#3E-Showing Off

[rayshippouuchiha]

Okay but in the fem tsuna that accidentally becomes a assassin with class 3e

That would be such a great crossover au!

Also would her guardians change, would she have multiple for each element? Takeshi would probably learn more off of her lol.

But! Does Tsuna do the same thing that nagisa does? Is it a snake or lioness? Or lion?

I do think she'd end up with different guardians for the simple fact that by the time Reborn shows up she's not only been through everything with E Class but she's become the class baby/princess. So you best believe that these gremlins she spent that year with (who spent the year learning and growing in the dim, flickering light of her sealed flames that eventually became an inferno) have kept her tucked close in their lives.

I could possibly see her ending up with multiples for each element, with E Class being a bit older and having their own lives too before canon catches up to Tsuna.

I do think she'd be more aligned to Nagisa's snake style than anything lion-related by the end, just given the nature of their training and what she's been through. Or maybe she is something cat-like but more subtle in nature than canon.

[thydungeongal]

Off anon this time. I sent the “player as product” ask. i want to minimize discourse on my blog lol but I am sauntering in. Like you said, the D&D player is the product. Hasbro/WotC’s goal, as you’ve stated, is to sell D&D products. In order to sell the products, you have to have someone to sell too. Unlike other things—food and clothes, for example, as well as toys like dolls—D&D requires its consumer to be primed. You can’t start consuming D&D they want you to without prior knowledge. You can buy pretty dice and do whatever you want, because they’re open-ended toys, but you can’t buy the Monster Manual and “play” with it because it’s a specialized “toy” for a specific sort of play.

I started with 3e. Back when I first got into D&D, it was through word of mouth (literally, new kid in school said I should play) and my prior exposure was looking at the cool pictures in the books at Barnes and Noble in the big towns (grew up buttfuck nowhere). There was minimal marketing in the mainstream. Compare with now: TV shows and actual plays and Critical Role romance novels and children’s books. Hasbro wants to saturate us with D&D, so it is easier for us to buy their shit. I went home a couple of years back, and I was floored that Walmart had D&D books and dice.

However, as I joined the ranks of 3e players, I also learned about and was exposed to other games. I was a lil Lovecraft fan and now I understood that Call of Cthulhu existed and scratched my itch since I had the prior knowledge to do so. Some biker dude ran RIFTS at my college. D&D didn’t have to be the only entry into RPGs, either. You meet folks who started with VtM, RIFTS (!!!), Star Wars, all kinds of stuff.

Now, D&D is considered the entry point AND the end point. Hasbro wants it to be our measuring stick. Not even old editions of D&D either, just its current milieu. It’s done that by using consumers as products, much like Amazon and Google has. That’s my thesis, because that’s the tea, sis.

Definitely agree with this as someone who started roleplaying around the same time and for whom 3e was her entrypoint into D&D (albeit not RPGs in general).

[ttrpg-smash-pass-vs]

Just throwing all the 5e books up here, and the other editions, since that was like 90% of requests last time. The further into PF2e we go the weirder we get, and you start getting things like the wereboar and more original dragons.

Now that I've found confirmation that Kobold Press is fine with people reading/showing the contents of thier books on streams and videos and such, I feel comfortable using them here. Speaking of which, I'm combining thier books because I ran out of options and like...come on. They're going to need all the help they can get in this vote.

Bright side for those into things other than D&D, all the 5e ones are short and there should be room for more off the wall options afterward

EDIT: I know it probably doesn't seem fair that D&D has its vote split between 80% of the options. But D&D consistently gets 70-80% of the votes when we run polls, so it's a lot more fair than you'd think.

[beansprean]

Oh, y'all thought the fight had started already?

My Familiar’s Ghost part 51

Masterpost

New pages on Patreon!

(ID in alt and under cut)

ID: 1a. Close up of bat Nandor from Guillermo’s POV, crushed into a wall and held there by Guillermo’s hand. One of Guillermo’s claws has pierced the membrane of his wing and Nandor is clutching at his fingers in terror, staring up with wide, panicked eyes. 1b. Reverse shot of vampire Guillermo from Nandor’s POV, holding him down with his left hand as his right rears back, claws bared in preparation to strike. He is grinning maliciously, relishing in a new kill. 1c. Wide shot from the side as there is a sudden screech of tires and crash of metal. Guillermo and Nandor freeze in place and whip their heads toward the viewer and the front windows of the Panera.

2a. Wide shot from outside, on a roadway running up a hill and parallel to the Panera. A blue hatchback car with a license plate that says ‘whoops’ and a bumper sticker that says ‘how’s my driving? 1-800-KISS-IT’ has crashed into a pole with a yellow traffic light and is smoking, front end crumpled and passenger window shattered. The pole is slowly falling sideways, towards the Panera parking lot below. 2b. Close up as the traffic light, yellow light still lit, smashes into the asphalt, cracking the green lens and ripping the blinders off the red lens. 2c. Repeat. The traffic light settles on its side, mostly intact, and flips to red. Unfocused without the blinders, red light pours freely across the ground. Nearly invisible red text behind reads “stop stop stop stop”. 2d. Repeat of 2c, Guillermo and Nandor still frozen in place but now bathed in red light. Guillermo is narrowing his eyes suspiciously at the scene outside and Nandor nervously flicks his eyes over to him, assessing.

3a. The entire Panera is now flooded in red. Shot from behind the pillar Nandor is pinned to as his leg, now human shaped again, kicks forcefully upward, sending Guillermo flying backward into the opposite wall, demolishing the sheetrock and destroying a wooden chair in the process. Debris flies everywhere. 3b. Waist up of Nandor, back in human form, as he stands himself up, his inner arm bleeding. He snarls angrily and points an accusing finger at Guillermo, saying ‘You want to fight? Fine! The truth is, I have been upset with you, too!’ 3c. Reverse shot of Guillermo struggling out of the ass-sized hole he made in the wall, fangs bared and deadly gaze focused on Nandor. Nandor continues from offscreen: ‘You get so angry when I don’t know things about you but then you don’t tell me anything!’ 3d. Close up on Guillermo’s hand closing around a broken wooden chair leg. 3e. Close up on Nandor’s hand closing around a wooden chair leg as he accuses, ‘You keep secrets!’

4a. Full body of Guillermo lifting himself from a crouch in the debris left by the wall, a long stake with a shattered pointy end clutched in his left hand. His eyes, like a predator, never leave Nandor. Nandor keeps talking: ‘You assume to know what I am thinking and how I will react to things and what I will say - well you don’t.’ 4b. Knees up of Nandor as he steps away from the crushed pillar to a more strategic place against the light, holding his own long stake point-up like a readied sword in front of him. He stares seriously at Guillermo and says, ‘You hear, but you never listen, Guillermo.’ 4c. Extreme close up on Nandor’s glaring eyes trailing a slash of red light as he makes a quick turn, shouting, ‘Well you will listen to me now!’ 4d. Full body wide shot on an orange and yellow starburst background as Guillermo, both hands on his makeshift sword, takes a backswing at Nandor. Nandor’s sword meets him in the middle as he swings it down single-handed in perfect form. Their eyes never leave the other’s; they’re both in the fight now. /end ID

[caption]

Bonus ID: shot through the shattered front windshield of the crashed car to show Laszlo in the passenger seat and Colin behind the wheel, both covered in broken glass and peeking out from behind inflated airbags. Colin asks, glasses askew on his face and grinning in his usual unflappable way, ‘How was that, Lazzo?’ Laszlo smiles patiently over at Colin and asks, ‘Marvelous work, my boy! Now, what possessed you to aim for this particular traffic signal?’ Colin replies, ‘I dunno, just had a feeling. Can we go for that Escalade next? I really want to see how sensitive that pedestrian detection feature is.’ The engine continues to smoke, and there are a few wisps of familiar blue light trailing away. /end ID

[ladiemars]

I love Nor and her giant sad puppy eyes, I would love to know more about her

thank you!! have a hastily drawn nor ft. her giant sad sopping wet puppy eyes:

+ a giant nor lore dump below the cut જ⁀➴

➸ her whole character was inspired by that one textpost that’s like, “characters with both the abject terror and desperation of an animal that knows it is cornered and destined to be eaten. you just can't get that kind of angst out a successful hunter” and this quote by james harriet: “if having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.”

➸ she’s is the product of a union between a drow woman and a deep imaskari man. for those who don’t know, the deep imaskari are a human subrace (from 3e) that have stone-like skin and hair that’s white or black. because that’s nor’s human half, most people assume she’s completely drow upon meeting her, since did not inherit any features from her father that would make her look less like her drow mother.

➸ the deep imaskari live longer than other humans—up to 550 years—so nor ages at a rate more akin to drow and elves than half-elves or humans. nor believes she’s currently around seventy years old, though she could be off by a decade or two. she’s not sure when she was born and has long periods without human contact. she really isn’t sure how much time has passed.

➸ she has no given name, but eventually ended up going by the name ratcatcher, which is what the locals in baldur’s gate called her. halsin is the one who names her nor shortly after they meet, which is the elven word for “passion” and also “run.”

➸ this excerpt from one of my fics sums up her urchin/orphan to urban ranger/beastmaster pipeline pretty well:

➸ around the age of twenty, nor grew to resent humanity so much that she decided to leave baldur’s gate and live in the forest with only animals for company for half a century. (this is when she lost track of time completely.) in the forest, she became an expert in survival, attuning her ears to the slightest twitch in the air, to every noise and smell. she lived in a cave and slept curled up beside velvet on a bed of willow leaves. the events of baldur’s gate 3 is the first time in decades that she’s had social interaction.. and it shows.

➸ she has a little wolfdog companion named velvet. (i’ve drawn him and her and halsin and scratch here). he was another half-breed who didn’t quite being anywhere, so they bonded very deeply. (fun fact: velvet killed the elder brain in my first playthrough as nor. he’s a legend in faerun now.)

