#the biggest reason to have a rogue in your party is to pick locks but there's no reason you can't have the bard do it

[flashhwing]

I love seeing everyone post screenshots of Astarion where he's wearing the drow armor in dark colors and then going to my own game where he's wearing the bard tunic in white. we are having fundamentally different experiences of this character

[bekahdoesnerdshit]

no one else has reblogged ask meme Mondays so I'm just going fucking apeshit with u. from the big boy: b7 for raini bc it's funny, c1 for cog bc it's inchresting, h3 for brilliance bc I know there's some gay shit going on and I want to hear more, then a17 (character proud of themselves or ur proud of ur rp as them) L5 and L6 for whomsoever u want to talk about

I won’t need a readmore for this one, I tell myself. There’s not that many questions, and they’re not proseboys. I was a fool. She’s too long to be allowed to run on people’s dashboards unrestrained 😔 Thank you! For going apeshit!!

Raini

B7. How do they respond to babies crying in public? I guarantee the image you have for how Raini would react to a crying baby is 10000% correct. She’s unhappy. Uncomfortable. Unimpressed. Can you please make that thing be quiet. Why did you have it if you can’t mange it. This is why she’s never having kids. Like she’s not gonna say anything to the parents or shoot them dirty looks, because she’s not that specific flavor of asshole, but she’s going Mind Her Business and vacate the premises if possible. People who want to take care of something should just get a cat. Goddamn. There is ONE (1) baby that may qualify for an exception, and that’s Red. This is because (and please, picture Raini, the absolute picture of ‘fed up’, squatting down to look a fussy Red in the eye while she says this) “Baby Lent. You’re better than this. I know you are, and you’re letting me down. You need to stop making that noise.” This is unrelated to the question, but please also picture a Raini who was asked (blackmailed?) into babysitting using her Mage Hand to change Red’s diaper. It has nothing to do with the question but I think it’s a Very funny mental image. Thank you.

Cog

C1. Does your OC have a moral code? If not, how do they base their actions? If so, where does it come from, and how seriously do they take it? Absolutely! The way Cog approaches the world is defined by three main mantras: - Kindness is a discipline, not a character trait. - Doing the right thing isn’t always easy, but it is always worth doing. - If you are able to help someone, you have an obligation to do so. Between these three things, Cog sees the world in pretty black and white terms. There are right decisions, and wrong ones. The difference between the two is usually clear to anyone who cares to look, and so most of the evil in the world is born of selfishness. Consequently, Cog does very poorly in morally grey situations. She will commit without hesitation to any course of action that she deems “right” and “kind” no matter how drastic or dangerous it is, but she pretty much shuts down the second she’s faced with a decision that has consequences for someone regardless of what she does.  I’m sure that has not, and will not, come in her life ever at all. Ahah!  I think originally, this worldview was born of naivety. She grew up that religious kind of super sheltered where everything in the secular world was dangerous and dirty, and so when Cog began to realize that definitely wasn’t the case she made the choice to intentionally see the best in people and the world around her to fight what she was told growing up. When she started traveling with her party and actually seeing more of the world than the extremes of a) shitty cult town b) shiny clean magic school, she began to realize that the true state of the Wasteland was somewhere between what her Mama had told her and what she wanted to believe it was. But I’ve never in my life made a character who is stubborn as hell deep down, so instead of letting the world she found herself in change her Cog took a deep breath, rolled up her sleeves, and settled in to be the one changing it by loving and helping the people around her.

Brilliance

H3. Does your OC believe there’s only one ideal partner (or multiple ideal if not monogamous) for everyone, or that there are many people who could be right? I think Brilliance absolutely adores the idea of two people being made for one another. Two souls, wandering the world looking for one another? Who slot together so perfectly that when they find each other it’s clear they never could have fit anywhere else? Bruh. Yes, she knows love takes work. Sometimes you and your partner are going to disagree, and sometimes there’s going to be conflict. The world isn’t “love at first sight” then smooth sailing for the rest of your life. But you put in the work to make your lives better, together, because the universe gave you this person to care for. Maybe there are many people who you could be happy with, and those relationships aren’t anything to look down on. But when you find The One, Brilliance thinks, you know. She certainly did.

