#critical rolling

[veliseraptor]

[thatwavephenomenon]

me: i sure hope the crows are not gonna be solely depicted in veilguard as a brave force who 'fight for all' when they are at their core a criminal organization who is known to buy children to indoctrinate them and turn them into assassins, by putting them in overcrowded warehouses and making them fight for scrapes in order not to starve, to later torture those who reach adulthood to finish their initiations and kill them anyways if they dare to try getting out

bioware: i cooka da pizza

[ghostpainters]

Critical Role: The Mighty Nein

Well, 6 of them anyway.

Beauregard, Caleb, Fjord, Jester, Yasha, and Mollymauk.

[undead-knick-knack]

Oh thank gods 🙏😭

[andi-o-geyser]

POP A BOTTLE Y'ALL THE DND COUPLE OF ALL TIME HAD ON SCREEN SEX WHILE EVERYONE ELSE AROUND THEM GOT 0 (ZERO) DICK AND SOME MINOR HEARTBREAK GET FUUUUUCKED PERC'AHLIA WINS

[aroacesetitoff]

not romantic not platonic but a secret third thing (in the same adventuring party)

[shaniacsboogara]

liking dnd is so funny because yeah you play the actual game sometimes but mostly you just think about the game and watch other people play the game and slowly go insane thinking about how much you wish you could play the game and hoping that buying more shiny rocks will fix everything

[zombolouge]

The thing is, it's not about the Therapy Speak. It's not that everyone who disliked DAV hates healthy communication as a dynamic in fiction. It's not even about only being allowed to be a good guy, really, because most of us did do that anyways (though the option not being there is a loss I grieve even if I never chose it myself, but that's another rant for another day).

It's that DAV does all that stuff at the expense of being believable. At the expense of characters being permitted to have personalities. At the expense of emotions behaving the way emotions actually work for people. At the expense of letting the plot build tension through the stakes we're forced to grapple with.

Half the fics out there take the conflicts between the characters in the previous games and resolve them. I do it myself ALL THE TIME because I like to find a path to resolution through just about any conflict, that's what fascinates me about telling these stories. But the higher the stakes, the harder a conflict is to resolve. You CAN resolve any conflict, you CAN communicate healthily through any emotion, but you can't skip the time it takes to process it all to even be able to communicate it. As someone whose got CPTSD and recovered from many Traumas, I can tell you that the TIME it takes to work through it is not something you can fast track, and the ups and downs of your emotions on that journey can't be skipped. It doesn't matter if you know exactly how to do it, exactly how it's going to feel, or exactly what the end state will be, you CAN'T speedrun it.

DAV has stakes that are astronomical, but nobody treats them that way. Nobody experiences denial - a common psychological reaction to being presented with information that shatters your worldview. Nobody expresses any distrust in the establishments handing out this information - something common among cultures that have at times been at war, even if those wars are "resolved" in the present. Nobody really ever breaks down - something that any person is capable of under extreme circumstances, especially when facing multiple crises of faith that challenge everything they thought they knew about themselves. Nobody blows their lid because they've been repressing the hell out of everything. Nobody grieves for southern Thedas, the entire thing dying off screen and giving you, the player, NO way to engage with it in any way.

Not to mention there are barely any inter-party conflicts, when there should be a lot more. Why is everyone (except Spite) fine with it if Emmrich sacrifices Manfred to become a lich? Why is everyone fine with Illario potentially being set free if he was working with the venatori and Elgar'nan, two sources that have actively attacked everyone in the party? Why doesn't Neve resent Lucanis if Treviso is picked? Why doesn't Harding get pissed off at Nevarra for having a secret society of liches that never helped during the Inquisition's war against the breach and corypheus? Why doesn't Harding feel ANYTHING about Ferelden and the rest of the south? Shouldn't Harding resent the fact that she's stuck in the north while her home dies?

All of these conflicts ARE resolvable, but not easily. And it's not believable that they're never brought up. It's not believable that these characters skip through everything that happens with like, barely a frowny face most of the time. In DAO, Alistair leaves if you don't treat his conflicts with respect. In DA2, your party members try to kill each other if you don't pay attention to their conflicts/emotional needs. In DAI, people can leave or betray you, Cassandra throws a chair at Varric and tries to body him out a window. ALL of these can be resolved but it takes effort, and the characters get to SHOW that they're bothered by them and struggling the way a person would when faced with those emotions.

The problem isn't the therapy speak, or that everyone is loyal and won't leave, or that they aren't mean to each other enough. It's that it's toxic positivity. It's toxic as fuck to imply that anger or grief should be smiled over or else you're giving up, and it's damaging to people to avoid engaging with their own negative emotional responses to extremely negative stimuli. It's pasting optimism over very real, very weighty issues, sweeping it all under the rug, and you keep waiting for the lid to blow off the pressure cooker that creates, but it never does. It never becomes anything that emulates real emotions, which is why the whole damn thing feels hollow. Everything's dying and nobody cares, not even about themselves, and that's NOT healthy communication.

It's bullshit, half-assed storytelling that didn't tell us the actual story, just the vague idea of what it could have been.

[luddlestons]

thank you to @lav3ndaze for the inspiration! I had been considering these 4 in a cuddle pile for a while now, but they inspired me to 1. actually draw it, and 2. put ashton in the middle.

[asharaks]

cutting davrin out - of his own death, his own epilogue, his own plot - in favour of his dog was a calculated choice bioware made: people won't care about the black, indigenous-coded man unless we give them a reason to, so rather than putting work and effort into giving him a complicated, emotionally impactful plot that ties into the themes of the game, we'll just stick him with a cute animal and hope that's enough to get people to care, and it worked! assan is the thing people care about. i've seen davrin's death scene giffed and tagged with just assan, i've seen people saying they hated making this choice because assan's just a baby, people saying they hate that assan dies alongside davrin because he "doesn't have to" . like, folks, can we step back and think for a second abt what agenda the writers could've had in making you choose between returning fan favourite fantasy catholic white woman harding and late-recruited indigenous-coded black man davrin, with a gimmick thrown in so you can pretend to feel bad? can we? for me?

[sapphiregem01]

CR cast has never fumbled a photoshoot and my bi ass is THANKFUL

[veliseraptor]

[ghostpainters]

Vox Machina Plays Mario Kart 

Vex’ahlia is obviously winning. Keyleth is better at this game than she gives herself credit for and isn’t doing half bad. Grog is being a little too aggressive with the turns and keeps crashing into things; and yet somehow, he’s still a place ahead of Scanlan. The game is clearly rigged! 

Vox Machina House Rules: 1). No loud music before 9 AM 2). Butter knives are NOT weapons 3). PLEASE try the doorknob first 4). Whoever breaks the door down, pays for it.

[pocketgalaxies]

Her dead husband. I'm going to have his face. || Delilah and I have shared a brain for an incredibly long time. (for @sharkodactyl)

[yashley]

Then why are you here? What is it you want? I want to free you.

[skrs-cats]

wanted to draw somethin like this for a long time now

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