➸ laezel is her bestie. they are ride or die. neither of them understand a damn thing about faerun or its inhabitants. but that also means they don’t judge each other for anything, cause they both just kind of assume what the other is doing is normal

➸ a big part of her character is her dynamic with the emperor. she gets manipulated by him so bad because he tells her everything a forgotten, unloved creature wants to hear: i need you, i’ll protect you, you’re not like other people, we’re a team, you can trust me, i want you to join me, you aren’t alone. it’s not until he begins to pressure and compel her to become illithid against her will she starts to fear him and his power over her, and after certain revelations she realizes he was using her and turns on him altogether.

➸ obviously she romances halsin. i love the dynamic of beastmaster/druid. they’re extremely well suited because they’re both such inherently good people and they bond a lot over their love for nature. they are also the only two people who can really understand each other’s animalistic quirks.

i’ve written some fics with her that you can read here if you’re interested. >:3c

[vivi-the-goblin]

*pants* usually I take like 2 and a half weeks when working on an episode, 3 and a half at most. 6 weeks while actively working at every possible time is a new one, but holy shit have things been crazy. HOWEVER!~ I've got 13 PF2e statblocks (10 being conversions) and 14 D&D 5e stats (11 conversions) to show for it! Including an animal companion in pathfinder and a very customizable one for both! Odd for me to only have one conversion from older editions but there was way too much to talk about even in current editions. I'll reply to this post in a second with the 5e ones for easier viewing. For PF2e

Deadbark Dryad/Queen (Dryads who failed to protect the forest, in hindsight I should've made this a template/adjustment)

Flytrap Leshy Graftling (Mine, ones who fused together for good)

Flytrap Leshy Thicket (Mine, Dozens fusing together in a last stand)

Living Topiary (3e/PF1e monster, like a shapeshifting hedge with a BUNCH of extra options)

Living Subshrub (Living Topiary animal companion, uses shapeshifting to distract and demoralize)

Maize Leshy (Mine, little buddy that shoots kernels and makes maize mazes)

Twig Blight (Weak little blind creatures grown from a staked vampire)

Needle Blight (Twig blights but bigger and with range)

Vine Blight (Like the other but with grappling vines)

Astral Blight (Like Vine, but glowing and stronger)

Razorvine Blight (Like Vine, but drains blood)

Tree Blight (Angry ambushing grappling tree creature)

Wood Woad (Regenerating shielded protector thing made from a gruesome ritual. Regeneration turns off by lifting it!)

[cupidbread]

DEVOTED

ANAKIN SKYWALKER X DROID! FEMALE! READER

Warnings: Smut. Sub! Anakin. Master kink. Droid!Reader.

ANAKIN has been keeping something from Obi Wan. The feeling of loneliness and desire that calls to him every night, but as a Jedi he is prohibited from acting on those urges. Which is why he came up with a solution, Anakin has always had a knack for repairing and creating droids since he was little, this skill is of great use in this situation.

He hissed in pain as a wire lightly electrocuted his pinky. After some hard work and sweat, he twists the screwdriver one last time and switches the droid on impatiently.

"Commencing project R0-3E" the droid comes to life and blinks.

"Whoa..." he lets out a gasp of disbelief.

"Assessing... Anakin Skywalker. Booting completed. What would you like me to do, master?" That sent a rush of blood straight to his cock. Master, huh.

"You've programmed me to be anything and do anything you want, Master. Say the word and I am a slave at your feet." She whispered seductively. His skills truly are impressive if she learns this quickly, he thinks.

"Undress. Get onto the bed for me." He commanded, loving the fact that he was in charge for once, not Obi Wan or the Council.

"As you wish sir." R0-3E purred. She crawls onto the plush bed, showing off her round ass with such fatness, you wouldn't guess she was a droid. He unbuckles his pants like a desperate teenager and crawls in behind her.

"Fuck... I've had dreams of you, sweetheart. No one can take you from me now, no one will have to know. You're mine and mine only aren't you?" He breathes stroking his thick cock from behind her.

"Yes Master..." He groans.

"Master, I like the sound of that, I'm gonna make u scream it tonight, until you're too dumb to do anything but bounce on my cock, yeah?" R0-3E whimpers in pleasure of his words.

The automated lube inside her is released at the sense of lust in the air, making her cunt wet.

"This might hurt baby, just hold on for a bit huh" He muttered, drunk on lust. Brain fogging up making up unable to think of anything but her... He quickly shoves his thickness into her, whimpering at the sudden warmth and wetness.

The Jedi thrusts deeper into her, hands gripping her hips, as he uses her moans and mewls as fuel to go faster.

Anakin feels pathetic, desperately rubbing himself into her, mumbling nonsense while the room fills with moans from her and him. Bodies tangling with sloppy thrusts.

"M'gonna cum, m'gonna..." His eyes roll back as he falls onto the bed, thrusts never stopping, pulling the woman droid onto him.

"That fast? I never took you for such a pathetic desperate man, unable to even satisfy a droid, thank heavens you've never encountered a real woman interested in you." R0-3E smirks, finding his lust and stamina increase at her words.

"S-stop it. I'm in charge." He struggles out while she rides him like it's the last thing she'll ever do.

"Oh yeah? Is that why you're laying under me, as if you're nothing but a toy for my pleasure? You want to be used like this. You've always craved it, you're just a disgusting man in need of some attention you never got." She chuckles, knowing he is so close to tipping over the edge.

"P-please... I c-cant-" He shoots out ropes inside of her mechanized body. Tears are falling down his face due to the overwhelming pleasure he's never experienced before.

The droid comes to a stop and strokes his hair while he overcomes his pleasure.

"Aren't you pretty when you cry..." she whispers, a mind full of an unknown feeling her processors can't recognize.

His eyes snap to hers in pure vulnerability, "Can we just lay here a bit?" He trembled.

"Oh of course, Master. Anything you want." R0-3E lays next to him, his head moves onto her artificial breasts.

He traces her droid number, tattooed into her waist. "R0-3E sounds rather complicated, don't you think?" he sighs.

Before she gets to respond, "I think I'm gonna call you Rose. Goodnight Rose."

Just like that, he dozed off peacefully. Which was pretty funny to Rose, humans are strange like that she concluded, but rather lovely.

This was my first time writing and I KNOW IT SHOWS but please do interact sweethearts, it would mean the world to me.

My first post being a smut fic for Anakin Skywalker was not what I expected HAHA

Thank you,

Cupid xx 💋

[shunin-gumis]

As Master Joe Wishes - Track 04

Seasonal Team Event - L4mps

My parts are coming up! Thank you TLWard for letting me work with you!

Location:  HAMA House - Lesson Room

Ryui: (I don’t give a shit if that damn bear is getting targeted. I don’t, but…) 

(Whatever Toi wants is what I want. I’ll grant any of his wishes, even if I have to go through hell and back for it…!)

Sakujiro: Ryui-san, you’re not bowing low enough! The most respectful bow is at a precise 45 degree angle, you must bend until you can see your feet clearly! 

Ryui: Ugh… 

Sakujiro: Keep going! 56, 57… 

Netaro: I can’t do this anymooore~

Toi: Me neither~

Nagi:  My lower back is already waving a white flag because Ryui won’t recite the commandments…. 

Ryui: Aaaaaahhh!! Fuck!! 

Sakujiro: Oh dear… I suppose I can offer you a short respite from your little “bowing” punishment. 

Nagi: Oof… 

Chief: I see now… So that’s why Sakujiro-san is giving you special training on servitude? 

Toi: I have a feeling this is gonna lead up to a dramatic and heartfelt scenario!

Netaro: Perhaps the Suspension Bridge effect will give birth to many many new couples! 

Netaro and Toi: Ooh~~~~! 

Nagi: Chief, this might get dangerous, so it’s best if you don’t get involved. This kinda work that involves the 3Es is better suited for someone like me… 

Yodaka: I believe they were, “𝓔mbrace without” looking out of place, “𝓔xposure to danger is OK”, and “𝓔asily counted on.”

Chief: Oh… To be honest, I’m extremely worried about you guys, but unfortunately, Kafka called me in earlier… I’ll need to leave for an overseas business trip tomorrow. 

Ryui: (He probably figured this was gonna be a dangerous job… I’d do the same if I could.)

Yodaka: Not only do we have the police, we even have Danny, the brawn of HAMA Tours, on our side. I’m sure it will be fine.

Daniel: You can bet I’m gonna apply for that worker’s insurance and paid leave after this.

Ryui: —There’s something I just don’t get.

Ryui: We were only asked to escort her, I don’t see why we gotta dress up as maids or butlers and blend in as the manor’s staff. 

Sakujiro: I must disagree.

Ryui: … Go on.

Sakujiro: It would be quite unnatural to have multiple unknown faces wandering about the manor out of the blue. 

Nagi: Um, then why can’t we act as security guards instead?

Sakujiro: We must not give away that Joe-sama is the treasure. Introducing security into the picture would only bring unwanted attention.

Netaro: Indeed… Having guards around would only rouse suspicion. 

Ryui: Tch… 

Sakujiro: I’m certain you understand the necessity of your roles. Now then, let us take a short recess. We shall continue your punishment from the 58th bow.

~~~

Sakujiro: I apologize for disturbing you all during your break time, but I have something that requires your attention.

Nagi: ? Sakujiro-san, you look pretty excited?

Sakujiro: Fufufu… Was I perhaps too obvious? Please, take a look at these.

Toi: Wow…! It’s a sketch of butler and maid uniforms! 

Sakujiro: The moment I heard that you would all be working at a manor for your next assignment, inspiration welled up within me. Should you find these designs acceptable, it would be an honor to sew them up for you. 

Yodaka: These iterations honor the classic designs of old. I think they’re splendid.

Toi: But, I’m a maid? Not a butler?

Sakujiro: I believe being a maid would suit you better.

Ryui: You got that right. But… The hell you putting me and Hachinoya in dresses for too…? 

Sakujiro: I believe being a maid would suit you better.

Netaro: Lookie!! Daa’s gonna be a maid too!

Nagi: Woah, I feel like that’s gonna show up in my dreams, somehow.

Daniel: Whatever… I’d rather wear a maid dress than have to bow down one more time… 

Ryui: An old man like you should know how to stand your fucking ground! There’s no way in HELL I’m wearing a dress! I’d rather bite my tongue and let it fucking bleed out!

Toi: Ah, if Ani-sama is biting his tongue off then I will too…!

Netaro: Count me in~

Nagi: That’s a lot of “Tongue-cut Sparrows”… *

Yodaka: With this response… I’m sorry to say, but we should probably shelve that idea… 

Sakujiro: Understood… Boohoo… 

~~~

Sakujiro: Good work, everyone. Please keep in mind what you learned today. I expect you to become the absolute most perfect servants.

