#I'm being perhaps a little critical and there are other ways to read eg the fragile masculinity moments

[wolves-in-the-world]

the thing about eliot spencer as a character, right. the thing about him.

(and as always your mileage may vary on my analyses so if we disagree that's cool actually)

is that he is in fact a somewhat emotionally constipated idiot who is occasionally sensitive about his perceived masculinity and gets defensive about emotional intimacy around other men (largely hardison, who's much more comfortable expressing affection and embracing a softer kind of masculinity), but eliot displays enough emotional awareness and sensitivity and respect for women etc etc that anyone who's been subjected to that era of television will put on rose-tinted glasses without even looking twice.

(and he is, don't get me wrong, incredibly emotionally aware for a professionally punchy guy with enough trauma to sink the titanic. it still startles me to see.)

on top of which we have the layers and the accessories and the excellent hair with the secret braids and the way he barely has an ego and he's good with kids and protective of his team without taking it too far, and some of us never stood a fucking chance.

[utilitycaster]

speaking of jasmine bhullar, she and brennan had a great convo about min-maxers and i was wondering what your own thoughts on min-maxing were? i'm new-ish to actually playing dnd and i still worry about making myself a problem to the dm as opposed to an asset.

First off as someone who enjoys Adventuring Academy but never has the time to watch the full episodes, thank you for bringing this up - I watched just the debate, and it was incredible and hilarious.

This is a good question. I am 100% in agreement with Jasmine here and she said it better than I could: min-maxing simply means that you read the rules to D&D and decided to use them to your advantage. Reading the rules to D&D is great and everyone should do it (in fact, this a reliable way to be an asset to the DM: know how your character's abilities work). There are a few cases where it sucks but most of those aren't actually due to min-maxing so much as shitty player behaviors that can occur in min-maxers.

I think one reason people dislike min-maxers is that the stereotypical min-maxer builds a character who truly can't do anything except for massive damage, and that does kind of suck, but I also think that that is really hard to build in 5e. You're going to have some other abilities. I think it was much easier to truly min-max in 3.5e, and perhaps in older editions you could really break things (in fact, having listened to some pathfinder 1e actual plays, I know you could).

There is also, as Jasmine points out, a false assumption that min-maxers aren't interested in RP or won't do it. This is very clearly untrue and a few examples off the top of my head from Actual Play that are debatably min-maxed are: Deadeye Cybin (played by Brennan, natch) in NADDPod (damage dealer); Laerryn Coramar-Seelie of EXU Calamity (optimized for survival, especially against non-magical foes); Caduceus Clay and Deanna Leimert of Critical Role (both optimized to be healers, incidentally); Orym and Vex, also of Critical Role (optimized to have a stupidly high perception score), Theo Gumbar of A Crown of Candy (optimized to tank and have a stupidly high AC). These are all fantastic characters with profound RP scenes who happen to also be really, really good at a narrow band of things, but they're also not just good at that. Many of them also can serve as the brains or the face of their party; many have utility spells far beyond their area of specialization.

Another reason people dislike min-maxers is they have a reputation for being ungenerous - for swooping in and stealing the spotlight. The above characters, played by some of the most generous people in actual play, show that's clearly not the case. Also, to be honest, a spotlight hog doesn't have to be min-maxed. It's just a shitty "hey, hey look at me" player. I think attention hogs might be a bit more inclined to try to build a character who is really really good at something (again, usually damage more than say, healing) but that doesn't mean that everyone who builds a gunslinger is here to steal all the glory.

Specialization also isn't bad! The reason D&D is a game where people are in a party is because not everyone can do everything! There are a small handful of characters who are a utility knife who can basically do a little bit of almost everything (Keyleth, Fjord, Moonshine) but they are the exception rather than the rule. Barbarians, for example, are a class that usually is structured around tanking and doing damage. This is fine! You probably don't want a party that's all barbarians because it is useful to have healers and ranged attackers and people who can sink all their high stat rolls into the mental side of things because they don't live and die quite so much by their physical stats, but it sure is nice to have a barbarian in the mix to balance out the glass cannon wizard, isn't it?

If you show up to a table where there is a clear gap in party composition (eg: healing) or there's a clear story the GM wants to tell (eg: very social, requires a lot of diplomacy) and you decide not to fill it because you are too busy building Guy With Stealth Bonus of +20, then that's a problem, but that's ultimately a failure to collaborate. Min-maxing for something that doesn't really help the party is simply the way in which you happened to fail that compromise.

I'm sure there are edge-case, dark corners of D&D Reddit builds that do suck, but honestly most of them suck in that they are actually not good (eg: coffeelock). Your typical case of dumping one stat to max out on another? totally normal, totally cool.

Anyway to get to the part of your question regarding not being a problem: you probably aren't! You're thinking about how to not be a problem to your DM, which people who are problems tend not to do. However, the big takeaways of the above are 1. read the rules of your character and 2. build a character who fits into the world. In the session zero, build a character who has a reason to be doing the things the DM outlines in broad strokes, and who complements the other PCs. If you do that, then it doesn't matter if you min-max or not.

