#Rpg asks

[hellofromthehallowoods]

Clarification about the pricing for the open D&D campaigns. It's $25 for each individual session?

Yes indeed; Startplaying charges players each session the night of the game, so it's good to be aware up front. Though there's a Session 0, character creation, scheming, etc. that is just part and parcel for joining the campaign.

[invisible-goats]

🌤️ for ye Pyrates :)

🌤️Share your favorite mechanic from a game you’re working on

You can pay money to have permanent changes to your genotype, and roll to see if it changes your phenotype (eg. growing antlers if you get deer genes). Naturally you can choose to fail this roll :-p

[gimmickblog-taxonomist]

How do you become a gimmick blog?

step 1: think of a gimmick

step 2: blog

[dailyhatsune]

This

with a regular miku on the side for comparison because Huh

[horsegirlwithnoname]

I love that the four corps in Lancer are like ... Amazon, Pfizer, Lockheed-Martin, and then like a Discord server filled with trans women with fursonas and felony hacking convictions

[vexwerewolf]

If I could ask you for some advice, what do you think helps the flavour text of a mech or piece of equipment sell a player on the fantasy of using it?

I'm finding it frustratingly difficult to do so with my own homebrew content: I can come up with lore and backstory easily enough, but re-reading it feels dry, and I can't help but contrast it with how the descrptions in official content and other supplements is more evocative, at least for mechs.

Let's observe some corebook Lancer flavour text and examine the various varieties it comes in.

Purely Functional

While it's usually not the most fun type of flavour text, this just tells us what the weapon is, and - if it has any particular tags or on-hit effects - why it's like that. The Hand Cannon is a good example: here's what it is (modified pistol), here's why it does more damage, and here's why it has Loading.

The main advantage of Purely Functional flavour text is that it provides space for other types of flavour text to breathe. Flavour text is a great place for jokes, but it's not good for every piece of flavour text to be a joke - the pauses between notes in music are just as important as the notes.

Obfuscating Vendorspeak

The Bristlecrown Flechette Launcher this is a great example of dark humour that Lancer uses quite often: marketing fast-talk to cover up something really unpleasant. The joke here is based on us understanding precisely what the equipment does mechanically, and then seeing how the manufacturer tries to sell it. There's a bunch of dense technobabble here meant to obfuscate the fact that this weapon fires knives in every direction specifically designed to kill infantry.

Deadpan Weirdness

The joke here relies on describing something extremely weird like it's the most natural thing in the world. Wait, you're telling me that in a world where I can just print new parts if the old ones break, they put DRM on my fucking knife and I have to apologise to the fucking knife maker to get a new one? What the fuck, dude? Why are you acting like this makes any sense?!

My sword uploads fucking what to the Space Internet?!

Third-Act Twist

This type of flavour text disguises itself as something else - most often Purely Functional - and then hits you with Third Act Twist. It makes you go "wait, what?!" It's very classic setup-punchline stuff. You're telling me my mech can rot?!

As a side note, Lancer loves to use this for its NHPs.

WHY DID YOU PUT THAT IN SCARE QUOTES, LUCIFER

Worldbuilding

This is similar to the Purely Functional, but instead of just describing technical specifications of the weapons, it puts the weapon in the broader context of the setting's history. Okay, so we know what this weapon is and what it does - why was it built? What was the original use case, and why? Most importantly, what can the existence of this weapon tell us about the world that build it?

Whimsical Aside

This is the insertion of a light-hearted, humanising little insertion regarding how this piece of equipment gets used in the field. This serves to remind us that soldiers aren't cold, unfeeling killing machines: they can be as emotional, irreverent and silly as the rest of us, and they do things like name their mobile bombs...

... or call resupply drones "mech snacks."

The Ominous Out-Of-Context Quote That Explains Nothing And Only Raises More Questions

As I've said in multiple textmash memes, this is basically Tom and Miguel's shorthand for "this technology is Intensely Fucked Up in a way that it is more fun and scary not to explain." This is essentially Lancer's version of SCP's [REDACTED].