Don’t Worry About It

A17. What’s one of your OC’s proudest moments of themselves? Gonna hijack this question to talk about rp moments I’m proud of because Alex sorta kinda gave me permission to do that! Alright! For Raini, the biggest rp moment I’m proud of was her “I’m getting our memories back” speech a few sessions ago, specifically the line, “We’ve been fighting with one hand tied behind our backs for too long. If we’re going to die fighting this thing, I want to know exactly what I’m fighting for.” Morgan and I had been planning to kick off our return from July Hell Hiatus with Wish Two for a couple of days, which meant I was lucky enough to be able to spend a little while planning what to say. I feel like that line in particular embodies Raini’s unwavering confidence in her magic, her determination, and her specific brand of caring for the people around her without actually admitting that’s what she’s doing. I also really liked the way the scene of her apologizing to the party for being Bitchy post losing Magic for a minute went! Idk if anyone else remembers it, because it was pretty short in game, but! I thought it was a very good moment of Raini finding the most Roundabout way to say “thank you for looking out for me while I was defenseless”.  If I can pat myself on the back a little, my Cog monologues kick Ass. The most recent one was when she was talking to Ace about how War is Bad (radical, I know) and there was a moment where she looked at him and said, “...I’m not going to ask for your help, because I don’t know what I’ll do if I do and you say no.” Which. OOF. That was her and I realizing in real time that she and Ace were very much on different sides of this issue. When the session ended everyone said they Loved how good and hurtful that conversation was and I :’) Also, there was a really small moment when Cog was pleading for Maelo’s life (when Sunny’s dad had him locked in a cat carrier. It’s a Long story, made slightly better by the fact that Maelo was wildshaped into a cat at the time) and Cog went Straight for the dad heartstrings by sniffling and asking if, please, would Robert at least let her say goodbye to her friend before he killed him? Please? 😢  She is using her baby face for EVIL!  And oh my god how could I forget! Arcane Timeout! When the party went back to New Alexandria and was confronted by Ace for helping a prisoner escape (which, in fairness, Maelo did do) and Cog brought the encounter screeching to a halt by casting Wall of Stone to make a timeout hut with herself and Ace inside. She then sat herself down, looked Ace dead in the eye, and told him that the wall wasn’t coming down until he actually talked to her, or until he broke her concentration on the spell. She banked hard on him not being willing to hurt her, and it paid off. There were tears all around, both in and out of character. It was Wonderful. Also! I do just want recognition for the fact that I did not give into my impulses to be a little Shit as Cog last session by subtle casting Heal in Ace’s face after he Counterspelled my Healing Word. it was what I Rebekah wanted to do more than anything; unfortunately Cog is a better person than I am. There is No worse feeling than wanting so badly to do something you have no choice but to admit isn’t in character. Rip.  For whatever reason, all of my favorite Brilliance rp moments came during combat. Pressing her forehead to Sabre’s after he died in silent grief, forcefully taking a Narzugon off his Nightmare and then using Misty Step to mount it herself and take off after her friend, planting herself in the chokepoint of a hallway to stare down three minotaurs so she could keep her party safe behind her, pushing deeper into the hellwasp nest to rescue Dembe and Sabre despite knowing that doing so all but destroyed her chance of making it out alive, the list goes on. There were good out of combat moments too (despite the rest of the party’s best efforts 🙄), but I feel like for once I made a character who really shone in combat.  oh GOD I just remembered one really really good rp moment, when our rogue Zihro died when he got separated from the party during combat. We finished taking care of the main devil we were fighting, then began searching the dungeon for Zihro and the npc he was with. We, instead, found both of their corpses. Dembe looked to Brilliance, our healer, and demanded to know why she was just standing there instead of fixing their friend. We were only level three or four at the time, so Brilliance had to tell Dembe, again and again, that she couldn’t fix Zihro. It was too late, she wasn’t powerful enough yet, her goddess wouldn’t answer a prayer like that- It was a rough scene, and without question one of the best rp moments I’ve had with that group. Tae, if you’re reading this, you’re the only one with rights. Also, please unfollow this blog immediately.  Now as a quick pick-me-up after that mess, Pip’s best rp moment was when our barbarian Durokal -who couldn’t read and had a habit of running off and causing Problems- found a plaque he could tell had five words on it, and called Pip over to read it for him when Pip finished chasing him down. Pip, annoyed and out of breath and all of two feet tall, looked up at this 7 foot half-orc and told him, “It says: I’m. Gonna. Kick. Your. Ass.” Also, he regularly called very powerful figures in Barovia by sweet nicknames with “Mr.” in the front. As a sign of Respect. Because he’s the Best. sdfhsdkfj he also he couldn’t think of a fake name quick enough one time so he told an npc that is name was Dick and he was Very embarrassed about it. She: bought it!

Brilliance, Again

L5. Which OC do you think is the most decent morally or behaviorally?  AKA, which is supposed to a “good guy”? The answer is Cog, but we already went in depth on her morals this ask. She’s HAD enough screen time let’s move on. Brilliance is the only other character who, if asked, would say they saw themselves as a good guy instead of just “a person”. She strives to do right by the people around her, and to protect the light and beauty found in the world. She doesn’t have the same illusions about the world wanting to be a good place that Cog does, and she very much understands that sometimes the best thing you can do for the world is to put the things that make it dangerous six feet under. What’s interesting I think is that, despite being a paladin, she isn’t Lawful Good! She’s Neutral Good, because you know what? She wants to do the right thing, and laws aren’t always right. It’s up to you, as a person with a mind and free will and agency, to look at a situation and decide what you think is the right thing to do. And, for Brilliance, generally the right thing to do is heft her sword, raise her shield, and face trouble head on.

