Pierre Fournier #steampunk #steampunkart #art #fantasy #lamachine #calais #france #dragon

[sunnypsychopath-blog]

The image hasn't loaded and I still don't know which one you mean

Is Balthazar still available? My second choice would be Gabriel. Thanks!!! ILY!!! :)))

My handsome sarcastic favourite angel is free but he’s all yours now!

join my new spn fam?

[sunnypsychopath-blog]

A quick reminder Misha isn't short... He's just filmed amongst giants!

The hight difference tho

[sunnypsychopath-blog]

YOU

hot tip: bisexuals, pansexuals, and other people attracted to more than one gender are still queer

even if they are in a relationship a cis person of a different gender

because, hey, it’s still a gender among the many that they can be attracted to

they are not “betraying the cause” or whatever shit just because they are in a relationship that happens to make them appear straight

because they ain’t straight

[sunnypsychopath-blog]

It probably isn't going to be in Poland at all WHAT DO I DO?!?!?! Oh, wait. I'll just watch it on a website

i also love supernatural but season 12 doesn't come out in the uk unTIL JANUARY I CRYYYYY

oh nO it probably isnt out here either in many months but i’ll just watch it on some website so lol

[sunnypsychopath-blog]

Must be those polish genes ;)

Jared Padalecki is Destiel trash.

Jared Padalecki is Samstiel trash.

Jared Padalecki is Ackles×Collins trash.

Jared Padalecki is Jensen trash.

Jared Padalecki is Misha trash.

Jared Padalecki is Moose Jokes trash.

Jared Padalecki is one of us.

All hail Jared Tristan Padalecki.

[sunnypsychopath-blog]

I want the one saying “Yes I like to read books” so I don’t have to repeat it ten times a day!

[sunnypsychopath-blog]

Hot chocolate, with a dash of peppermint, whipped cream, snuggled in a soft comfy blanket resting against Dean, who is reading Cas's favorite book to him. Poor guy's been hurt enough.

Sounds good to me, yes!

[sunnypsychopath-blog]

Yes, exactly! Pour vodka for this young man/woman speaking wise words!

Please FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY let us find out about what Naomi was talking about with the whole, “You’re the famous spanner in the works. Honestly, I think you came off the line with a crack in your chassis. You have never done what you were told. Not completely.” I NEED THIS IN MY LIFE

[sunnypsychopath-blog]

Sometimes I really don’t mind if Destiel becomes or not canon. There are thousands of diferent worlds and realities where they have found each other and They fall in love in any way possible, they love each other, they fight, they die, they have their happy ending, they don’t. They have sex, they kiss. No one can take this away from me, any hate can reach this.

[sunnypsychopath-blog]

“you can’t ship them they’re not in love!”