#the insanity of this god damn ttrpg

[tinnixiart]

When you come back 2 years later

[dimension-20-every-introduction]

Everyone Introduced in Dimension 20′s Mentopolis episode 6 (finale)

[honourablejester]

I’m realising as I browse around that I really love lore when it comes to ttrpgs, games and game worlds. And by that I don’t mean I like to obsessively learn lists of dates and wars, and the names of leaders of factions, I mean …

I like learning weird, juicy details about the worlds of games. I like finding little nuggets that say things about the set-up and culture and assumptions of the world. I like finding fragments of ideas to hang whole story and character concepts off.

I love that in D&D 5e’s Spelljammer, the Astral Sea is full of the corpses of dead gods that you can fully sail up to in your ship. Just. Floating out there. Waiting for you to rock up to them.

I love that in Sunless Sea, the king of the drowned is the way he is because he fell in love with an eldritch sea urchin from space, and successfully married it. His niece is an angry sentient floating mountain whose mother is a goddess-mountain and whose father is a face-stealing humanoid abomination. This is fine and normal.

I love that in Starfinder, there are mysterious bubble cities in the surface of the sun that the church of the sun goddess discovered and cheerfully occupied despite having no idea who the hell built them or for what purpose.

I love that in Dishonored, the entire industrial revolution that has built the empire we’re in the midst of saving or destroying was built on the properties of whale oil harvested from eldritch tentacled whales that live half in the oceans and half in an eldritch void personified in the form of a weird-ass black-eyed shit-stirrer of a deity who was formed from a murdered and sacrificed child. And this is largely a background detail.

I love in the Elder Scrolls that the dwarves up and fucking vanished, as a race, at some point in history and absolutely nobody has any clue what happened to them or where they went, but their technology is so insane that ideas like ‘they time-travelled’ or ‘they erased themselves from existence’ are absolutely on the table.

I love that in Numenera, so many incredibly advanced civilisations have risen and fallen on this world that it’s absolutely littered with bonkers science fiction artefacts that have caused the current medieval-esque society built over top of them to develop in bizarre ways, and also you can find a mysterious artefact that absolutely baffles and delights your character, but that you the player will fully recognise as a slightly-more-advanced thermos flask.

I love that in Fallout, an irradiated post-nuclear apolocalypic hellscape, there’s a cult that worships the god of radiation as they have come to understand it, and they are mysteriously immune to radiation with absolutely no explanation whatsoever. They’re not ghouls, the usual result of fatally irradiated humans with some resistance, they’re perfectly normal humans who can somehow just tank rads all damn day. It could be a mutation, but Lovecraftian gods apparently do also fully exist in this setting, so it’s also possible that maybe they were on to something with this Atom thing.

I love that in Heart The City Beneath, there’s a mass transit train system that they tried to hook up to the eldritch beating god-thing buried under the city so that they could metaphysically chain the stations together more easily, which went horrifically and metaphysically wrong in entirely predictable fashion, and now there’s a whole order of train-knights who have to keep people safe from the extradimensional weirdness magnet the network has become.

That, and all the fantastic little details you can stumble across. There’s a biotech augmentation in Starfinder called an angler’s light that gives you a little angler-fish bioluminescent antenna on your forehead, and it was developed by asteroid miners who needed light but also both hands free for work. In Dishonored there’s a festival that everyone pretends is outside of time so nothing you do during it can be held against you. There’s a god of snuffed candles mentioned in a single line from Heart The City Beneath who has pacifist cannibal priests, and that is literally all the information you get on him.

While things like the history and geography and timeline of a world do also fascinate me, I’m not really here to memorise stuff like that. I’m here to find weird little nuggets of information and worldbuilding and delight in them. Give me funerary customs and weird myths and oddly specific circumstances and baffling little objects and absolutely bonkers cosmological implications. Give me the corpses of dead gods, and aesthetic movements with highly specific backstories, and bureaucratic fuck-ups of titanic scale, and mysterious things that seem to break all other rules of your setting with absolutely no explanation because people in-universe have no fucking clue how they work either. Why are the Children of Atom immune to radiation without ghoulifying? Not a clue, but Confessor Cromwell has been cheerfully standing in that irradiated pond that kills the player character with about 10 minutes of exposure for the last year and he’s still absolutely fine.