Raini, Once More

L6. Which OC do you think is the worst morally or behaviorally? AKA, which is supposed to be a “bad guy”? I don’t have any evil aligned characters, because I personally find things like “getting along with my party members” sexy, but the character who’s the shittiest and the worst is obviously Raini. She’s not a bad person per say, she’s just selfish and results oriented. Very much “the ends justify the means” and in a party like hers she’s aware that somebody has to be the bad guy sometimes, and she’s not afraid to make sure that’s her. She’s also very very likely to fall victim to her hubris making her feel like she definitely knows what’s best, and acting on that maybe without consulting other people (see: the whole fucking premise of the campaign). She sees a goal, she sees a way to accomplish that goal, so why shouldn’t she begin taking the necessary steps to reach it? I think the events of the game have mellowed this flaw out a little bit, but you can still see traces of it in the way she, for example, wordlessly handed Lent a bunch of diamonds before launching her consciousness into the Abeast and very nearly dying in there without consulting with the party first. It happens!  Also, behaviorally, she’s just. I mean. She’s like that. The worst. And that, I promise, will never change. 

[dreamscapeadvent]

Intrepid Party pt. .6

This is, for the most part, the beginning of a RWBY fanfic. Canon-continuation, diverging into a universe of my own. I'll eventually put what comes just before - an edited version of what I posted months ago - and the rest as it develops.

As I said before, I hope I do the characters justice.

It's mostly first-draft. Lay on the lit crit.

---

The rock in Vergo's boot was slowing him down, if the hike through End's after-path wasn't bad enough. He wanted to stop, sit down, yank off the boot and dump its contents, wiggle his toes in the air. He would watch End's bright, silvery vortex wander away, and he would go find a rift that didn't deliver monsters to their doorstep. Vergo stopped and put his hands on his knees, looking accusingly at the white tornado his diver party was following. They'd only just dropped into its direct trough minutes ago, so the rest of the men were excited enough to give Vergo a headache.

“Pull your weight, scav!” said the tall, sonic-pike wielding diver in front of him, having looked back as though expecting - correctly - to find their caboose slacking. Vergo only groaned and trudged forward, knowing better than to complain.

The leaders of their party, the tall, beastly brothers Taiko and Timpa who “brought glory and riches to End” - far enough to be out of earshot - were following close enough to the rift that Vergo thought there was a chance it'd TAKE something, for once. He imagined the two being plopped on an alien world bloodied and confused, with otherworldly divers stabbing them in the chest before they could get their bearings.

Of course, not many others believed that was how the rifts worked. And only the most monstrous of the rift's deliveries survived the apparent trip. Vergo coughed on End's metallic air and decided to remain being mad at it anyway for being so selective.

“VEEEEERGO!” came a taunt and a wiry, gangly diver with another sonic pike bounded back from the middle of the group with his two typical lackeys. Vergo kept his head down and tried not to limp on his rock.

“Come on, buddy!” It was that seething kindness that made his hackles rise. Shouldn't this asshole be digging through the dirt? “You can't find anything for the town if you're always trying to catch up!” A few divers cackled as the gangly one craned down to look up at Vergo's lowered face. “Need HELP, buddy?”

Vergo merely plodded onward, trying his best to seem preoccupied with the dive, his heart beating fast. He was a small man, awkwardly shaped, so he'd been used to this kind of treatment since he was little. He wanted to retort - say he was fine - send these idiots back to their hike, maybe ask them why they weren't paying attention to the dive - but he knew it'd only be ammunition. So he stayed silent, kept on while the carrion feeders circled.  

The tall one - Vergo struggled to remember his name- stopped directly in front of him, halting the rear procession. “Looks like you could use a hand,” he said with a barely-veiled sneer. Vergo tried to look around him at the receding backside of the one who had first told him to keep up, actually concerned about being left behind - but the stage was set for the gangly bully and his audience. “This looks like a good spot,” he said, and used his weapon to whip some dirt up at the small man, who barely had time to shield his eyes. Among the sound of falling dirt and pebbles, the silence was deafening as the troup watched.

Vergo stood frozen for a second before kneeling down to feign investment in the new little furrow. He scrunched his brow, rubbing some of the unearthed dirt between his fingers.

“No such luck,” he said quietly - but before he could finish the last word a boot kicked more dirt in his face, getting in his mouth and eyes. He cried out and sputtered, rubbing at his eyes, which burned and screamed for the intrusion. Didn't they know this soil was rogue? The gods only knew what End put in it! But Vergo heard only laughter as he fell back, both spitting and trying not to scratch his eyes. Yeah, a tiny piece of metal with the dirt in his mouth. He fumbled for his canteen and uncorked it over his squinted eyes.

“Vergo's wasting water!” he heard another say.

“He's not even trying to use the help we offered,” said the first voice. Vergo's heart picked up again, seeing the man kneel through blurry, watering eyes. He instinctively fell back on his ass and scrambled back. “Just wasting everything, eh, Verg’?” Tall and gangly picked up something Vergo had dropped, turned it over slowly in his hands, shaking his head. His shock baton. “Can't even kill the stragglers with this thing you made.”

“Catro!” came a call from toward the middle of the group. Vergo rubbed his eyes, seeing a little better. His abuser had stood up at the call looking to the messenger with a relaxed smirk. His followers looked like animals after thunder.