Location: HAMA House 2nd floor

Ryui: (Ugh… My back’s stiff as a board…) 

Sakujiro: Ryui-san, a moment, please.

Ryui: What? I ain’t doing any more bows.

Sakujiro: No, I didn’t stop you for such a reason… I have something I need to share about Joe-sama.

Sakujiro: As I recall, Joe-sama was actually a present that the late madam Brunhild had received from her father at a tender age. 

Sakujiro: She must have been treasured greatly as a close companion.

Ryui: …..

Sakujiro: When a person senses that they are not being valued, that is when they experience true anger. The duty of a servant is to find the true meaning hidden within their master’s demands, and act accordingly.

Ryui: And? What’s your point?

Sakujiro: Please keep in mind that if you perform insincerely, the other person will know.

Ryui: Yeah yeah, thanks for the warning, or whatever. 

Sakujiro: ….. 

~~~

Location: Manor - Large Parlor

Hiramei: Good morning everyone! We’re counting on you all for this mission! 

Hiramei: Please try to act natural! Samejima-san and I will be checking in on you guys every once in a while!

Ryui: ( –Is what that guy said, but… )

Location:  Manor - Bedroom

Ryui: What was next again, making the bed? How’s it even getting messed up when there’s only a plushie in here… 

Ryui: ��The fuck! The heck you loungin’ around for, old man?

Daniel: My back… it hurts… It’s as stiff as a board… Give me a break already… 

Ryui: That’s what you said last time when you were lazin’ about on the sofa! For fuck’s sake, you’re a lost cause—

*loud tumbling noises*

Ryui: … Who messed up this time… 

Location: Manor - Large Parlor

Joe: My goodness! What in the world happened for the room to get to this state!

Toi: Wha- The laundry room and corridor are totally covered in foam...!

Nagi: I’m sorry… It’s my first time using a washing machine like this, so I put in a random amount of detergent and clicked some random buttons, and this is how it ended up… 

Ryui: Ah… Hachinoya’s technology impairment rears its ugly head… 

Yodaka: Joe-sama, pardon us. We’ll clean this up right away, so please overlook this. Nagi, could you bring in the cleaning supplies?

Nagi: Joe-sama…I apologize for my carelessness… 

*loud tumbling noises*

Joe: W-What in the world is it this time!?

Location: Manor

Netaro: Hmm. I thought I could grow some fresh veggies for dinner, but I seem to have injected a cell-positive agent instead of a growth promotant… 

Tomato Monster: GRRR—!

Toi: Wah! There’s a cluster of man-eating tomatoes with fangs surrounding us!

Joe: The manner in which they gnash their sharp fangs is giving me a fright! I-I fear for my life!

Yodaka: Pardon us, we will promptly harvest them. Netaro, please bring a shovel and a trowel.

Netaro: Roger that! Joe-sama, sorry about this!

Ryui: (Damn, can’t believe Natsume could clean up this mess so fast… Glad we have him around.)

Ryui: By the way, why’s Joe been on Toi’s back this entire time? You’ve even got him using a baby sling… 

Toi: Hehe, I’m Joe’s nanny right now! Joe-sama, are you comfortable on my back?

Joe: As expected of my “nursemaid.” I am feeling quite comfortable indeed!

Toi: Ehehe~ I’m glad to hear that.

Ryui: (Well, it’s all good if Toi’s happy with it.)

Ryui: Joe, you better not work Toi too hard, got it?

Joe: …..

Joe: My, whyever could it be that you are the only one to show me such disrespect… 

Note:

Nagi is referring to an old Japanese fable "Shita-kiri Suzume" or "The Sparrow with the Slit Tongue"

[alpaca-clouds]

The thing that bugs me about Cazador

Allow me to ramble about a thing that really bugs me about Cazador and his character design.

Let me start out with the fact, that it is super iffy that Cazador is the one recognizable east asian character in the entire game. At least from what I came across. And, you know. It is iffy if you take a minority and make their only representation the "sadistic vampire who wants to sacrifice 7000 mostly white people to become a god". I hope I don't have to explain that.

And yes, technically speaking... yeah, Karlach is technically also East Asian. With just one problem: Her being red-skinned and having the make-up very much hides this fact. Like, I did not realize this until I saw the mod that removed the make-up from the companions.

But outside of the basic issue with the trope... Well, look. I do not think that the folks Larian were like: "Hehe, we will use this character to show how evil the Asians are!" or something like this. But the game very much shows that there was a lot of internalized biases. And be it just in the fact, that we barely come across non-white characters in the entire fucking game. All non-white characters are basically tokens.

And before someone comes in with: "Faerûn is based on medieval Europe!" First off: "Shut up." Second: Going by official DnD Lore Faerûn is a super diverse place, where you will find all sorts of Asian, Arab, and Black people. I mean, just look at the DnD movie, where they made an effort to have half of the cast be non-white. Like, the Faerûn that Larian depicts is basically the Faerûn of 3e, not 5e.

And then... Well, when it comes to Cazador, then there is the Early Access design.

Now, this is actually where WotC stepped in and was like: "Yeah, you cannot do this." Officially by explaining that elves do not have facial hair. But I do imagine that someone at WotC actually looked at this design and was like: "... Do they realize that this is Fu Manchu?"

Because yeah, this design is simply just Fu Manchu. And for those who are not aware: Fu Manchu is a character popular in pulp fiction of the early 20th century, that arose mostly from Yellow Peril stereotypes.

He was a Chinese magician, who was up to all sorts of evil schemes, which suspiciously often involved sacrificing white people (mostly white women) to evil gods or demons. He made appearances in all sorts of media back then, including movies (where he obviously was portrayed by white actors in yellowface) and some off-brand Sherlock Holmes novels that were not written by Doyle but other writers.

Fu Manchu was also what the original Mandarin in the Marvel Comics was based on.

This is one of the Renditions of Fu Manchu in one of those off-brand Sherlock Holmes stories.

And here is the earlier Mandarin design:

And, like, I am sorry. But that stuff leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

Again, I do not really think that this stuff was done on purpose. My best guess is, that Cazador was either based on the Mandarin, or on some of the other "Chinese Magician" villains that some American Kung Fu movies put into their media in the 70s and 80s.

But I also think there was nobody at Larian who did any sort of sensitivity consulting when it came to the inclusion of non-white characters.

[featherwurm]

How to Karlach's and Tav's tail lengths and width compare? Are they the same, if one shorter/longer, is one thicker/thinner, do they have any scars etc :)

They both have pretty average tails overall - the length of their outseam plus about a foot or so - which for both of them is quite long. While I know Karlach shares the in-game model height with the tall fem tief of about 6', in my heart (and drawings) she is the same as her character brief of 7' (putting Zatavia at 6'9".) Tav's tail is a little longer than Karlach's, tapering to a thinner tip because she doesn't have the same skin webbing that Karlach does, and she just has a lighter build overall. Karlach's tail tip is more typical in shape - although Tav's tail isn't unusual in that regard - it's like having an attached or detached earlobe.

How I, personally, think BG3 tief tails work, with the caveat that I'm of the opinion that tiefs should still be able to be weird as hell despite Hasbro standardizing them a lot for marketability (compare 3e to 5e). You'll sometimes see cartilage on both sides (for a more classic devil 'point') and more variation on proportion of skin, making for heart or club shaped tail tips too. Similarly you might more rarely see bifurcation, or multiple cartilage ridges. I think of their tails as being about as dexterous and strong as a pinky finger - able to wrap around things and hold them, but not strong enough to pick up heavy things, hold their whole body, wield a weapon, or do fine, detailed work unless specifically trained for. With minimal fat distribution the tail tends to be the one of the last places on the body to show significant weight gain or loss.

Karlach's tail has scars in similar proportion to the rest of her body - lots of old, well-healed cuts and scratches, but nothing exceptional. Some probably have stories attached, others are just in the milieu of 'was fighting in hell for 10 years straight after being a bodyguard and a rambunctious kid.' Nothing particularly stands out as exceptionally bad.

Tav is similar, though less scarred overall, with markers of 25 years traveling as a wandering monk after 10 years of monastery training and a similarly active childhood. The one significant one is that she's missing the very tip of the hook of her tail - which she accidentally bit off as a toddler. She had gotten into a fight with it, as kids do, and the tail lost. Her poor mum came home to a bloody kitchen, husband, and daughter, although Tav was easily soothed after the initial shock and flailing. There was a surprisingly large amount of cleanup - tail wounds bleed like a bitch.

I know I draw them all over the place but this is because I operate on a principle called vibes, but that's my personal feelings on size and shape and such!

[myfandomrambles]

C-PTSD & BPD Thirteenth Doctor pt. 3

(Doctor Character Study part 3E.3) E.1, E.2

An analysis of The Doctor as having Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) along with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). If you read my ADHD & Autistic doctor posts you will notice some symptoms overlap mostly with impulsivity. I chose to put C-PTSD and BPD as one post because symptom overlap is strong, and the disorders are highly comorbid

[Thirteenth Doctor will be in 3 parts due to length. Find the whole thing on AO3]

13th Doctor 3: Relationships, Grief, Neurodivergence Overlap & Conclusion

Her struggles with agitation, anxiety, hypervigilance, identity issues and her alienation from those close to her directly affect her relationships. These relationships are very hard for Thirteen, she cares very much but has a disjointed affect and struggles to take in information related to social connections. To some degree, this overlaps with her other neurodivergence. (TV: The Woman Who Fell to Earth, TV: Arachnids In The UK, TV: Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror, TV: Fugitive of The Judoon, TV: Can You Hear Me, TV: Eve of The Daleks, & Comic: A Little Help From My Friends)

The Doctor still shows a need for connection and to combat abandonment fears. But her continuous struggle with letting them in. In TV: The Woman Who Fell to Earth she attempts to leave without having any of her companions with her. Not openly inviting people who share a stressful event with The Doctor to become companions.  In TV: Arachnids in The UK we see how she is still anxious to have them come along, even if she clearly was saddened by being alone and then happy to be invited to go with Yaz for tea and them wanting to come with her. 

“Doctor: Proper goodbye this time.

Ryan: About that.

Graham: Do we have to? You see, Doc, the thing about grief is it needs time. I don't want to sit around my house waiting for it to go away, ‘cos that house is full of Grace and it makes it so much harder. But, er, being with you and seeing all these things out there, it really helps.

Doctor: What about you?

Ryan: Do you really think I want to go back to working in that warehouse? No way.

Doctor: Yaz, you wanted to come home.

Yasmin: I know. I love my family, but they also drive me completely insane. I want more. More of the universe. More time with you. You're like the best person I've ever met.

Ryan: You're pretty awesome.

Graham: You're all right, I suppose.