I just. I really love lore. I like my settings to have some meat in them, some juicy details to dig into, some inexplicable elements to have fun trying to explain. Particularly that last bit. I feel like a lot of people when building worlds feel like the rules have to be absolute and everything has to have an explanation, but nah. Putting some weird shit in makes everything immediately feel bigger, more real, because we don’t have even half an idea of how our world truly works, there’s always something we just don’t fully understand yet, and you can put that in a fictional world too. Some mysteries, some contradictions, some randomness, some weirdness. There’s a line, obviously, this depends on execution, but a little bit of mystery really does help.

Lore is awesome. And weird lore is even more so. Heh.

[cavegirlpoems]

So we all hate DnD, but I am kinda curious what are the actually bad ttrpgs?

I know that 3,5e and pf got bloated even more than 5e did, FATAL is a meme, but what else?

I think Chronicles of Darkness tell you the system's gonna be a sleek, streamlined narrative system and then immediately bukakke's pointless fiddly complexity all over everything, to an extent that I never see most STs actually use half the subsystems (does anybody actually like the Doors mechanic?) but also you can utterly break the game if you combine the right merits and powers in a way that I really hope isn't intentional. WoD games all have slightly clunky, lame mechanics but at least in OWoD the mechanics take an extremely simulationist approach of simply modeling the fiction, balance be damned; CoD throws out the simulationism in favour of abstraction and narrativism, but perversely only makes the mechanics more complex, and deploys more weird dice tricks so eyeballing probabilities gets much harder. Everything is fiddly, everything has specific exceptions, and everything good is gated behind weird prerequisites and builds as if the devs thought they were making pathfinder. If you're some sort of weirdo who actually prefers the CoD settings, run them using OWoD mechanics for the love of god.

Shadowrun 6e's character generation is so complex that people have created third party apps that are basically mandatory in order to wrangle it into shape. It's notoriously complex in play with basically every action requiring multiple steps of calculation, to the extent that 'you need to do calculus if you set off a grenade next to a wall' is a meme; when I played we simply never used grenades because we were all to scared of trying to make sense of the mechanics. However, in play a slightly minmaxed mage can make every other party member obsolete by simply summoning an extremely powerful spirit to solve every task. I hated every minute of it.

Pokemon Tabletop Adventures uses d20-based mechanics for trainers, where you roll a d20 vs armour class to hit, and then roll some damage. It also recreates the mechanics of the pokemon video games largely verbatim. Its expected that trainers and pokemon can and will interact despite using totally different systems, and trainers can even learn pokemon moves. Some classes are good at things like 'capturing and training pokemons' while others are good at 'fighting pokemons themselves with martial arts' or 'winning contests' or 'being a film noir detective', but you only get XP or mechanical support for the first ones. Some classes get abilities like 'perfect mind-control, no save' while others get abilities like 'you're better at growing berries'. You are expected to calculate the stats of every pokemon individually, from scratch, for every encounter. Encounters typically feature 5-10 wild pokemons often of multiple species and levels, alongside 3-5 player characters and up to six pokemons per PC. Its a fractal spreadsheet nightmare. Unlike shadowrun, the app to make this insanity playable doesn't exist. Good god. Send help.

On the other end of the spectrum from stupid fiddly crunch, Ten Candles is responsible for the single most miserable ttrpg experience of my life. It claims to be a narrative game which gives players the ability to define the fiction as they go, but fails at this because the GM has secret knowledge that other players aren't privy to, meaning that it invites players to be creatively vulnerable when they have narrative authority, with a chance that they might get their contributions unilaterally overruled due to information they had no way of knowing. Since the game ends with everybody dying automatically, the game inherently leans on the GM to railroad in what's meant to be a colaberative narrative experience. And finally, on a purely practical level, the clever conciet of playing by candlelight and extinguishing candles as the game progresses means that by half-way in you can't read your fucking character sheets or dice, which is less spooky and more irritating. God I hate ten candles.