You might think this is the domain of HORUS, and you'd be right, but every single manufacturer indulges in these - although IPS-N had to wait until NRFaW to get theirs:

What the fuck do you mean by that, Lancer?

[gigizetz]

For context I was fighting an art block and I thought drawing someone’s character would help, and surprise your dnd character Abbi helped me with the art block, I really do love her design a lot and she’s very gorgeous, I do hope you enjoy it

OMG I LOVE IT SO MUCH SHE LOOKS AMAZING THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU-

[pr0cyon-lotor]

AU where PIWD is a RPG game that follows LBH defeating the disgraced cultivator turned demon king (emperor? lord? Whatever) Shen Qingqiu and becomes the demon king and gets a harem made up of his adventuring party.

Shen Yuan had playing it and it sucked major ass (I might make him fond of SQQ again the au is growing on me ngl). He enters the modding community for the game. He makes mods that give story behind the characters, give the girls actual personalities, fleshes out the villain, etc. He's fairly popular in the community and is well known to be Airplane's biggest hater.

Shen Yuan gets a helper eventually someone that also dislikes how the story went (totally not Airplane on an Alt account. nope.) and together they work on a mod that completely rewrites the whole thing because the game mechanics are good enough. (Airplane finally gets to tell the story he wanted)

It's their magnum opus. It takes years to finish and when they finally upload it, bullshit happens and they both end up croaking because yay 😊

Shen Yuan gets thrown into the modded version of PIDW. He is the current demon king's son. He recognizes that he will be the demon king that is the predecessor to Shen Qingqiu.

He tries to run away from his fate and ends up running right to the throne and accidentally becomes way over qualified. He eventually resigns to his fate and instead focuses on making sure his staff is loyal to him because the former demon king was betrayed by his staff or something.

Shen Yuan ends up becoming one of the most well liked kings in their history without realizing it.

One day when he's doing fuck all in the mortal realm. He encounters a town gets raided. He came too late to stop it, but he did manage to take down the raiders (Huan Hua Palace). He looked over the town and didn't find many survivors, one was a little girl that he picked up after she clung to him in desperation.

He takes the survivors back with him and makes sure they're fine, but accidentally adopts the girl since she tugged at his heartstrings. So he has a daughter now.

Years pass and he becomes an old man before he figures out how to halt his aging (old man Shen Yuan makes me feel things). And by then his daughter (take a wild guess who it is with my track history. c'mon we all know it's Su Xiyan) is an accomplished cultivator.

He's proud of his daughter and insists that she at least visits him. Su Xiyan eventually joins a sect/guild (honestly depends on how much RPG I want to make this) and gets aquatinted with the people there.

She becomes friends with one of the cultivators there named Shen Jiu and they're both very catty and take shit all the time.

Things happens, plot occurs, and Su Xiyan accidentally releases an ancient demon that had been sealed away for centuries. She is fascinated by his pathetic rizz and decides that "sure, I'll fuck that."

She brings back her totally-not-demon boyfriend to the rest and he is accepted in (YQY couldn't find it in himself to really gaf). Eventually Huan Hua Palace requests for help to take down the demon king.

And even though they have an ancient demon among them they said "yeah sure :)" Cang Qiong ends up being the ones to actually do the journey.

They get there, it was a tiresome and perilous journey. And they're finally at the demon king's throne room in front of this terrifying demon and this terrifying demon is like

SY: "Oh my God. Hi Xiyan you're visiting again? You were here a few days ago. Are these your friends? :D"

SXY: "Hey dad. These are my friends also we're here to kill you :)"

SY: "Woah really? That's great, sweetie! Make sure to aim for the head :D"

The cultivators get their asses handed to them (Tianlang-jun's ass was NOT helping)

And instead of getting killed by Shen Yuan he invites them to dinner to recover their strength. And like the demon king is like pretty chill and asks if they want to try to kill him again. Yue Qingyuan proposes an alliance instead.