Doctor: I can't guarantee that you're going to be safe.

Yasmin: We know.

Doctor: Do you? Really? Cos when I pull that lever, I'm never quite sure what's going to happen.

Ryan: That's okay.

Doctor: You're not going to come back as the same people that left here.

Graham: But that's all right. I think that's good.

Doctor: Be sure. All of you, be sure.”

It's easy to see how this relates to previous Doctors who lost many companions in upsetting endings even if they ended up okay in the long way round. But those losses and Grace dying make inviting people to go with her anxiety provoking, even if she loves having them with her. 

Her need for connection and anxiety when alone even when she has been struggling with connection can be seen in In TV: Can You Hear Me we see her consider jumping in time to be able to be with her friends instead of staying with her anxiety and loneliness. She also continues trying to show off while on her own. Showing off her knowledge and prowess as a hero I believe supports The Doctor’s egoic state and is a way to push down her anxiety. (TV: Kerblam!, TV: The Witchfinders, TV: Spyfall pt1, TV: Praxeus, TV: Can You Hear Me, TV: Village of The Angels, TV: The Vanquishers, TV: Legend of The Sea Devils, TV: Power of The Doctor, Prose: Molten Heart, Prose: The Secret in Vault 13 & Comic: New Beginnings )

In Comic: Hidden Human History the group ends up involved in a time situation connected to a podcast which taught people about history. When they end up in places where the companions know about it before The Doctor notices she becomes slightly grumpy and Yaz and Ryan note that she is jealous of the podcast. This I believe references the way The Doctor generally wants to be admired and how being able to guide them through history is how she seeks connection. 

The Doctor feels a responsibility for her companions. Examples show through in many moments where she puts herself between her companions and the person trying to hurt them or tries to be alone to fix the problem by herself. (TV: The Woman Who Fell to Earth, TV: Arachnids In The UK, TV: Kerblam!, TV: Resolution, TV: The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos, TV: It Takes You Away, TV: Orphan 55, TV: The Haunting Villa Diodati, TV: Ascension of The Cybermen, TV: The Timeless Children, Prose: Combat Magicks & Comic: Old friends)

Ryan Sinclair and The Doctor become friends saying as much in TV: Revolution of The Daleks

“Ryan: So, when we're done with this Dalek problem, you find out about your own life. Confront the new, or the old. And then everything will be all right.

Doctor: Will it?

Ryan: No doubt. What?

Doctor: Thank you, Ryan, for being my friend.

Ryan: Thank you for being mine.

Doctor: Always”

This scene shows their affection for each other, another example is Thirteen telling Ryan’s dad off for him missing Grace’s funeral when she knows Ryan wanted him to be there. This scene shows growth in Ryan being more open with people, something he learned through the courage and compassion travelling with The Doctor brought out of him. The comments Ryan makes have a  good portion, reminding The Doctor change is inevitable and not always bad. But him telling her that everything will be alright feels a bit hollow as we know It won’t be okay, not during any of Thirteen’s subsequent stories. Even when we get to Fifteen he is willing to acknowledge the facts of their history but feels they are all alone. And we know adventures and traumas never really stop for The Doctor. However It shows Ryan’s empathy, kindness and willingness to help friends, which are part of his motivation for leaving the TARDIS. 

Graham O’brien and Thirteen have an interesting connection in the sense that Graham is one of the older companions. Most of the companions start travelling with The Doctor in their teens and twenties, making the way he viewed The Doctor a bit different than many of the younger companions. They share the trait of being grandparents and having lost partners. To some extent Graham does see her as a fully adult in a way he doesn’t with the other companions. An example is during TV: Can You Hear Me where he tries to seek emotional support from The Doctor which she struggles to return. By the end of his time as a companion he clearly loves travelling, adventure and new places. He only stays because he loves Ryan and won’t let him be alone, a trait that I believe Thirteen does respect, and they share a sweet moment. 

“ Graham: we do get Aliens in Sheffield”

One of the most core relationships Thirteen has is with Yasmin Khan. Yaz spent the most time out of any of the companions or ‘fam'. She is with Thirteen from the first moments till the start of Thirteen’s regeneration into her next body. They are very good at working together as time goes on being able to be in tandem. Yaz gains a lot of self-assuredness, changes in her goals and even uses phrases like ‘result’ (TV: Praxeus). The Doctor shows her care for Yaz, teaching her to fly the TARDIS and giving her the hologram when they get separated (TV: The Halloween Apocalypse & TV: Survivors of The Flux)  Yaz does her best to keep The Doctor on level with her and not hiding or lying but never loses her belief in The Doctor. This ends with Yaz saving The Doctor's life. (TV: Power of The Doctor)

Why they do have a tight bond this relationship often falters when The Doctor is in her worst headspace. Her anxiety, agitation and tendency to hold her emotions come out as manipulative behaviours.

“Yasmin: What are you doing?

Doctor: Checking all systems for malfunctions. Also, quick MOT check on my mind. Had a little glitch earlier.

Yasmin: What sort of glitch? You didn't mention it.

Doctor: You know what, Yaz? I don't mention everything.

Yasmin: No kidding.

Doctor: Are you being mardy?

Yasmin: What sort of glitch?

Doctor: A glitchy glitch. What does it matter?

Yasmin: Because I thought we were friends.

Doctor: We are friends.

Yasmin: Then why won't you let me in? What's going on with you?

Doctor: Nothing's going on with me.

Yasmin: Don't lie.

Doctor: Have we not had a good time together? Since Ryan and Graham left, have I not taken you to amazing places?

Yasmin: Of course, but...

Doctor: I thought I was showing you experiences of a lifetime.

Yasmin: You're hiding something about him [Karvanista]. About why you tracked him down in the first place. Tell me.”

(TV: The Halloween Apocalypse)

The love The Doctor has with Yaz is often threatened by these behaviours. Telling someone who's upset with you that they should be happy since you have done good things together invalidates emotions and perceptions. Yaz is rightfully upset here. Even though Yaz does love travelling with The Doctor it appears to make Yaz feel very left out. There is the above reference to lying but it is very clear that The Doctor lies as a protective measure so she never has to let herself feel. 

Their romantic tension is slow and stressful for both of them. Yaz is afraid and won’t face her emotions, not even fully accepting the connection is romantic. Yaz does start to notice they are special to each other commenting she has a similar feeling as another person in romantic love (TV: The Haunting Villa Diodati) They are forced to look at their feelings by Dan Lewis. (TV: Eve of The Daleks) Dan had lived for a long time with Yaz both with and separate from The Doctor making their connection stronger than even his relationship to The Doctor. Dan notices Yaz’s feelings kindly, gently offering that she should understand herself. Whereas with Thirteen he is much more of a ‘don’t play with her feelings’ style comment. He knows The Doctor is aware and is choosing not to do anything about it. 

An interesting connected situation can be read in the Comic: A Little Help from My Friends The Doctor goes back in time to where Martha and Ten are in the 60s waiting for an option to come for them to escape. Thirteen can with time watch that Ten was being unfair and overall not treating Martha well. She can see the infatuation Martha is experiencing while refusing to notice Yaz’s and her hiding things from her companions again. 

The Doctor promises more than once that Yaz and her will be able to communicate about what happened, on a beach, since TV: The Vanquishers. An above-mentioned quote from that episode has her promising to tell her everything, The Doctor wants to fix a lot of the loneliness and alienation she had fallen into when trying to cope with her trauma, a behaviour which started in the beginning but only got worse over time. 

The Doctor tells Yaz she wants her to stay but that they won’t be able to have their relationship exist in a new type.The major parts of this conversation appear in TV: Legend of The Sea Devils. 

“Doctor: ...you know what I said earlier about not being a bad date? Well, dates are not something I really do, you know. I mean, I used to. Have done. And if I was going to, believe me, it'd be with you. I think you're one of the greatest people I've ever known. Including my wife.

Yasmin: Your what?

Doctor: Ah. Wasn't going to mention that. It was a long time ago. I was a different man back then. But the point is, if it was going to be anyone, it'd be you. But I can't.

Yasmin: Why not?

Doctor: Because at some point time always runs out...”

&

“Yasmin: You okay?

Doctor: Yaz, I can't fix myself to anything, anywhere or anyone. I've never been able to. That's what my life is.

Yasmin: Yeah, of course.

Doctor: Not because I don't want to because I might. But if I do fix myself to somebody I know, sooner or later, it'll hurt.

Yasmin: My nani says, courage is knowing something will hurt and doing it anyway. Mind you, she also said it's the definition of stupidity.

Doctor: Can we just live in the present? Of what we have, while we still have it?”

There would be more kindness in this if she more explicitly gave Yaz a chance to leave. It also shows the kind of thinking Thirteen has, she already loves Yaz and finds her attractive, but can’t bring herself to make a more clear declaration of commitment. I think this comes from the trauma of what happened with people like River Song as well as her dealing with her trauma in a way that she doesn’t facilitate relationships. Her knowing this regeneration will end soon due to the prophecy of Time I believe also fuels her not wanting to do anything new and just enjoying what she has left. The fear is palpable in Thirteen and it causes her and Yaz hurt.  

It’s perfectly understandable and fair of her to say she can’t be in a romantic relationship, no one owes anyone romance. But the way she goes about it puts Yaz in a difficult situation, knowing your friend does return your feelings but can’t do it and still wants to have the same relationship you had before the sharing of feelings. Yaz is not very put off by this as they continue travelling and she goes out of her way to save The Doctor when The Master attacks. It’s clear Yaz is okay with it, but I believe it still shows difficulty communicating feelings and how fear is part of what keeps The Doctor’s relationships struggling. (TV: Power of The Doctor)

Yaz and The Doctor both deal with trauma from their childhoods. Both what The Doctor Can’t remember (TV: Timeless Child & TV: Survivors of the Flux) and the alienation The Doctor does remember from her childhood (TV: The Empty Child, TV: The Girl in The Fireplace, TV: Listen, TV: Heaven Sent/Hell Bent, Prose: Power to the People, Audio: Must-See TV). We also have before Thirteen the myriad traumas when she was young in timelord years. Having companions die of others taken from them, being exposed to violence and whatever version of why they had to leave Gallifrey. 

Yaz references that she dealt with severe bullying and anxiety as a teen. Understanding how trauma and loss can make you physically ill in TV: The Witchfinders, 

“Yasmin: I think I know what it is that's making you sick. I had it at my school, where I am from. When Izzy Flint turned the whole class against me. Every day I'd wake up, feeling this... dread. Fear.