[kingwuko]

I saw a Wu post you reblogged and it mentioned that on supplemental content it's revealed that Wu was in republic city for a degree and me being me couldn't shake the idea of that degree being in musical theater. Am I projecting my own wants amd desires on my favorite blorbo? Yes a little bit, but also look at him. Come on. So this idea is in the back of my mind for the past few days and then just now I'm listening to a song from that fan project of atla as a musical (I'm honestly not sure how many more songs they've made) and I'm like. Heh, what if Wu wrote that musical. Then i go no. No this is just as a silly thing, I'm not serious about it... but then I imagine him actually singing this, and singing it well, while playing it at a piano and.

Gods DAMN I want it so bad. I mean can you imagine him asking former fire lord zuko himself about what his sister was like so he can WRITE about it?

Insane.

Idk, I feel like it has the potential of being the anti Ember Island play, something genuinely good with all its sources thoroughly checked and vetted and every living person featured in the story consulted and given explicit permission to use their likeness.

I also just generally like the idea of Wu being a composer? I recall the joke about his singing being that its awful and I wish that weren't true but if it is then I think he should be a good composer at least. Just has a terrible singing voice lol.

Anyway that's all, let me know if I'm sending too many of these btw I just enjoy your responses a lot!

AAAAAH Wu being in a music theater program in RCU is actually a great idea. Being a composer or writer totally tracks for me. His lil rhymes he came up with while singing on the spot were actually delightful and clever!!! I love his silly badgermole songs and I don't think his singing voice is too shabby either!

Oh my god to that song though what a fun fan project. Wu is well versed in history (citation ruins of the empire) so yeah! He could make the anti-ember island musical retelling of Aangs adventures why not!

You are not sending me too many asks. I feel like I'm annoying begging people to interact with me lol but seriously please send me all your Wuko thoughts I love talking about these guys!!!

(for anyone wondering the supplemental content referenced is from the Avatar Legends TTRPG Republic City book idk if you guys have noticed but I'm kind of obsessed with Avatar Legends lol)

[fatmaclover]

12, the whole gang. would love to hear every head canon you have tbh!!

oh gosh thats gonna be a lot. im gonna be excluding anything that would make this blog more personal or less tame than i want it to be but you really arent missing much there

well. first and foremost UNFORTUNATELY its a hc that im a joyce kelly truther. shes so unbelievably transfem to me at this point its hard to see her as much else. genuinely forget its not canon sometimes. oops

i also must say all of @pariskim's joyceverse tag is canon in my mind and i really recommend you go through it even if you dont see joyce the same way i do, genuinely some of my favorite fan content to consume period. yes i am also sending you over there to become a joyce truther. go.

honestly if mac and dennis could be responsible pet owners (theyll never be.) i think theyd LOVE having a snake. i know theyd go for a ball python because theyre more stereotypically "snake" than some other pet trade species, but frankly i think theyd do best with a hognose. theyre pretty social (with humans. dont keep hognoses together in a tank) idiots with huge attitude and they look god damn adorable. hognoses would also be great for them because they tend to be more food motivated! its also good for snakes to just take them out and like. set them on your bed n just chill or talk with em for an hour or so. thatd be great for mac.

i personally think that mac will only hook up with you as a fellow man if you a) can pass as older than him or b) look like dennis. yeag i think he, consciously or not, goes for people that have similar traits to dennis, physically or personality wise. if dennis let himself accept that he cares a bit too much about who mac is dating, that little fact would single-handedly make macdennis canon. dennis would tell mac to just date him if he wanted to date him so badly

not entirely a headcanon but i imagine almost all of the gang besides maybe frank has methods for getting dennis to regulate his diet a bit more instead of eating like 1 meal a day. i think mac can get dennis to eat or drink just about anything by just giving it to him in conversation. he'll just let dennis talk his ear off and continually hand him chips or fruit or even drinks or nearly any drug at all. having a small bite or drink or hit during conversation is such a reinforced habit that its natural to the both of them now.

i think dee does it by purposefully playing into her status of being "below" dennis. she'll complain about being too weak to open a peanut shell or something and he'll snatch it and do it to prove hes better and out of habit maybe has a little bite. though i imagine if theyre inebriated in any way its as easy as genuinely just feeding it to him. dennis will never admit it, because he hates his sister, but he trusts her.