Shen Yuan agrees because he figured out that trying to run from your fate brings you straight to it, and he might as well benefit his kingdom before he's killed.

The dealings take a while (a suspicious amount of time) so Yue Qingyuan, Shen Qingqiu, and Shen Yuan get aquatinted. They start having tea and gossip and maybe start a bookclub :D

Shen Yuan thinks he somehow thinks he befriended the guildmaster and his future murderer and is a little confused while Yue Qingyuan and Shen Qingqiu is like "This Gap Moe is Crazy. We wanna fuck this old man 🤝🤝🤝"

Eventually they do, in fact, fuck that old man. Su Xiyan is not impressed that her friends are dating her dad. Tianlang-jun is personally enjoying the fanfiction.

[ardentinwoe]

More mechs

[thestuffedalligator]

A Zelda game where Hyrule castle is invaded before Link can be reborn and the hero’s spirit inhabits and animates a doll Zelda had in her bedroom.

Same open-world exploration as Breath of the Wild, just on a smaller scale. During the final boss you kill Ganondorf after climbing him Shadow of the Colossus style and stab him in the eye with a fork

[snakeguy999]

“Eli, Eli, lamma sabacthani” cried Christ

[invisible-goats]

Storm cloud for the ask meme?

🌧️Share something melancholy from one of your games (name the game, or let me choose)

oh too easy :-p This is from the Magic section in Chymus

Melancholic magic hides itself in the occultists' humours, and hides other things with it. Any effect that hides can be done with melancholic magic, as can effects that involve deception or illusions. One can become invisible, change your appearance or make people believe falsehoods. The melancholic humour can hide from anything that watches. It might shield you from bureaucracy, make a machine give false readings or evade magical detection. Melancholic overshooting leads to it hiding too much, rendering the occultist unable to be found even if they want to. Whatever illusion it casts can't be lifted, for better or worse.

[prokopetz]

It's actually kind of striking how tightly wedded most major genres of tabletop RPGs are to the decades when they were popularised.

Trad fantasy tabletop RPGs – even those that aren't positioned as revivalist – are so intent on emulating the sword and sorcery literature of the 1970s that the only reason they don't come off as quaintly nostalgic is because nobody reads sword and sorcery anymore.

Cyberpunk tabletop RPGs are, at this point, essentially an exercise in retrofuturism, endlessly polishing a vision of what people in the 1980s thought the year 2015 would look like.

Urban fantasy tabletop RPGs might include smartphones and electric cars in their equipment tables and mention 9/11 in their lore chapters, but culturally and aesthetically, most of them are taking place in a world where the 1990s never ended.

I don't mean this as a criticism – I'm just fascinated with how this tendency is so strong that, for example, a brand new urban fantasy RPG written in the year 2024 is liable to end up being a 1990s period piece at heart even when that was 100% not the author's intention, simply through the inertia of the medium's well-established tropes.

I'm mostly curious what the characteristic tabletop RPG genre of the 2020s is going to end up being thirty or forty years from now, and I hope I live long enough to find out!

[gazkerber]

A silly Kefka requested over my Patreon~

[spookydingus]

Rolling your own check without asking and announcing it is one thing, and disrupts the game for everyone, but I will never understand DMs that hate players asking for checks.

Like, what? Being proactive and playing the game and using their brains for creative solutions? You hate that? This isn't a video game, my brethren.

"Hey, can I do an insight check on this guy?" is a good idea, and something I might not think to call for every single time. Also, when a party needs help, it's my job to do that??? Like, what would you rather them do? "Yeah I'm just gonna stare at this guy and say that I examine him and use a whole bunch of keywords until you call for a check like it's chatgpt"?

Learn how to play with the party, not against them.

[bayonettas-tits]

I think there's something wrong with my copy of the game.