Willa: How did you get rid of it?

Yasmin: I didn't. I just took it, had the year from hell. When I say hell, I don't literally mean hell, I mean it was really awful. And I told myself when I got bigger, I'd stand up to the Izzy Flints of this world.”

They also have similar experiences when it comes to facing both having a history of running, and depending on how you read their stories, suicidal thoughts. (TV: Twice Upon A Time & TV: Can You Hear Me) While not directly discussing the need to be 'anywhere but here' animates both of their experiences of being in the TARDIS. Connecting threads of their arc include both the alienation Thirteen often felt from her friends causing friction and the happy moments like when they are reunited in TV: The Vanquishers and Yaz carrying Thirteen back to the ship in TV: Power of The Doctor.

The Doctor and The Master always have a complex and dramatic connection and that is true during Thirteen’s era with Dhawan!Master. They start with a lie and a ruse on The Master’s part which is a common Master behaviour, he’s having some degree of fun while Thirteen seems pretty over it. She is willing to act very cruelly to The Master who appears as an Indian to the Nazis. This happens after they have their requisite back-and-forth about their history. 

“Doctor: When does all this stop for you? The games, the betrayals, the killing?

Master: Why would it stop? I mean, how else would I get your attention? When did you last go home?

Doctor: What do you mean?

Master: I took a trip home, to Gallifrey, hiding in its little bubble universe. Not sure how to describe what I found. Pulverised? Burned? Nuked? All of the above. Someone destroyed it. Our home, razed to the ground. Everyone killed. Everything burned.

Doctor: You're lying”

This conversation is normal Master/Doctor back and forth, it is interesting how virulent they are with each other in TV: Spyfall pt2 compared to the way Twelve and Missy interact. The most coherent view is that due to not knowing Missy wanted to be with him, The Doctor could feel abandoned. The Master claims to want to kill The Doctor during TV: Spyfall pt2 but then leaves a message for The Doctor to find, they both know at this point either one of them dying fully isn’t likely. They always find some way to survive. This sets up The Master's part in the Timeless Child. 

During TV: Can You Hear Me we have the legend of these two space creatures who are eternally linked and always come back together and cause mayhem when they are there and when they leave. I believe this has an analogous sentiment to The Doctor and The Master due to both being linked so strongly it can never fully be split and the fact that they fight with each other across planets often leaving pain behind them. 

When The Master brings The Doctor to Gallifrey she originally treats The Master as more of a nuisance before the more distressed anger. The Master attempts to hurt her and damage her sense of self. He is angry about what was done to him, but now there are no Galifreians to take it out on; he directs it at The Doctor for the crime of being part of him. This is interesting as The Doctor and Master over time have linked their sense of self to each other. But this time there is also a power imbalance, they are no longer both renegades The Doctor is now special. The fact that the kind of special she is came with horrendous abuse doesn’t seem to compute for The Master. He fundamentally believes that he can break her and make her hurt. In some ways The Master is correct, he did cause her pain and confusion. But The Doctor won’t show it to The Master, they can’t. Even if as explained above, her identity was shaken by the Timeless Child story. 

We see some of his thoughts in TV: The Timeless Children:

“Master: I do believe you're appealing to my better nature. And we both know I don't have one. I'm not going to help them, and neither are you. And the history between us does mean something. It's the rage and pain in my hearts. I'm sending you deep into the Matrix to understand the truth of Gallifrey and of the Time Lords. Brace yourself. This is going to hurt.”

&

“Master: This is no time to be sleeping. Is it hurting, Doctor? I hope it's hurting because it really hurt me.

Doctor: It's all lies. None of this is the truth.

Master: For the first time in my lives, I can honestly say every word is true.

Doctor: I know my life. I know... I know who I am.

Master: No, you don't. You never have. Your life has been hidden from you.”

&

“Master: Wake up. I know you're broken, but it's all over now.

Doctor: What do you mean?

Master: When I said I killed everyone here...”

&

“Master: What have you got left anyway? You don't even know your own life. Look how low I have brought you. I have won, Doctor. You may have made me, but I have destroyed you. Become death. Become me. Come on. Come on, come on!”

(She lowers the grenade.)

Master: For just a moment there, I thought maybe. Argh. Oh, Doctor, the universe will suffer for your weakness. I'll make sure of it.”

The Master can lure The Doctor in TV: Power of The Doctor into what he wants to happen by introducing himself, the Daleks and Cybermen, something The Doctor couldn't refuse. She does her best to manage him, letting UNIT help and giving Yaz a weapon. It’s pretty intense for both of them. 

His grand plan here is to try and take her very identity from her. Breaking and suppressing her consciousness, leaving him more himself than The Doctor as their consciousness is not melding. You also have the Cyberium as a factor in the way The Master is not acting coherently with that much fracturing. But he does kill her, leaving The Doctor’s body alone and stealing the TARDIS. The Doctor has to decide to not give in to letting her mind be taken with the help of her past regenerations trying to get her to not jump into a symbolic pit. 

Yaz and Vinder are able to save The Doctor with the help of a new hologram that Thirteen gave her friends so they could receive a form of consciousness should she be unable to help because of death. The use of this and her trust in Yaz being able to fly the TARDIS and pull the best parts of The Doctor in leadership. 

The hologram was also given to Tegan Jovanka and Ace Mcshane. If you read these versions of the Hologram having The Doctor’s current memories then she was unnecessarily mean to Ace. Ace was not the person who was in the wrong for most of their situations, it was very much Seven's fault as he was much older and he even references that he thinks of her as their child. Giving some kind of back and forth that they both made bad choices would have been much kinder and more realistic. Now for pure characterization, it’s not inherently wrong, The Doctor tends to not see her relationships clearly. 

The Doctor's obsessive pain about The Master leads to her death as she stops to watch The Master die. This attack from The Master and not the forced regeneration ends up killing her. 

Connected to her relationships, is her experiences of grief. Her early time is highly steeped in loss. At the end of TV: Twice Upon a Time she lost most of what she loved. Once we get to TV: The Woman Who Fell to Earth she then is separated from her TARDIS which is her home and best friend. Of course, then we have Grace die on her watch, The Doctor does feel guilty to some degree and feels upset about her death. The Doctor stays for the funeral, putting off leaving and talks with these people she’s connected with on her loss and grief and home.

“Yasmin: Have you got family?

Doctor: No. Lost them a long time ago.

Ryan: How do you cope with that?

Doctor: I carry them with me. What they would've thought and said and done. I make them a part of who I am. So even though they're gone from the world, they're never gone from me.

Graham: That's the sort of thing Grace would have said.

Yasmin: So everything we saw, everything we've lied to people about, is this normal for you?

Doctor: I'm just a traveller. Sometimes I see things need fixing, I do what I can. Except right now, I'm a traveller without a ship. I've stayed too long. I should get back to finding my Tardis.”

The Doctor can relate to other people who have lost a lot of things which can sometimes come out as frustration but is still a part of her experiences. Seen in episodes like in TV: It Takes You Away;

“Doctor:...Cos the Solitract doesn't want a husband, you want a whole universe. Someone who has seen it all, and that's me. I've lived longer, seen more, loved more and lost more. I can share it all with you. Anything you want to know about what you never had. Cos he's an idiot with a daughter who needs him. So let him go and I will give you everything.”

During TV: Demons of The Punjab we see how she can connect with Prem and the Thijariand in the history of strong loss of home and complicated interplay with the people they do love. Self-sacrifice as part of grieving and loving also connects to The Doctor. 

In Comic: Old Friends she has a collection of items in her TARDIS that seem to relate to previous friends and adventures. After viewing the call for help she had received from the Corsair asking for help. This incident (TV: The Doctor's Wife) hurt them greatly as he realised there were no more Time Lords and that the body of their friend had been torn for parts. Remembering these events pushes her to agree to an adventure with the Corsair.

Thirteen is also neurodivergent in that she has ADHD & Autism. There are some definite overlaps. Social difficulty, sensitised stress system, anxiety, impulse control, fear of rejection and others. Generally feeling different from other people and having thoughts considered weird is quite common for people on the autism spectrum. A moment that illustrates the way being neurodivergent affects her social experience is in TV: Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror

“Tesla: You're an inventor!

Doctor: I have my moments.

Tesla: I knew it! So you... so you can understand how it feels, you know, when you have an idea and... and to make it real. I don't think there's any greater thrill.

Doctor: I couldn't agree more.

Tesla: You... you spoke of aliens. People, you know, laugh at the very idea.

Doctor: But not you.

Tesla: Well, apparently I'm not like other people. It can be difficult, you know, to feel no one else sees the world the way you do. It's like you're, er...

Doctor: Out of place.”

Her being alone in how she processes the world is shown in Tesla as also being out of place in his life, due to most likely being neurodivergent. This is deeply important in examining her character as it very effectively points out that the alienation Thirteen feels comes from her trauma, her neurodivergence and the toxic stress being different from those around her.

Thirteen will have dissociative and shutdown experiences. (TV: The Woman Who Fell to Earth, TV: Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror, TV: Ascension of The Cybermen, TV: Once, Upon Time, & Prose: Combat Magicks) This is seen strongly in TV: The Ghost Monument, when she can’t keep just keep moving forward at the apparent loss of her TARDIS she shuts down and gives in to a shutdown space even when the companions haven’t reached there first. After traumatic instances, shutdown tends to follow a fight response, like in TV: Fugitive of The Judoon and TV: The Timeless Children.

This dissociative factor interplays with hypervigilance and can play out in The Doctor in having the ability to function well in many stressful situations but it is very hard to maintain the social situations that would be best for her and her friends.

The regeneration for Thirteen is a relatively calm and peaceful one. Closes to Four, Nine or Eleven’s regenerations when it comes across as bitter-sweet. While wrapped up in so much trauma dealing with The Master, Daleks and Cybermen she takes it more in stride than others, wishing she had more time but moving to a calmer state making better final memories for her and Yaz.

“Doctor: Why's the Cloister Bell ringing?

