#hey so this will be my new system

[tunamayuuu]

IMAGE 1 - [Image ID: The left illustration is a rendered redraw of a manga panel from Chapter 78. It shows Kunikida sitting on a hospital bed, with a withdrawn expression as his amputated arms are revealed. The right illustration is a 5 panel comic.

Panel one shows a zoom in of Jouno's eyes, looking like he's thinking deeply.

Panel two shows a chibi Jouno who looks like he has thought of an idea.

Panel three shows Jouno sitting down and presenting the half peeled apple pear. He says, "Perhaps my proposal was too unfavorable on your end. How about this: on top of your FREEDOM, we will have our specialized technicians create prosthetic hands catered to your specific needs." "All expenses paid!"

Panel four shows Jouno's smug expression, with red dots in his blackened irises, making him look suspicious.

Panel five shows Kunikida's uncomfortable expression, in between panel four and five is a speech bubble that says "What do you say?" /.End ID]

IMAGE 2 - [Image ID: There are 3 different doodles of Kunikida with his handless limbs. The first drawing on the left shows Kunikida sitting and looking down on his limbs. There is a shadow over his head as if to show his despair. The second drawing shows Kunikida raising his arms to eye level. On top of the arms are transparent hands, to demonstrate his phantom pains. He says, "It's still there. No. Why can I still feel them?" The third is a bust shot, where he is looking off to the distance. His arm doesn't have bandages compared to the first two drawings. /.End ID]

IMAGE 3 - [Image ID: It is a five part comic. From right to left,

Panel one is a waist up shot, showing Kunikida in a white button up similar to the Hunting Dogs uniform. He is looking at the prosthetic hands attached to his limbs. He looks shocked.

Panel two shows him extending his arms out, as if to get used to the feel of prosthetics attached to his arms.

Panel three shows one half of his Ideals notebook.

Panel four shows a zoom in of him picking it up with his prosthetic hand.

Panel five shows a pleased Jouno, who says, "It seems that we do have an agreement after all!" /.End ID]

@bsd-disability-week-2024 DAY 1: PHYSICAL DISABILITY (Amputee)

i've always thought it was a missed opportunity to have an amputee in the main cast moving forward, but i do understand that it will not make much sense narratively (given yosano's ability)... so how about a kunikida joining the hunting dogs and getting prosthetic hands as part of his deal?

[dykedvonte]

Love that in New Vegas you can like personally and permanently fuck over your human companions:

You can destroy the Brotherhood of Steel which Veronica still considers her family despite their differences. On top of that you can kill Elijah and Christine, the latter not being necessary or beneficial to you at all.

You can set up Cass and take her to the Silver Rush to be killed by Jean-Baptiste. Which is extra cruel cause you can literally only do it by first getting her to sell out to the people who tried to kill her in the first place.

You can put more innocent blood on Boone’s hands and fuck with his head more by having him kill his former best friend who is the last person he is implied to have any sort of relationship with outside the Courier.

You can literally sell Arcade into slavery to the Legion in where his hatred for every single one of them is so strong he literally disembowels himself as a final fuck you and so he doesn’t have to spend one more second there.

Not to mention how you can just ignore ED-E, Lily, Rex and Raul’s issues leading them to live their relatively immortal lives full of hardships, unhappiness or inevitable slow deaths. Like it’s not cool but it’s really cool that the game lets you be really awful along with really good.

[babacontainsmultitudes]

Ough guys I'm hopping on the train in less than 2 days to move to a new city this is sooo fucked up what do you meannnn

[heybiji]

hi i found your page cause of your Masks art!!

imma be running a game of masks and was wondering if you have any tips

Oh hello! Very cool you're gonna run a MASKS game, it can be a lot of fun!

I'm not sure how helpful my advice will be since I'm still learning and am not sure how well I actually run the game haha, but for starters there's a whole lot of great advice on Reddit that will help with the mechanics and the structure of the game. In my opinion, the Principles section in the GM part of the core book is critical and succinct and is great advice for running ttrpgs in general.

my top advice is:

"We play to get the next issue picked up!"