“Yeah?” he called back. He dropped Vergo's shock baton, who barely caught it before it landed on his crotch. Vergo wheezed, grasping, and rolled over, his weapon trapped between his legs.

“Taiko's callin’ for the stray,” the voice called back with a hint of distaste. “Get him up there and form up the rear.”

“Can do!” Catro shouted, then pulled up a still doubled over Vergo. The small man struggled to right himself, gingerly pulling his weapon from where it stuck locked between his knees. Catro smiled with predator teeth. “Go be useful, knot-tier.”

Without a word, Vergo set up the path eyes-down, fighting nausea, passing other divers examining the fresh rift soil. Oh, he thought. They must be close to the rift itself for the black soil of its prowling grounds to look this undisturbed. He had to fight two urges as he delicately made his way past the other divers, all at least a head taller and several grades rougher than him. The first urge was to stop, kneel, and run his fingers through the fine, mostly pristine soil.

The second was to turn and run away as quickly as possible. Diving behind this monstrosity was inSANE.

As though feeling left out of his thoughts, End itself bloomed into his vision as he topped a rise in its wake-path. Vergo froze, wide-eyed, before what his brain called an apex predator: a thick, blue-white finger of god stretching from the ground to an angry vortex of dust in the sky - End looked like a tornado without spin, a slightly tapered column of angry light surrounded by perpetually shattering mirrors. It was the biggest rift Vergo had ever seen, and he'd never been this close to it before.

What made him want to turn around and run in that exact moment was that End wasn't moving.

“-can outrun it if it turns around,” Vergo suddenly heard just below the rise in front of him. Two large men in faceted leather armor stood with their backs to him, regarding the frozen rift.

“Yeah, that's not the problem,” said the other. Taiko, and his brother. Two separate survival instincts started to have a staring contest in Vergo's head. “When was the last time you saw 'er stop still like that?”

Timpa turned his head, grimaced through his beard at his twin. “Wasn't that…”

“When that thing took out bunch of Jimba's guys, yeah.” Taiko barked a surprising laugh at his twin. “Dear cousin was pulling ahead of us, Timpa. End gave us an edge.”

“Yeah,” Timpa said, “but what's it giving us, now?”  

Vergo stood frozen on the rise, his leaders below him, his fingers unconsciously tightening around his shock baton. For the twins’ part, their hands only moved to check their armor as the three of them looked on at the uncomfortably stationary rift, which shuddered for a moment before going still again. Taiko’s hand found a loose knot under a plate on his armor, and he seemed to remember something he was waiting on - he turned and saw Vergo, who jumped at his name.

“Vergo!” Taiko said, turning on a massive heel. “Get over here! Where've you been?” Vergo tried to don his most apologetic face as he slid down the rift soil, nearly tumbling forward. Taiko gestured with both hands impatiently. “I’m gonna lose this plate!”

Trying and failing not to look over Taiko’s shoulder at the rift, Vergo felt a huge, gloved hand clap him on the shoulder as he reached the leader with the weak knot. “You look at that thing too long,” Timpa said, “and you can be the first that tries to kill what comes out of it!” Timpa threw back his head with loud laughter, earning a few well-needed chuckles from the advance divers surrounding the leaders’ stopping point. He leaned forward, grabbing and releasing Vergo’s arm with a little shake. “You fix my brother’s armor, knot-man.”

Honestly, Vergo preferred Taiko and Timpa to the divers like Catro who seemed to have a lot to prove.

Taiko turned his torso to look back at the rift, forcing Vergo to strafe around him as he undid dependent knots before fixing the armor.

“What’dya think we’ll get?” he asked Timpa quietly, seeming to pay the little knot-tyer little mind. “Never seen it pause this long.” Timpa’s response was a thoughtful, guttural growl accompanied by a meaningful stabbing of the butt of his pike into the dirt.

“Something dead,” he said after a moment, loud enough for everyone to hear. “One way or another.” More than a few surrounding divers made sounds of affirmation.

Vergo’s eyebrows furrowed as he began re-tying knots, pulling plates back into place around Taiko’s torso. Why were these men so eager to kill? His whole family had been divers where he came from - they’d been wary of junk that came through their rift that was slightly radioactive, or even sharp. There were sometimes tiny, dead alien animals - but they were usually barely recognizable pieces of meat or char, and Vergo’s family had burned them. The idea of living monsters coming through End still boggled his mind. He eyed a long scar on Taiko’s underarm. He supposed… maybe just a bit… that these men had reason to fear their rift’s treasures.

“Maybe,” he muttered, “it’ll give you a lifeless thing that you can use or sell.” Vergo barely realized he’d spoken aloud until he recognized the deeper-than-normal silence between the two brothers towering over him. His fingers froze. Then he heard quiet laughter bubbling up in Timpa’s chest, slowly building like rolling thunder, before it erupted out of him, making him toss his head back in genuine mirth.

“That’d be the day,” Taiko said, looking down at the little man with an unreadable expression. Vergo immediately got his fingers moving again, noticing the lack of comment on his prior silence. The surrounding divers shared looks of annoyance.