Yasmin: Doctor, look at your hand.

Doctor: No. No. That's not right. I need more time. I want more time! Ah! You know what this means, right? Yeah? It's all right. It's all right, Yaz. One last trip. Where would you choose? What flavour ice cream?

[scene shift]

Yasmin: How many times do you think you've saved Earth?

Doctor: I've lost count. But look at it. How could you not love a planet like that?

Yasmin: I don't want it to end.

Doctor: A wise person once said to me, goodbyes only hurt because what came before was so special. Oh, and it's been so special. You, and Graham, and Ryan, and Dan. Nobody else got to be us. Nobody else got to live our days. Nobody. And my hearts are so full of love of all of you. Oh, I have loved being with you, Yaz. And I have loved being me. I think I need to do this next bit alone.

Yasmin: Let's not say goodbye.”

& 

“Doctor: Oh, the blossomiest blossom. That's the only sad thing. I want to know what happens next. Right, then. Doctor Whoever-I'm-about-to-be. Tag, you're it.”

Choosing to go one by herself comes across as a bit positive in choosing to let Yaz remember her as her and not create more stress on them. And a bit of sadness on her part, while not afraid to regenerate, I think she still feels a bit lost. 

Thirteen is a very interesting look at C-PTSD due to her showing more than one reaction over time in a more drastic way then Ten or Eleven. The fact that she appears female also causes some watchers to not be willing to view as fully ‘The Doctor’.  People paradoxically going from seeing her as too anxious and flighty [flight response] to disliking her level of anger and coldness [fight response]. 

She is a version of The Doctor who is more openly anxious while being one of the most closed-off one's when dealing with her deeper thoughts and a lot of the complexity of their psychological state. Thirteen in the early episodes it is often characterised by the fandom as being ‘healthy’ and healed, mainly due to her not having the same visible and expressed scars from the Time War. But this analysis hopefully shows that she always had clear trauma symptoms; hypervigilance, anxiety, identity issues, grief and social difficulty.

When going through her arc there are many moments where they are subjected to trauma, starting with the loss of Grace tied to her and ending with dealing with The Master and other long-term enemies. Understanding that she already had trauma as part of her core along with the layered new trauma is a full view of the characters. Looking at Thirteen through this lens is important to be able to see her motivations and everything she does.

[paperanddice]

Just a random off the cuff from going over a bunch of previous edition D&D monster books, but 4e had probably the best expanded monster manual devils. There's usually lots of passable to good demons people come up with, but devils seem to be a more difficult prospect. Just going through some examples we get:

3.0 Monster Manual 2: 8 demons, 3 devils. I'd argue that the demons are mostly so-so, the abyssal maw is pretty good and probably the only one to be carried over to future books, but at least the jovoc and palrethee have some interesting ideas, and most of the others at least aren't bad. Meanwhile, two of the devils are just awful. At least the malebranche made its way into 4e.

3.5 Monster Manual 3: 2 demons, no devils. The arrow demon feels like a devil in design, it's so weird to have a mid tier demon who's identity revolves around wielding weapons and strict military combat strategy.

3.5 Monster Manual 4: 4 demons and the demonhive as an extended Abyssal stat block, again no devils. Not the most beloved batch again, none of these ones carried forward as far as I know, but at least the demons are getting more stat blocks at all.

3.5 Monster Manual 5: 5 demons, 3 devils. At least the devils get some stat blocks this time, but the demons absolutely won in terms of quality. The adaru, draudnu, and solamith all have some solid designs, and solamith have made some appearances since. Meanwhile the gulthir is just kind of horrendous, and the stitched devil isn't actually a proper devil type and is just the creation of night hags.

4e Monster Manual 2: 15 demons, 7 devils. Numbers are still much more in the demon's favor, but design wise I think the devils are overall superior. One demon and one devil are just members of the main batches for each type that didn't show up in the first book (dretch and erinyes), but the demons get stuff like two runespiral demons, one just a higher level version of the other, it has to fill in with the nycademon, which was usually a yugoloth but they just lumped yugoloths into the demons for 4e, and overall most of the demons are less interesting than the devils. Though they do get the pod demon, so lots of points for that, love that one.

4e Monster Manual 4: 7 demons, 8 devils. First time in a suppliment monster manual we've had more devils than demons, how wild. Plus, the demons have to be filled in with the babau, nalfeshni, quasit, and the ultrodaemon (last one is a yugoloth). The maw demon makes its return from 3.0 though, so that was nice. Technically there's 2 maw demons, but one is just a leveled up version of the other (okay, fine, one extra action as well), so I'm not counting it as unique. And if I did, I'd probably have to count the 6 minions for the corruption devil, the upleveled version of the corruption devil, and both hellwasp devils, which would just put the devils further ahead. This also brings in two of my favorite devils from 4e, the rage devil and the vizier devil. Just overall a great showing for devils.

There isn't a real point to this rant, it's just kind of interesting how the design space of 4e was so much better for devils than 3.0/3.5. Stat blocks being more condensed and focused probably helped, but they could have padded out so many of the 3e era books with way more devils and demons (and they absolutely did with some of the other supplements, stuff like the Fiendish Codex books and the infinite monsters in Sandstorm, Frostburn, and all the other random books. I'm not going to go over every single book from these two eras to compare every single demon and devil, but I just find the contrast in the main monster books very interesting.

[nagisasstunningpersonality]

Comprehensive Guide For Assassination Classroom Content

Because it's pretty hard to find a straight up list of it all. Please note that whilst I believe this is accurate, I was not involved in the fandom whilst the series was active and so could reasonably miss something.

Core Content

Assassination Classroom manga as serialised in Shounen Jump. If you buy the physical volumes, there's a bit of additional content between chapters, most notably introductory character profiles.

Assassination Classroom anime (some count seasons 1 and 2 as separate entities)

Assassination Classroom Meeting Time - an animated short featuring Korosensei and Karasuma's first meeting.

Assassination Classroom Extra Curricular Lessons - adaptations of a couple of manga chapters that weren't in the show itself. I'll just link a playlist here. Fun fact this is where Nagisa gets hit by a chair (lowkey he deserved it)

Additional Content

365 Days Movie. This isn't 'canon' as it's an anime original thing. There's no official English release that I know of. Honestly the movie is mostly a series recap, and only features Karma and Nagisa in new scenes. It's only really worth watching if you especially ship them as there's only maybe 10 minutes of actual content (and most of that is just montage, you can get the gist with this)

Roll Call Book - this was published mid manga run. It's mostly just a bunch of bonus content particularly character based. No official English translation exists, but snippets are easy enough to find online.

Graduation Album - as the name implies, it accompanies the end of the manga. About half of it is an art book, but there's extra character information especially about their post graduation lives. Crucially it includes a few manga shorts which extend past the actual canon ending.

Korotan A, B, C, and D plus Korosuu. They're mostly just Assassination Classroom themed text books (Seriously. My actual university book store sold them.) Korotans are for English vocabulary, Korosuu is for maths. Notably each book also contains a light novel (sometimes these are just referred to as 'the light novels'). It is debatable how canon these are as Matsui didn't write them, but he was involved through illustrating and overseeing the writing. Korotan D is especially debated because it's post canon content set when 3E are 18, but there's a small 'it was all a dream' implication right at the end of the book. Personally speaking I take them as full canon.

Official Spin Offs

The live action movies (part one and two). They change a lot of plot so I place them more in the spin off area. Easily skippable.

Korosensei Quest Manga (otherwise known as Koro Q) - a spin off gag manga set in a fantasy/video game inspired universe. This is not canon (unfortunately) and as far as I understand Matsui isn't involved in it. There's an implication of the idea it's Fuwa's own manga creation. Overall there are four volumes but there's no official English version (though fan scans aren't hard to find).

Korosensei Quest Anime - lightly based on the Koro Q manga. This is only a short 10 episode series though, and was complete long before the original, as such only the first few episodes are actual adaptations and it starts doing its own thing. All voice cast return so that's neat.

The OVA - basically an early adaptation of the Kyoto arc. Link here. It was released in 2013 so predates the actual anime, and a lot of the voice cast are different.

White day shorts featuring Karma, Maehara, and Nagisa - posted on official website as an otome game parody for promotion. Included because they're voice acted.

The 3DS games. They're region locked as far as I understand, and there's no translation of them. You can find it dumped if you know what you're doing with emulators, I've only played a few minutes of it myself.

The app game - no longer available. It was a gatcha tie in game featuring a variety of character illustrations.

Various merch lines and related illustrations. There are far too many to list and new ones still come out sometimes.

As I said, I hope I covered everything but there's a good possibility something slipped my mind.

[talenlee]

The Nemuranai System

Alright, in Oriental Adventures‘ expanded 3e books –

Wait wait wait don’t go, hang on.

Content Warning: This is going to discuss some books that are, very simply, quite Orientalist, in the classical Edward Said sense. Not nakedly racist in a slursy way, just racist in how it simplifies cultures in the names of telling a particular form of story. If you don’t wanna mess around with that, y’know, probably want to avoid it.

Anyway, there’s this system in the Rokugan books for handling gear. Specifically, the idea is that as a character in the Rokugan setting levels up and accumulates experience, rather than going to a magic store and picking up new swords and armours that are part of an ongoing escalation of gear in a marketplace that is constantly creating an increased demand, rather that player characters themselves, by dint of being powerful and cool and renowned, start to affect the gear they’ve been travelling with the whole time. The spirits of their equipment awaken and become powerful in response to the person who owns them being powerful.

This also is transitive – if someone powerful gives you their sword with its awakened spirits, it can be a powerful item thanks to them conferring it, but not as powerful as if they had it, or if you take something off someone that was powerful, it won’t work for you and will just be a sword. This association, this effective transformation of gear into a social improvement, where you have to convince spirits in the equipment that you’re worthy of how cool they are, is interesting in that it both serves as a way to disincentivize theft and looting, but also means that player characters are going to get equipment that’s explicitly coded to them as they level up and fitting the way they want to do things.