Play the game like we want people to buy the next issue and not put the series down! Take chances! Make big choices! Make it interesting! Be bold!!

other things:

Theme. Establish the themes of your story early on. This will help you understand how the world and story should respond to the PCs. And make the themes interesting to you! For example, beyond the general coming-of-age story themes already built into the character arcs, I lean heavily into the concepts of fame, celebrity, and the 24-hour news cycle. And all the things that were going on in the early 2000s.

Be a Fan of the PCs. This is my favorite rule from The Principles. Make sure all your players soak this rule in. The MASKS mechanics mean characters will often make less-than-optimal decisions, so players must feel supported in their character choices. You should be a fan of the characters, and so should your players! They should want to help bring out every character's arc, not just their own.

Treating Human Life as Meaningful is what Makes Threats Real. This is another principle, but yeah, make the world's NPCs feel like they matter, and that will make the world worth protecting. Treat them as people. Give everyone Drives, not just your Villains. Mentally treating even non-villain NPCs as having Conditions can do a lot to help with characterization.

Condense. Condense your world, your NPCs, make the world feel smaller. In our game, for example, having the Protege's mentor also be the same superhero who saved the Delinquent years ago was a great decision.

Playlists. I have a bunch of different playlists for the campaign, from a big one of music of the time (our game is set in 2004) to playlists for important NPCs, to playlists I asked my players to curate for their characters. Music inspires me a bunch, a song can help create a villain for me, and I also like choosing a different "ending" song for every episode based on whatever happened.

Stories. Okay, here's the thing. I don't really care much for superhero stories. Why did I choose to run MASKS, you ask? Because of the emotion-based mechanics. That's my shit. But anyway, I don't take in much superhero media... But I do LOVE movies and television and stories in general, and I think taking in a lot of "short stories" is helpful to develop an instinct on how to pace a story, make a character or moment memorable, etc. And because MASKS has an episodic nature, this is extremely important! The sheer amount of movies I've watched has helped me a whole bunch, since they have to get the Beginning, Middle, and End done within such a short time frame.

Don't Wait. This is an instinct I've picked up from some of my favorite media. Don't wait for The big important moment. Make a lot of big important moments, and make the characters have to make a lot of important choices, and keep the momentum going. Paint yourself into a corner and then force yourself to think of ways out! It makes the story more interesting. (this may not apply to everyone, I get this kind of mindset from shows like Breaking Bad and Succession, which for your story could be too much haha)

Everyone Works. Okay, I am not a benevolent, sweet GM, I will not smile with tears in my eyes and quietly work away and accept that without complaint. no way. I make my players help me a lot. I'm gonna whine. Guys I'm doing so much work! Guys this is hard! Weeehhh! MAKE THEM HELP YOU. RUNNING A GAME IS SOOOOO MUCH WORK OH MY GOD IT'S SOOOOOO MUCH WORK!!! Ask them to take notes! Ask them to treat the world with sincerity! Ask them to make NPCs! Ask them to play NPCs! Ask them to help fill out the world! Ask them to tell you what their character wants to do next so you have extra time to consider it! Ask them to make playlists for their characters to help you figure out how to engage with them! Don't let them just show up on playday!! I'm a "you get what you give" kind of GM. You're a player too and you deserve to enjoy the game as well, and having the other players help you helps a BUNCH. PUT THEM TO WORK.

what else. uh. visuals help a lot with engagement so i subscribed to a bunch of modern battlemap patreons. i run using Foundry which lists the rules upon every roll which is great for me, someone with horrid memory. if you're lucky and favored by god, you'll have a benevolent player that will be the scribe for your sessions and log everything down so they can be referred back to (again, great for someone like me with a horrid memory). remember to give focus to the PC's out-of-costume lives as well. make NPCs in response to your PCs (superheroes, villains, touch on something of a PC in the creation process). be silly. be serious. be sincere.

i'm still figuring out how to run the game, maybe i'll have better advice on a later day, but i hope this can help some! sorry this is longwinded and more a stream of consciousness than it is succinct.