“Where’d be the fun in that?” Timpa said between gasps of laughter. “The achievement?” Vergo tried to pretend he hadn’t said anything, hastening his work on Taiko’s armor, but the other leader wouldn’t let him go that easily.

“Is that what you want, boy?” Taiko said, raising his arm to let Vergo finish, who grimaced. He was half again Taiko’s senior, probably. When Vergo tried to stay silent, Taiko raised his voice. “Speak up!”

“Y-yes,” he said. “Yes.”

“And why is that?” said Taiko. The advance divers around them had fallen silent, listening. “Don’t you want to earn your keep?”

“I want to feed my family,” muttered Vergo. “If I have to kill something…” he considered his words. “... I want it to end up on the dinner table.” Surrounding spits of laughter.

“Boy,” Taiko said, leaning forward. “If what crawls out of End - with what you’re gonna sell to feed your family - doesn’t eat you, you sure as hell don’t want to eat it after it’s dead.”

“Last week,” Timpa said, making a wide gesture with his arms, palms inward, “big toothed worm, HUGE. Didn’t want to burn after we finally put it down. Pried a tooth out, brought it back to town, and it couldn’t even be shaped into a pendant.” He clapped Vergo on the shoulder again. “Good sport, though.”

“The machinery in the building that it came though in, though, paid its weight,” Taiko said. “Not the goddamned monster. You about done?” he added, gesturing at the rift. Vergo looked and felt his heart palpitate. It was difficult to tell by looking at its column, but the ground beneath it was crawling away - End was on the move.

“LEZGOHHH,” shouted Timpa. Vergo nearly fell over. “Get ‘er shit while it’s fresh!” Divers were stirring, scuttling, stowing food and checking weapons. The group started to move forward, led by a trudging Timpa, like predators following the herd. Recovering, Vergo finished his work and Taiko loped off behind his brother with an impatient grunt.

Before he could gather his things, Vergo felt an impact and bolt of nervous pain from the back of his knee, knocking him down - he knew it was Catro, and swallowed his cry of distress - no fuel for the fire, he growled at himself, eyes shut tight.

“Get up, Vergo!” the man shouted, jogging ahead. “Go and get your bread!” Vergo wanted to hate him, but - as he tended to do - pushed his thoughts towards supporting his family.

“Bread,” he muttered, getting to his feet, shambling after the group. But then, he didn’t have far to go.

They’d stopped cold.

He could see the brothers’ heads at the front of the crowd of divers, frozen solid, looking at something in End’s fresh wake. There was nervous, confused muttering, and the sound of shifting feet and packs being laid down, blades powering on. It didn’t sound like a group of hunters seeing prey, Vergo thought.

Unable to see what’d stopped the group, Vergo scrambled up the side of the rift’s wake-trough and squinted over their heads at what had quieted them. His first thought: yellow.

His second thought: this was hell, and hell was confusing.

The monster, a short jog ahead of the group, was a tallish young woman with wild blonde hair, wearing some kind of leather riding outfit complete with boots and jacket. She was staggering, trying to lift her hands from her knees to stand upright. She doubled over, instead, and vomited square in the middle of End’s fresh rift soil.

There was no doubt she’d come from the rift, being nearly otherworldly, disoriented like he’d heard monsters always were after exiting, and directly in the middle, right in front of them. But… she was standing.

What came through a rift and just stood?

The woman straightened, seemed to just then see the group of rough, armed men before her, and wiped her chin on her sleeve. She staggered one more time, trying to find her balance, before calling out, seemingly without a care in the world.

“Yo!” she shouted. It struck the group like a wave. “Any of you seen a girl with cute little kitty ears?”

[sgt-nerd]

Cargo Culture

Nerd Company, fall in!

Today we're going to talk about cargo cult game design.

First, terminology: After some people in Melanesia first encountered things like airplanes, they understandably didn't know how they worked. They knew the planes would bring in all sorts of goods and cargo after people built things like airstrips, landing fields, and so on. It was as though these people who'd arrived had discovered a way to summon damn near any sort of goods. To try and bring the goods for themselves, they would replicate what they'd seen the other people do. They'd go through the motions, but without fully understanding the reasons for it.

They weren't stupid, but they lacked critical elements of information. Similarly, a lot of times people will copy things they've seen working, but without knowing why.

We talked earlier about the figuring out the intentions behind your rules. If you're going to borrow rules from somewhere else, it's important to figure out why the hell they used those rules.

One of the biggest sources of cargo cult game design is Dungeons and Dragons. This ain't exactly a shocker, since D&D was the first real RPG on the market. Every RPG that exists owes some amount of debt to Gygax, even if they're designed as a reaction against D&D.

It's taken a long time for games to really start to move out of the shadow of D&D, and even today people design games in certain ways because that was how D&D did it (though which edition of D&D varies).

The thing is, original D&D was a designed around a very specific style of gameplay. Today a lot of people think of D&D as being generic fantasy, but while Gygax borrowed a lot of shit from different books and stories, he had a tight focus on what the game should do.