This system for the ‘spirits of the item’ was known as the Nemuranai system, based on the word ‘nemuranai’ which I think translates to ‘not sleeping.’ I don’t know if this is a full-blown hilarious translation mistake in an early guidebook way, but it might be and I’d leave it to someone who knows Japanese properly to ask.

The number of books that were put out for 3.5 really is hard to hold in the mind. In a time when ebooks were just starting as a market, in a time when we didn’t have the same obvious massive front-end surfaces like DriveThruRPG and its subordinate DM’s Guild. The OGL came along at just the right time, in the same vein as other Web 2.0 stalwarts, to be a thing that resulted in a lot of people creating a lot of material the whole time.

Like me!

Anyway, that meant that not only were you getting unique lines for D20 like Warcraft and BESM but we also saw the rise of D20-ified existing games, like D20 Rokugan. I’ve talked in the past about how great Rokugan was because its creators didn’t give a stuff about Wizard Supremacy (even if they didn’t appreciate the scale of the problem). The D20 Rokugan books included books about handling magical spells and items, in a setting that didn’t really have a lot of those things.

And make no mistake, I do not have any illusions about what real Samurai or real Asian adventures in the same vein as the Dungeons & Dragons ouvre are. This is not really about Actual Asian Adventures, this is about the vision of Samurai adventure media made and distributed and remembered and replicated in the west. There, people aren’t questing and finding ancient swords (which is ironic because of all sorts of things to do with palingenesis), but instead, it’s about inheriting old swords. Notably, nobody kills people and takes the sword off them unless they’re someone bad.

This is what Nemuranai was trying to address.

I really can’t underscore how important your equipment was to your character in 3rd edition. Gear was so important to how a character functioned that when you built a character higher than level 1, there was a table that showed the appropriate amount of magical gear you started with. There were functions of how a character works in 3rd edition, like your access to weaponry with an appropriate set of bonuses, your ability to absorb or escape damage, and even your ability to engage on multiple platforms. Around level 9, everyone flies, and if you don’t pick up a way to fly around that level, even for a little bit, you are going to be in trouble as encounters are sculpted assuming you can handle an enemy just flying away and pelting you with ranged attacks.

What’s more, gear is so important that if you level up manually, and follow the tables that generate treasure and gear — distinct categories, make no mistake! — then you wind up with a character whose budget is larger than these characters who were made at a higher level, because you were expected to lose some money through the course of operations by things like selling gear or consumables, like potions and wands and scrolls or stuff you crafted for yourself (oh hi, Wizard problems, why are you here)?

Looting is a big part of the game, in that there’s a big pile of tables for it, but it’s also a meaningless part of the game in that as long as the DM is doling out rewards appropriate to the table. What this meant in my experience was players constructing wish-lists, hoping for particular items, or the DM using that level-by-level budget to construct a chain of items to give to the players. It’s there, I did run the game using the loot tables sometimes, but it wasn’t an interesting tool to use and it relied heavily on preloading, adding an accountancy element to the interesting thing (designing meaningful combat encounters).

And then you throw this game into a different thematic space, where ostensibly, ‘people don’t loot.’ Which doesn’t break the game, because the looting and the loot tables aren’t… that… important. The gear is, but the way you get the gear, it turns out, isn’t.

Look, Dungeons & Dragons, in every edition, is a modular game system of exclusions. There’s a body of opinion about D&D that thinks the idea that players don’t have an exhaustive, comprehensive vision of the rules, is a sign of a problem in the game, which is completely unhinged. The nature of a class system is to make it so that there’s ways the game can sequester operations. Don’t have a Barbarian in the party? Then nobody needs to track Barbarians. You’re not using the encumbrance rules for anyone? Then nobody needs to worry about them. If you are using them, they interact across all people.

There’s a vision of how this is a sign that there’s something wrong, or broken in how D&D works, as opposed to literally structural to the entire design methodology. If a thing is not present in the game, its operations aren’t necessary, and therefore, any new thing can bring its own operations with it. Now this is a design approach that is volume-heavy. There’s a reason you can print a dozen monster books and still not really have a reasonably varied ecology for a real world scale, because every one of those monsters is a discrete module that lets you pull it in and out. There’s a reason that building real estate is in a bonus supplementary book and the core rule book has optional content like ‘the fighter.’

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[kakita-shisumo]

In which I sound off for much too long about PF2 (and why I like it better than D&D 5E)

So, let me begin with a disclaimer here. I don’t hate 5E and I deeply despise edition warring. I like 5E, I enjoy playing it, and more, I think it’s an incredibly well-designed game, given what its design mandates were. This probably goes without saying but I wanted it on the record. While I will be comparing PF2 to D&D 5E in what follows and I’ve pretty much already spoiled the ending by the post title (that is, PF2 is going to come out ahead in these comparisons most of the time), I don’t want there to be any misunderstanding about my position or intention. My opinions do not constitute an attack on anybody. For that matter, things I might list as weaknesses in 5E or strengths of PF2 might be the exact opposite for other people, depending on what they want from their RPG experience.

As I said before, 5E is an exceedingly well-designed game that does an exceptional job of meeting its design goals. It just so happens that those design goals aren’t quite to my taste.

# A Brief History of the d20 RPG Universe #

I’m going to indulge myself in a little history for a second; some of it might even be relevant later, but for the most part, I just want to cover a little ground about how we got here. By the time the late ‘90s rolled around TSR and its flagship product, Dungeons and Dragons, were in trouble. D&D was well over two decades old by that point and showing its age. New ideas about what RPGs could and even should be had taken over the industry; TSR had finally lost its spot as best-selling RPG publisher to comparative upstart White Wolf and their World of Darkness games; the company even declared bankruptcy in 1997. Times were grim.

That, however, was when another comparative newcomer, Wizards of the Coast, popped up and bought TSR outright. Flush with MtG and Pokemon cash, they were excited to try to revitalize the D&D brand and began development on a new edition of D&D: third edition, releasing in August 2000.

Third edition was an almost literal revolution in D&D’s design, throwing a lot of “sacred cows” out and streamlining everywhere: getting rid of THAC0 and standardizing three kinds of base attack bonus progressions instead; cutting down to three, much more intuitive kinds of saving throws and standardizing them into two kinds of progression; integrating skills and feats into the core rules; creating the concept of prestige classes and expanding the core class selection. And of course, just making it so rolls were standardized as well, using a d20 for basically everything and making it so higher numbers are basically always better.

At the same time, WotC also developed the concept of the Open Gaming License (OGL), based on Open Source coding philosophies. The idea was that the core rules elements of the game could be offered with a free, open license to allow third-parties develop more content for the game than WotC would have the resources to do on their own. That would encourage more sales of the base game and other materials WotC released as well, creating a virtuous cycle of development and growing the industry for everyone.

Well, long story short (too late!), it worked like fucking gangbusters. 3E was explosive. It sold beyond anyone’s expectations, and the OGL fostered a massive cottage industry of third-party developers throwing out adventures, rules material, and even entire new game lines on the backs of the d20 system. A couple years later, 3.5 edition released, updating and streamlining further, and it was even more of a success than 3rd ed was.

At this point, we need turn for a moment to a small magazine publishing company called Paizo Publishing, staffed almost exclusively by former WotC writers and developers who had formed their own company to publish Dungeon and Dragon, the two officially-licensed monthly magazines (remember those?) for D&D. Dungeon focused on rules content, deep dives into new sourcebooks, etc., while Dragon was basically a monthly adventure drop. Both sold well and Paizo was a reasonably profitable company. Everything seemed to be going swimmingly.

Except. In 1999, WotC themselves were bought by board game heavyweight Hasbro, who wanted all that sweet, sweet Magic: the Gathering and Pokemon money. D&D was a tiny part of WotC at the time and the brand was moribund, so Hasbro’s execs hadn’t really cared if the weirdos in the RPG division wanted to mess around with Open Source licensing. It wasn’t like D&D was actually making money anyway… until it was. A lot of money. And suddenly Hasbro saw “their” money walking out the door to other publishers. So in 2007, WotC announced D&D 4th Ed, and unlike 3rd, it would not be released under an open license. Instead, it would be released under a much more restrictive, much more isolationist Gaming System License, which, among other things, prevented any licensee from publishing under the OGL and the GSL at the same time. They also canceled the licenses for Dungeon and Dragon, leaving Paizo Publishing without anything to, well, publish.

At first, Paizo opted to just pivot to adventure publishing under the OGL. Dungeon Magazine had found great success with a series of adventures over several issues that took PCs from 1st all the way to 20th level, something they were calling “Adventure Paths,” so Paizo said, “Well, we can just start publishing those! We’re good at it, the market’s there, it will be great!” And then, roughly four months after Paizo debuted its “Pathfinder Adventure Paths” line, WotC announced 4th Ed and the switch to the GSL. Paizo suddenly had a problem.

4th Ed wasn’t as big a change from 3rd Ed as 3rd Ed had been from AD&D, but it was still a major change, and a lot of 3rd Ed fans were decidedly unimpressed. Paizo’s own developers weren’t too keen on it either. So they made a fateful decision: they were going to use the OGL to essentially rewrite and update D&D 3.5 into an RPG line they owned: the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. It was unprecedented. It was a huge freaking gamble. And it paid off more than anybody ever expected. Within two years Paizo was the second-largest RPG publisher in the industry, only behind WotC itself, and for one quarter late in 4E’s life, even managed to outsell D&D, however briefly. Ten years of gangbuster sales and rules releases followed, including 6 different monster books and something over 30 base classes when it was all said and done. It was good stuff and I played it loyally the whole time.