[energeticpoltergeist]

Part 1: Mad King's War

Prologue: Diverged History(pages 1-4)

[i-dont-r3member]

*taking my bajillion ibuprofen in the past month or so*: urghhhhhh my poor little celllsss im sorry guys pls don’t hate me if i get an ulcer my back hurts :(((( i have. :((( chronic pain. :(((( that i haven’t fully figured out how to deal with properly yet :(((

(The poor cells I am envisioning)

[doctorweebmd]

ok my OTHER reflection:

on the one hand its really frustrating to see the posts about docs and healthcare in general on here be so narrow-minded. bad experiences with certain providers have lead to a huge spread of misinformation and mistrust with the whole system. which can and HAS lead to people avoiding 'evil' doctors for perfectly treatable illnesses and dying from them (the vaccine bullshit, anyone?)

but on the other hand. it is TERRIFYING how some of these docs practice medicine. at times i think 'are you just burned out and don't give a shit or are you straight up just stupid?' and i work in critical care. where quite literally every case is life or death. even in the academic sector where there is supposedly a standard of excellence, some doctors i would not let touch my loved ones with a ten foot pole.

and that sucks. i know this is the no nuance piss on the poor webbed site but 'the medical system and people that work for it are fallible and aspects of it are morally questionable at best/unethical at worst' AND 'the field of medicine exists to help people first and foremost and mistrusting/avoiding it can be detrimental in the long run' can and DO co-exist

[jusiri]

Love going on long ass rambles about my thoughts on characters and stuff, posting it, and having basically no one interact with it And I mean that genuinely, it's so funny to me, because I can only imagine people checking the tag and seeing my username with a mile a text following it like "oh god not again..."

It's great, I'm having a blast, I will not stop ever, you will subjected to my thoughts, boy, there is no escape

[sesamenom]

browsing stormlight art on tumblr and ran into a post about how different dalinars life would have been with a somewhat healthier childhood and i think someone tagged it 'kaladin adopts young dalinar au' or something

anyways i propose a Make Everybody Worse au. teenage dalinar and gavilar get dropped directly into formenos and unofficially adopted by feanor a few years before the flight of the noldor. they both participate in the First Kinslaying/Oath/Losgar and then feanor dies. maedhros adopts them and then thangorodrim happens. maglor adopts them for a few years until mae gets rescued. they participate in the first few decades of the wars of beleriand, after which they get dropped back into the middle of alethkar.

on the noldorin side of things, m&m assume the random children they sort-of adopted (300some years before Secondborn were awakened) got killed somewhere in the battle. the kidnap fam situation now has the additional context of m&m having known even more pairs of children who died because of the Oath - one pair killed in the Second Kinslaying, one pair who presumably died in battle because they swore the Oath

on the alethi side of things, dalinar & gavilar are now Oathbound kinslayers who just lost five-to-ten parental figures and all their friends, and spent most of their lives being actively encouraged in war and military strategy. they also skipped the entirety of the navani-related conflict and are probably somewhat closer because of that. violence ensues.

[kimthemangoguy]

weaponizing plurality against my ocd tendencies by calling upon the headmate who Eats Thoughts

[silent-sentinels]

i think it'd be cool to like. let other select plurals know we're plural without letting everyone know we're plural. like some kind of secret passphrase in our bio on main that only plurals used. limp wristing at the gays yknow.

[regicidal-defenestration]

Most annoying advertising trend is "the new [existing media]!!!" because maybe 7 times out of 10 it's doing a disservice to both the new and old thing

[pokimoko]

I have had it with these motherfucking spam bots on this motherfucking site.

[mylittleredgirl]

they recently had us switch to a new organization and calendar system at work (including some new software but mostly “this is how you should organize your entire life and you will know peace and never miss a task again!!”). at least half of the system is just a digital version of what i was already doing, and other parts of it are better, so i have no idea why it took me out at the knees. i had been riding a long sweet wave of low anxiety and now i'm trapped in a byzantine maze of highly doable tasks and shaking like a shelter dog in a crate—the exact opposite of what the system is supposed to do.

and the craziest part is that somehow... i can't seem to go back to my old system anymore either?? it's only been a few weeks! i used that for five years!! it’s like i have forgotten how to do the most basic parts of my job or make decisions. my brain turned into a stack of marbles and now they’re all over the floor.

like damn, apparently those crayola markers and glitter stickers were a load-bearing structural element of my professional competence. how do i explain that to regular people.

[strictly-confectional]

experiencing a normal amount of concern at a random uptick in fondness for a character