And it's right in the goddamned name. It's Dungeons and Dragons. You go into dungeons and fight monsters. You also haul out loot. The original game had you get most of your experience by hauling gold out of the dungeon.

The game revolved around resource management. You lasted as long as you had spells and hit points. Weight was tracked carefully. Thieves could only pick a given lock once. Random monster rolls pushed risk vs. reward gameplay.

But when you take those rules out of that context, when you toss 'em into another kind of game without thinking about it, they can fuck your game right up.

For example, let's look at those lockpick rules from older editions of D&D. Now, part of the reason you had lockpicking was because you had a lot of thieves in fantasy fiction. Bilbo, the Grey Mouser, L. Ron Hubbard... But it's used in a way that actually enforces the tone and other mechanics of the game. If you pick the lock on a chest, you get whatever treasure’s inside. But if you fail, you either have to lug it out of the dungeon (reducing the overall amount of loot you can carry), abandon it, or break the chest open (possibly wrecking the Magical Coffee Mug of Zandalur). Risk, reward, and resource management.

Under the influence of D&D, a lot of other games have lockpicking rules. This is partly to justify the existence of thieves/rogues. Jerry wants to play a rogue, so goddammit, the rogue has to have something to do. But the game designer thinks only getting one shot at the lock is unrealistic, or maybe he isn't as into resource management for his game. So, he lets the rogue try over and over again until he gets a lucky roll.

Well, now so long as the rogue can possibly make the check, he eventually will.

There are ways to make this interesting, of course. Time crunch is the easiest. Having interesting penalties for failure (you made some noise hammering at the lock, and someone’s coming!) But a lot of games don't bother with that. Published adventures for 3rd edition D&D often had locks that needed picking, but it was pretty rare for there to be any real penalty for failure. If you can't really fail, what the hell's the point of rolling? Either give the rogue a reason to want to get it first try, or don't bother having a roll.

Instead, ask why you needed lockpicking in the first place. What does it add to the game? What /can/ it add? How can it be used well? If it can't, then toss it. If it can, then change the rules around until it is. Make sure that your gamebook tells GMs when to use the skill and how to roll it into the game's fiction.

You also see cargo culting with World of Darkness. World of Darkness was one of the big rivals to D&D in the 90's, and a big departure from the D&D model in a lot of ways. So it's natural that a lot of games, especially urban fantasy ones, borrow from it. So you get dice pools, race/faction combos, and other bits lifted straight from Vampire or Werewolf without any thought to why it was used in the first place.

Sometimes a rule's just bad. 1st Edition D&D had special modifiers for women. That pretty much always leads to shitty sexism and junk science biotruths. The barbarian couldn't associate with magic users (Whoops, I guess Mary can't play with the rest of the party; she hates Jose's wizard). In 3.5, you have the no-fail lockpicking I mentioned earlier, and the rules for drowning straight up didn't work if you ran them as written. You had feats like Toughness that were literally designed to be bad so to trap people who didn't know the game so well.

But you still get people copying bad rules design because that's what D&D did, and that must be how roleplaying games are supposed to work.

Here's one that works in D&D's original rules space, but gets put into a lot of games where it doesn't fit: Combat is the majority of the game. It makes sense in D&D (where the rest of the game was mostly puzzle solving to get around traps or find cool ways to use magic items), but you see it even in games that are supposedly designed around social skills and roleplaying. If your game is supposed to be about diplomacy and political maneuvering, you probably don't need to devote three quarters of your rulebook on how to hit fightmans with sword. If most of your game is out of combat, devote your rules space to whatever the fuck the players are actually doing with their lives.

Again, look at what rules you're using that have been done before. Ask yourself why they were done. If you can't come up with a good reason, you might need to figure out if it's actually going to work in your game or not.

Nerd company, fall out!

[thedeviantsrp-blog]

Congrats Rogue! We are so excited to see that you are interested in The Deviants RP! Your application for Emote looks amazing and we cannot wait to see her FC of Emily Browning as Eleanor Genevieve Chavez come to life on the dash! Please follow the checklist and send in your account within 24 hours! 

OOC Information

Name: Rogue Age: 21 Preferred Pronouns: she/her Timezone: EST Any Triggers: RFP Level of Activity: 6 Anything Else?: Nope!

IC Information

Character’s Given Codename: Emote Real Name: Eleanor Genevieve Chavez Faceclaim: Emily Browning, Shailene Woodley Age: 25 Hometown: Memphis, TN Previous Occupation: Law Student Ability: Empathetic Manipulation

Description:

There is a world that hides behind the eyes of someone, resting deeply inside their minds. A scape of a world that they created, hiding away from the eyes and hands of those that wander the world. Depending on the person, a light glows from the iris and others stare so blankly. For Eleanor, it had shifted between the two her entire life; an eclipse of thought and heart through each chapter of her life.

Growing up in Memphis, Eleanor had always believed with the right tune and key, you could cure the world with a heartfelt song. While her parents didn’t always agree, it was the music and the streets excited by that thought that pushed her eager mind into writing from a young age. Every emotion she had inside provoked an adjective to coincide. And when she knew exactly how she felt, a rehearsed poem would be written along white sheets of paper in a series of colored pens, all matching the emotions she felt. Memphis inspired her every day though she lived in a white house with a perfectly cut family. The moment she stepped out the door, the world erupted in color that matched how she felt every minute.