Eventually, though, time moves on and things have to change. The first thing that changed was 4E was replaced by D&D 5E in 2014, which was deliberately designed to walk back many of the changes in 4E that were so poorly received, keep a few of the better ones that weren’t, and in general make the game much more accessible to new players. It was a phenomenal success, buoyed by a resurgence of D&D in pop culture generally (Stranger Things and Critical Role both having large parts to play), and its dominance in the RPG arena hasn’t been meaningfully challenged since. It also returned to the use of the OGL, and a second boom of third-party publishers appeared and thrived for most of a decade.

The second thing was that PF1 was, itself, showing its age. RPGs have a pretty typical life cycle of editions and Pathfinder was reaching the end of one. It wasn’t much of a surprise, then, when, in 2018, Paizo announced Pathfinder 2nd Ed, which released in 2019 and will serve as the focus of the remainder of this post (yes, it’s taken me 1300 words to actually start doing the thing the post is supposed to be about, sue me).

There’s a coda to all of this in the form of the OGL debacle but I don’t intend to rehash any of it here - it was just like six months ago, come on - beyond what it specifically means for the future of PF2. That will come back up at the very end.

# Pathfinder 2E Basics #

So what, exactly, makes PF2 different from what has come before? There are, in my opinion, four fundamental answers to that question.

First: Unified math and proficiency progression. This piece is likely the part most familiar to 5E players, because 5E proficiency and PF2 proficiency both serve the same purpose, which is to tighten up the math of the game and make it so broken accumulations of bonuses aren’t really a thing. In contrast to 5E’s very limited proficiency, though, which just runs from +2 to +6 over the entire 20 levels of the game, Pathfinder’s scales from +0 to +28. Proficiency isn’t a binary yes/no, the way it is in 5E. PF2’s proficiency comes in five varieties: Untrained, Trained, Expert, Master, and Legendary. Your proficiency bonus is either +0 (Untrained) or your level + 2(Trained), +4 (Expert), +6 (Master) or +8 (Legendary). So if you were level five and Expert at something, your proficiency bonus would be level (5) plus Expert bonus (4) = +9.

Proficiency applies to everything in PF2, really - even more than 5E, if you can believe it, because it also goes into your Armor Class calculation. You can be Untrained, Trained, Expert, Master, or Legendary in various types of armor (or unarmored defense, especially relevant for many casters and monks), and your AC is calculated by your proficiency bonus + your Dex modifier + the armor’s own AC bonus, so AC scales just as attack rolls do. Once you get a handle on PF2 proficiency, you’ve grasped 95% of how any game statistic is calculated, including attacks, saves, skill checks, and AC.

Second: Three-Action Economy. Previous editions of D&D, including 5E, have used a “tiered” action system in combat, like 5E’s division between actions, moves, and bonus actions. PF2 has largely done away with that. At the start of your turn, you get three actions and a reaction, period (barring haste or slow or similar temporary effects). It takes one action to do one basic thing. “Attack” is an action. “Move your speed” is an action. “Ready a weapon” is an action. Searching for a hidden enemy is an action. Taking a guarded step is an action. Etc. The point being, you can do any of those as often as you have the actions for them. You can move three times, attack three times, move twice and attack once, whatever. Yes, this does mean you can attack three times in one turn at 1st level if you really want to (though there are reasons why you might not want to).

Some special abilities and most spells take more than one action to accomplish, so it’s not completely one-to-one, but it’s extremely easy to grasp and quite flexible at the same time. It’s probably my favorite of the innovations PF2 brought to the table.

Third: Deep Character Customization. So here’s where I am going to legitimately complain just a bit about 5E. I struggle with how little mechanical control I, as a player, have over how my character advances in 5E.

Consider an example. It’s common in a lot of 5E games to begin play at 3rd level, since you have a subclass by then, as well as a decent amount of hit points and access to 2nd level spells if you’re a caster. Let’s say you’re playing a fighter in a campaign that begins at 3rd level and is expected to run to 11th. That’s 8+ levels of play, a decent-length campaign by just about anyone’s standards. During that entire stretch of play, which would be a year or more depending on how often your group meets, your fighter will make exactly two (2) meaningful mechanical choices as part of their level-up process: the two points at 4th and 8th levels where you can boost a couple stats or get a feat. That’s it. Everything else is on rails, decided for you the moment you picked your subclass.

Contrast that with PF2. In that same level range, you would get to select: 4 class feats, 4 skill feats, two ancestry feats, two general feats, and four skill increases. At every level, a PF2 player gets to choose at least two things, in addition to whatever automatic bonuses they get from their class. These allow me to tailor my build quite tightly to whatever my idea for my character is and give me cool new things to play with every time I level up. This is true across character classes, casters and martials alike.

PF2 also handles multiclassing and the space that used to be occupied by prestige classes with its “pile o’ feats” approach. You can spend class feats from class A to get some features of class B, but it’s impossible for a multiclass build to just “steal” everything that makes a single class cool. A wizard/fighter will never be as good a fighter as a regular fighter is, and a fighter/wizard will never be the wizard’s match with magic.

Fourth: Four Degrees of Success. 5E applies its nat 20, nat 1, critical hits, etc. rules in a very haphazard fashion. PF2 standardizes this as well, in a way that makes your actual skill with whatever you’re doing matter for how well you do it. Any check in PF2 can produce one of four results: a critical success, a regular success, a regular failure, or a critical failure. In order to get a critical success on a roll, you have to exceed your target DC by 10 or more; in order to get a critical failure, you have to roll 10 or more less than the DC. Where do nat 20s and nat 1s come in? They respectively increase or decrease the level of success you rolled by one step. In practice, it works out a lot like you’re used to with a 5E game, but, for instance, if you have a +30 modifier and are rolling against a DC 18, rolling a nat 1 nets you a total of 31, exceeding the DC by more than 10 and earning you a critical success, which is then reduced to just a normal success by the fact of it being a nat 1. Conversely, rolling against a DC 40 with a +9 modifier can never succeed, because even a nat 20 only earns a 29, more than 10 below the DC and normally a crit failure, only increased to a regular failure by the nat 20.

Now, not every roll will make use of critical successes and critical failures. Attack rolls, for instance, don’t make any inherent distinction between failure and critical failure. (Though there are special abilities that do - try not to critically fail a melee attack against a swashbuckler. The results may be painful.) Skill rolls, however, often do, as do many spells with saving throws. Most spells that allow saves are only completely resisted if the target rolls a critical success. Even on a regular success, there is usually some effect, even on non-damaging rolls. That means that casters very rarely waste their turn on spells that get resisted and accomplish nothing at all. It also doubles the effect of any mechanical bonuses or penalties to a roll, because now there are two spots on a die per +1 or -1 that affect the outcome; a +1 might not only convert a failure to a success but might also convert a success to a crit success, or a crit fail to a regular fail.

# What About Everything Else? #

There is a lot more to it, of course. As a GM I find PF2 incredibly easy to run, even at the highest levels of game play, as compared to other d20 systems. The challenge level calculations work, meaning you can have a solo boss without having to resort to special boss monster rules to provide good challenges. I find the shift from “races” to “ancestries” much less problematic. PF2 has rules for how to handle non-combat time in the dungeon in ways that standardize common rules problems like “Well, you didn’t say you were looking for traps!” Everything using one proficiency calculation lets the game do weird things like having skill checks that target saves, or saves that target skill-based DCs. Inter-class balance, with some very specific exceptions, is beautifully tailored. Perception, always the uber-skill, isn’t a skill at all anymore: everyone is at least Trained in it, and every class reaches at least Expert in it by early double-digit levels. Opportunity Attacks (PF2 still uses the 3rd Ed “Attack of Opportunity” - but will soon be switching over to "Reactive Strike") isn’t an inherent ability of every character and monster, encouraging mobility during combats, and skill actions in combat can lower ACs, saves, attacks, and more, so there are more things to do for more kinds of characters. And so on.

Experiencing all of that is easiest just by playing the game, of course, but suffice it to say PF2 has a lot of QoL improvements for players and GMs alike in addition to the bigger, core-level mechanical differences.

# The OGL Thing #

Last thing, then. In the wake of the OGL shit in January, Paizo announced that it would no longer be releasing Pathfinder material under the OGL, opting instead to work with an intellectual property law firm to develop the Open RPG Creative (ORC) License that would do what the OGL could no longer be trusted to do: remain perpetually free and untouchable for anyone who wanted to publish under it. The ORC isn’t limited specifically to Paizo or to Pathfinder 2E or even to d20 games; any company can release any ruleset under it and allow third-party companies to develop and publish content for it.

Shifting away from the OGL, though, required making some changes to scrub out legacy material. A lot of the basic work was done when they shifted to 2E, but there are still a lot of concepts, terminologies, and potentially infringing ideas seeded throughout the system. These had to go.

Since this meant having to rewrite a lot of their core rules anyway, Paizo opted to not fight destiny and announced “Pathfinder 2nd Edition Remastered” in April. This is a kind of “2.25” edition, with a lot of small changes around the edges and a couple of larger ones to incorporate what they’ve learned since the game first launched four years ago. A couple classes are getting major updates, a ton of spells are either getting renamed or swapped out for non-OGL equivalents, and a couple big things: no more alignment and no more schools of magic.

The first book of the Remaster, Player Core 1, comes out in November, along with the GM Core. Next spring will see Monster Core and next summer will give us Player Core 2. That will complete the Remaster books; everything else is, according to Paizo, going to be compatible enough it won’t need but a few minor tweaks that can be handled via errata. So if you’re thinking about getting into PF2, I’d give serious thought to waiting until November at least, and maybe next summer if you want the whole Remastered package.

And that’s it. That’s my essay on PF2 and what I think makes it cool. The floor is open for questions and I am both very grateful and deeply apologetic to anyone who made it this far.