[windwardstar]

#murderbot#I have Thought about this#tho perhaps not quite as critically as it warrants#it does seem like less intelligent entities are still depicted as being worthy of kindness and care#eg: Ship#but also there *is* a background radiation of like#equating intelligence as Better#and I’ve waffled about the use of the words ‘dumb’ and ‘stupid’ when I’m writing#generally I don’t completely refrain from using it but I try not to use it in an outright derogatory way#kinda how I wouldn’t avoid using the word ‘fat’ if it’s descriptive yunno2#however. idk. perhaps I should reflect more#it’s one of those things that’s so engrained in the social consciousness#and in the books too#and it’s an ableist pervasive poison that rubs me the wrong way#I should read though the books again with this in mind#more deliberately#dissect the use of the infamous ‘you little idiot’#even if it *is* affectionate#etc

nice to see other people thinking about this :D

"the still depicted as worthy of kindness and care" is absolutely present in the story, more for bots than for humans (which are collectively treated as somewhat infantalized by murderbot bc murder bot absolutely sees them as lesser bc they're not as "intelligent" as it). the problem here is the hierarchy of worth based on intelligence/processing power. (The two aren't mutually exclusive, and in fact tend to combine quite frequently into paternalistic infantalization)

and yeah, the problem is that it's so pervasive in society and there's no larger social understanding of this as something that needs to even be addressed. I'd also say it's very different from fat as a descriptive word-- because the body positive movement has done a ton of work to make fat a neutral descriptor and push for people to use it in a neutral or positive way. Dumb, stupid, idiot, etc haven't had that. The word disabled has though. (Basically, fat and disabled have been reclaimed as identity words AND been pushed as general use descriptors for the group by the affected group(s) themself. Dumb, stupid, idiot etc do not have any such push, do not have any such recognition-- and in fact I'll see things like "X doesn't make you stupid" because it's still so ingrained as a negative that people who are advocating for other disabilities still have to say "but it doesn't make you [this kind of disabled that we definitely see as a bad thing to be/that you wouldn't want to be]"

like. When I am having a bad brain day and can barely process language inputs, when it takes me a minute to look at something and identify what i'm looking at and any body actions that I need to take (and sometimes I just can't even do that, I'll just stare and my brain will buffer because it is too much for my brain to process), saying "it doesn't make you dumb" is just... you're [generic] trying to say it doesn't make me worth less than people who don't have those cognitive difficulties, but what it actually going on is "you're not like this group [who is undesirable to be], so you're still worth something"

there's just. not really any room right now for "neutral" use because there's been no push by the affected groups to reclaim it + the fight right now is in just trying to get people to recognize that it's ableist in the first place and "well it's ok if it's not used in an outright derogatory way" is very much an undermining of that and just feels like a way to justify continuing to use it because it's "not as bad" (which is very much how a lot of the ok we can't call people retarded, so we'll call them moron, oh moron is bad too ok so braindead/brain damaged/smoothbrained/stupid and so on where instead of actively examining how they talk and think about intelligence they just find new words to use that aren't deemed socially unacceptable yet).

hope that helped explain some things. it's always nice to hear when people are thinking about these things and reflecting and trying to pay attention.

Reading the murderbot books bc murderbot is very entertaining and there is a ton of good parts of the stories but also the fact that it seems someone is getting called stupid or idiot or moron on every page is very grating. Especially because I'm three books in and there doesn't seem to be any recognition at all that it is ableism or any indication that there will be. This is likely because the author doesn't actually see it as ableism and is just reproducing her own ableist biases in the works. (Because like yeah the vast majority of people don't realize the ableism involved and will actively argue that it isn't. And there's no current cultural understanding that it is ableist that you can count on to reliably assume the readers will recognize it as ableism without framing it as such.)

And for anyone confused about this and thinking it means you can't write about ableism.

Writing about ableism as a topic: you put the content warning for ableism to let people know it will be present in the work as a topic/theme + it's recognized as ableism within the work either narratively or directly by the characters, the harm abelism does is shown and so on.

Reproducing your own ableist biases in your work: other people put a content warning in their recs the same way they mention the racism and ableism and misogyny in dracula or other historical works that were very much reproducing what was the prevailing attitudes of the time. The work itself does not actually recognize the ableism as ableism. It is simply reproducing it in the same capacity that it exists in real life and perpetuating it.

[pupsung]

Hi there! I believe i've written a very cute fan fiction about Jumin. SQUUUEEE! I really want others to read it but I'm super doooper sensitive like SUPER even with creative criticism it will make me cry and feel bad forever and I need some advice on publishing it and probably make it anonymous but idk how. Kay thanks! (Smiles and waves bye enthusiastically)

hmm well if you sign up to a fic website like ao3 or ffn with a username that's different to one you usually use, then that's kinda like being anonymous? i mean, my ao3 account was pretty much anonymous until i started sharing it around on here and twitter.but!!!!! don't let constructive criticism upset you too much!! usually people give it when they LOVE your work but perhaps are a little nit-picky about a few things. eg, the way i use to structure speech quotations was slightly wrong, but someone pointed it out and now i dont!! it might make you feel a little down at first, but you can learn from it and make your writing better. you don't want to just stop improving altogether! if it would make you feel better im happy to beta read what you write before you post it, to check grammar etcetc (this goes for anyone btw, just shoot me a message!)