As this girl, Eleanor had been built simply on her emotions. While some are run by their head and the logical way of doing things, she was always ran by the heart. When she needed to cry, she did and the same went for when she smiled. It was that which made her one of the most honest people her friends knew, and one of the only trustworthy advocates of the Chavez name. Though as time continued on, time showed that her emotions could fix very little, just as crying when someone else cried only seemed to make things worse. So then as the world grew around her, cold and hard like her family did, something that pushed those emotions back. So what happens when the store closes its door? Or God turns off the lights? The dark haze that sat behind Elle’s eyes began to settle as she slowly learned how to cope with the darkness that clouded the part of her she ceased to listen to. All she could do was to look in the mirror, mimicking the glass that altered her reflection.

That perhaps is what developed Eleanor into the woman she became. When the fog came in, there was still a voice of reason through each emotional pull, begging to turn the lights back on. To the girl who radiated the warmth of emotions in the cold world, she no longer wanted to settle for her own flame. Instead, she learned how to deal with the ice, to break through the fog and to listen to something new, something that wouldn’t hurt her as her heart did. It seemed that her mind, like her parents, knew what was best. And so she coped with logic and reason closely, using it as a weapon instead of the emotions that rattled in her chest.

There was no doubt that Elle was made to be the girl her parents wanted her to be. It wasn’t just the personality and charm she had achieved that was perfect, but with dark eyes and perfect locks of thin hair, she looked as though she could be sold as a porcelain doll. Each feature of hers was sharply cold, reflecting the ivory glass of a doll’s skin with the vacant shine in her eyes as well. Each time she looked in a mirror, it reminded her that she was made to be her family’s puppet; a charming toy that brought them joy and entertainment with each movement.

Slowly but surely, she became everything they had wanted her to be; a perfect student, a model citizen, and everything in between. Eleanor had become the dream daughter, a girl whom many envied and very few understood. Elle was no longer the girl that cried when a pin dropped, but was the one to pick it up and fix whatever it had broken from. And as she grew into the ideal they desired, she slowly manipulated herself to be that girl as well. With that growth, so did the volume of the voice. It told her what to do when people did wrong and what to do when people did right, which for her brother seemed to be the worst end of it. If she could change herself through a series of personal tests, then why couldn’t someone do the same? Her brother soon began to take a nostalgic form as what she hated most; herself.

Through the years, Elle followed her parents’ footsteps, pursuing a future in law. As both always were logical, finding the rules of life easy to play by, she found herself diving into piles of law books, immersing herself in their world. And here, she learned that the manipulation she used on herself, creating the girl she became, could also be used as her own strength. The court would be her battle field, her personality a weapon, together making her an unstoppable force, just as her parents had speculated. That was the biggest difference between the twins; while one then grew with the law, the other against. For every glorious party dress and curled blonde locks, her brother had a matching set of black eyes and street scars. The two were as opposite as a could be, both mentally and physically.

It was in law school that she first noticed what she could do. When her empathy struck with a case she worked with, suddenly others began to feel the same emotions. These feelings that she had tucked away had seemed to take a mind of their own, growing and spreading into a room. This had been every lawyers’ dream in having the ability to conjure people’s feelings to their side. It was that which could manipulate a court room to feel remorse for a cold blooded killer all at the hands of Elle. From a simple girl who wanted nothing more than to write and help the people around her soon turned into one of the most notorious law students as she reached for her parents goals. It wasn’t until their arrival in New York that Eleanor began to feel the empathy sink back in.

So what now? As the ice queen begins to melt, will she be able to mend the broken past between her brother and her? Or will her skill of manipulation push her empathy back in through her own personal desires? Only time will tell if Eleanor’s brain and heart will work together in tandem to reach the next level of her abilities or if she will crumble with the power of her own emotions, controlled or not.

Ethos:

Elle's strengths are that through her wit and ambition, she is able to achieve anything she truly desires. It is her minds manipulation that pulls her forward and convinces herself that anything is possible, something of which she learned from her mother.

On the other hand, while Elle's power lies in empathy, she had a great deal of apathetic nature that comes out from her loyalty to her family and their desires. With this, she can act quite ignorant to other people’s feelings.

[ranting-red-mage-blog]

01. The Public Image

The main reason I turn to Tumblr to blog is because I find it rather disheartening and flat out aggravating that our only source of reference is either the official community forums or reddit.

Needless to say, neither of these places are appropriate for posting honest opinion, least you be subjected to the hivemind that jeers and boos at you while giving -666 thumbs down because you simply stated, “I disagree.”

Alright, maybe I’m exaggerating; it’s never just ‘I disagree’, but you get my point. It’s a bunch of emotionally insecure hyper defensive wall flowers that just want Andy Warhol’s long promised 5 minutes of fame. Every waking moment I spend on reddit trying to accept it’s otherworldly culture for the sake of being involved, the more I realize: fuck this shit.

