#not necessarily planned beforehand I want to roll the dice for them or something chance based

[babblish]

absolutely no pressure to answer this, and this ask is only born of curiosity, but what was the 'sibling' peace you mentioned during ordership week?

(once again no pressure at all to answer, i know there's an..... amount of 💿🐴 (disk-horse) surrounding that whole topic haha)

I... I... Anon, if you're talking about my end note on the 🔞 art piece, by "sibling piece" I meant a diptych and to the best of my knowledge there's no discourse surrounding those, at least in fandom spaces.

Basically in the middle of the process of creating the first (and to date the only) piece I had this fanciful notion of using what I had already done and tweaking a few details resulting in two structurally similar but contextually distinct artworks. You know, in much the same way Observatory Musings B-side and A-side are sibling pieces, just in text in form.

😔I'm sorry for the english language if there has been some form of misunderstanding. It's after 1 am for me and there's a strong possibility I'm making a fool of myself, but in fairness I'm absolutely excellent at that at all hours of the day.

[transienturl]

I have watched/listened to, I dunno, a small to moderate amount of actual play tabletop campaign series... serieses? What is the plural of series?

Okay, before we get distracted: while I do so, I'm constantly thinking about what I would and wouldn't want to emulate from them if I were a player or GM in my own campaign. I have a couple of mostly-unrelated thoughts on this topic:

I actually have no idea how close these things are to a typical home tabletop roleplay game; I have been in... a little bit of one... once? Doesn't seem like a big enough sample size. Obviously, it's clear to me that there's a big difference between the ones where there's a set output format and in some sense it's heavily preplanned/"scripted" (live stage shows with a time limit; shows with elaborate physical props like dimension 20) and, you know, the shows that don't have those, but I'm sure there are much more subtle things that you do only when you're recording something for an audience that I wouldn't easily pick up on.

Even though the amounts of each roleplay group I've experienced besides the one I've watched hours of are like [two episodes, four episodes, about 10 minutes, one season], it's really obvious that everyone's strengths and weaknesses are different, to the extent that "actual play D&D" really doesn't fundamentally describe the same thing. Some groups seem, besides the DM, actively bad at the D&D part itself and the "rules" are more of an inspiration source for some professional-tier storytellers/roleplayers who are really using that skill. Contrast, I guess, with critical role, who seem to more actively be playing the game itself (neither of which is better or worse, obviously; it's just different).

My biggest pet peeve, that I'm really curious about the prevalence of, is when the GM presents the players with a problem, multiple players come up with ways to solve it that don't really engage with each other, that's kind of the end of the thought, and they say "okay each of our characters does their plan" and they all roll separately. I dunno, like... I guess when you say it that way it sounds fine. But it doesn't lend itself to, I guess, stuff like narrative drama? I thought I had a better way to describe this in my head. But, I guess, coming up with a plan that involves everyone's idea makes the successes or failures dictated by the device create a coherent narrative that everyone can contribute narrative ideas to, while everyone splitting up to (let's say) sneak into an area and one person getting caught usually just leads to the invalidation of the potential storylines of all of the other potentially clever ways to get past the challenge.

Related to that, and more generally: I like to think I would run tabletop in a very specific way: that of "the best, most compelling story is the one we're trying to create." For example, I would actively want my GM to decide how many wolves are around the corner based partially on the current state of the party, not necessarily because they wrote that down beforehand. To me, that's not a betrayal of the system we decided wherein the better my character is built the more successful they are! I would want to play tabletop more as a collaborative writing exercise than as a video game, I guess. I find "clever ways to skip boss encounters" actively annoying unless the clever way is cool, and makes a cool story, and feels good, which it often does but often doesn't! If not, it's just wasted story potential, wasted emotion potential really. The goal is to feel something. I'm not saying de-weight the dice, to be clear; the dice are also a way to feel something! I'm saying, engineer the scenario so each time you roll the dice, you have the maximum chance of feeling something because of it.

Yeah, I think about this a lot for someone who will likely not experience these things any time soon.

(If you're looking for recs: I don't think Oxventure is the sort I'd do a specific rec for since a lot of the draw is enjoying the people and just how they interact, but I do really like all of them and have watched it by far the most; the early bits of TAZ I've listened to give me similar vibes but I hear the worldbuilding gets pretty good later; I don't like how crit role does combat descriptions and I don't have the time to commit to understand the melodrama so I passed on it; I haven't gotten into friends at the table but I bet I would find them the most compelling if I did; their creative abilities seem off-the-charts but I have trouble parsing the voices...

...and I watched the first dimension 20 season and that one does get a straight up recommendation, because wow they are good at what they do; I would say the high-energy style is not actually my style but if you're gonna do that they do it in a way that I bet almost no one can

Still looking for a show that feels like, "oh, this is me." Not actively looking, but.).