The FFXIV reddit community is the equivalent of when someone refuses to shower for 2 weeks and then decides to bathe in french vanilla fragrance mist. It doesn’t work. Not only are people completely aware of the shit beneath the surface, but the sweet appeal you’ve thrown on is nauseating.

Reddit universally is disgusting, and normally I’d never even have reason to venture that close to it’s ilk — but the fact that it’s the only community outside the official forums almost forces it on you with each google search. Not only that, but so much of the information and the “theorycrafting” on there is flat out incorrect.

They’re infatuated with the idea of theorycraft (they probably think the word just sounds cool) and have the god-awful tendency of confusing opinion with fact. Perhaps the biggest ringer for me is that roughly 2 - 3 days out of the week if you look at the top upvoted discussions, you’ll find a thread dedicated to what a lovely, beautiful, and welcoming community we have.

Or people reminding everyone to be polite because that’s who we are. It’s our brand. Let’s quote:

We're a community praised for our generosity and overall welcoming feel. Let's not ruin it. If you suspect someone used a Jump Potion and you're not on board with playing with them, then kindly leave the party, don't bring it to the subreddit in hopes of farming up karma and inflating you're own ego because you think it's okay to do so. It's not. We're better than this guys. C'mon.

Piss off.

I could make a huge comment on XI’s well renowned community and how ridiculous it is that people want to control everyone on a video game that’s not even theirs to moderate, but I could summarize this perfectly by just saying: reddit.

It really grinds my gears to see so many people trying to take over this game, like they own company shares because they pay a subscription fee; so they’re entitled to tell everyone how the game should be, or how the community should behave. Even so far as to tell the developers themselves! The balls on some people! Let’s quote off reddit again:

Give 20% back with aetherflow - Any heavy healing and mana goes poof. 1/3 for energy drain is typically enough, but it would help.

Have bio again just for an extra button to press No really, the dungeons are still not that heavy on healing and I picked ACN for dots to start with even SMN feels like I don't have enough dots. Spamming broil just isn't fun :/

An extra stack of aetherflow. Since we have so many abilities locked behind stacks but this might be OP.

Any one of these and I'd be happy.

Okay, so school is in session everyone. Yoshi-P is considered one of the most highly receptive developers when it comes to personal feedback regarding MMORPG and player satisfaction.

Does anyone know why?

At the start of FFXIV 1.0 alpha & beta, the moderators/administrators were completely unresponsive to the opinions and feedback of the testers. People grew furious as their feedback went into the dark abyss and bugs/known issues persistently appeared while SE promised everything was working as intended.

I’m 99.9% certain everyone has watched the coverage on A Realm Reborn, posted on youtube by NoClip titled “Rewriting History”. This is the first time, after 7 years, that SE has opened up and explained what was actually going on behind the scenes. It also explains why Naoki Yoshida was placed in the position he’s currently in. 

In 2.0 beta, Yoshida and his team (although met with much doubt and criticism that they would just do the same as the previous alpha/beta), made it their utmost top priority to take player feedback and apply it to the game. This is why Yoshida asks for feedback.

The community, who most likely have no idea about the history behind this since Legacy members left playing this game are few and far between, have completely taken advantage of it and ran out the door screaming.

Now, every time a change happens people are instantly flocking to the forums & reddit to complain about how the idiot dev team has ruined their entire life and they will never return to that job so long as they live because blahblahblah.

Holy shit, get over it. This isn’t WoW, where the changes made inflict a notable 50% negative DPS impact on the meters. At most you’re looking at a whopping 1% - 5% difference. You could even go as far to compare damage dealt by job on FF Logs to see that almost every class is a toe hairs length away from each other in DPS (except Samurai because it’s clearly broken, hence the patch coming up to fix it.. I’ll look forward to reading the whining demands all over).

I nearly didn’t return to the game for Stormblood, truth be told, because of how utterly put off I’ve become with everything. I know I’ve ranted about reddit this entire post, but it’s not just them. It’s on personal domains, tumblr, and fan blogs. Websites across the board with patreon pages dedicated to support their unique careers on XIV. Careers.

We try to keep our monthly operating expenses low to begin with, but we also want to gain enough to set aside for expanding what we do. At this point, we'll be able to cover all operating costs and set aside savings to be used for expanding what we do, prize pools and more! Thank you for bringing us life!

The above is quoted from the official A Stage Reborn patreon page. Let me clarify this perfectly here: these people are trying to profit off a Square Enix video game. They’re using the FFXIV models (character & object), and even the original screenplay of “I want to be your Canary” from Final Fantasy IX to bring in-game entertainment and have the gall to link a patreon for funding. 

The terms of agreement and privacy policy attached to this is enough to make my head spin. This game is not for you to profit off. This game isn’t a career. It’s a game. In all my years on XI, and even the rogue few I bounced to a few other MMO’s, I’ve never seen this shit.

When did people start trying to profit off being part of a fanbase instead of enjoying it? How did we get here? It seems like everyone is clawing at the gate trying to rip off a small piece of XIV for themselves