joyce i think can get dennis to eat just by getting alone with him. she provides a bubble of decompression and a lack of worry for him. its also insanely easy for her to just offer dennis a huff of whatever inhalant shes been having fun with that day and i imagine that makes things easier as well

i think you could pretty easily get mac into nerd shit. just have some pretty boy be a little nerdy. get him to watch star trek itd be life changing for him even if i think a good amount of it would fly over his head at times. ttrpgs and roleplaying in general i think would be big for him

also bringing back my hc of him joining the philadelphia gay mens chorus ohhhhhh my god i need him to sing more i need him to embrace his love of singing

unngh thats not all of em but i my brains starting to lag a bit here. ill happily rb this post with more and make it a sorta masterpost for hcs eventually

[cyberdragoninfinity]

Axel and Anna for the character ask thingy!!!!

MY MAN AXEL 🔥

Why I like them/why I don’t: TRULY ONE OF THE REALEST ONES axel really carries like a solid half of season 3 on his shoulders and then comes back swinging with the Angst Agonies in season 4 like HE DOES IT ALL. HE'S JUST A RELIABLE DETERMINED GUY WHO WANTS TO FIGHT FOR GOOD. AND his duel disk is a fucking GUN.

What I like about their appearance: i love his eyelashes, theyre a more subtle detail but theyre very charming. Also it's just always a small miracle to see a black anime character whose design isnt Um. Questionable. All Things Considered (looks at girag 8| )

Do I prefer their dub names or original names? i like axel brodie and austin o'brien probably about the same! it's just nice to see him mentioned regardless of name choice.

OTP: again, he and jim are married in my brain for all intents and purposes. they did Not go through all that in The Duel Monster War Zone to not have a little gay thing going on.

NOTP: hm. i dont think ive even SEEN enough axel ships to have one i dont really like??!?

OT3: mentioned when I talked about jim but axel/jim/jesse is pretty fun. hell throw jaden in there too

Favourite card they use: Blaze Accelerator and Tri-Blaze Accelerator are fucking crazy. FIRE GUN(S)!!!!!!!! #BURNDAMAGEMOMENT

Favourite moment they were in: god his duel with the supreme king still goes so fucking hard. i do also like the Psychological Horrors he got put through by mr. T in season 4 STOP STOP HE DOESNT DESERVE THIS

Least favourite moment: all of the early season 3 stuff with him and professor viper but thats less axel's fault and more. god Damn i find professor viper extremely boring lmao

Something I associate with them: combat heavy war TTRPGS... in college AU he likes to DM them <3

AND MISS ANNA KABOOM!!! 🚂🚂🚂💥

Why I like them/why I don’t: anna rules so fucking hard...like most zexal girls i wish the show did more with her but just like. the sheer concept of a yugioh girl whose deck isnt full of cards that are solely Pretty Lady but instead GIANT TRAINS and RAILGUNS is so obscenely kickass im so glad she exists. i love that shes tough and pushy and overconfident!!! LET YUGIOH GIRLS BE A LITTLE MEAN!!!

What I like about their appearance: she is so CUTE!!! i love her sporty hair and white + pink + red color palette and her FUCKING CANNON SHE RIDES ON. it's such a delightful yugioh girl design

Do I prefer their dub names or original names?: SORRY ZEXAL SUB BUT NOTHING IS GOING TO GO HARDER THAN "ANNA KABOOM" I MUST SAY.

OTP: your honor anna/rio is MY yuri ship with two girls who didn't interact you must understand i like them So Much. butchfemme couple... fire and ice....snowpiercershipping..... i need to draw them again

NOTP: anna/yuma is like. it's not even bad anna is just such a baby butch to me this ship doesnt even cross my radar. she likes women.

OT3: ok now rio/anna/tori might be cooking.

Favourite card they use: GUSTAV MAX MY BELOVED. MOST INSANE ACE MONSTER ESPECIALLY TO GIVE TO A YUGIOH GIRL!!! TANK-TRAIN-RAILGUN BLAST!!!

Favourite moment they were in: i do love her tag duel with yuma where she duels her grownass adult woman friend and her husband and said woman's ace monster is the fucking Titanic and her husband's is the Hindenburg. i think about that duel like once a month.

Least favourite moment: like it's cool she got to team up with the sparrow and duel mizar but it still does kind of suck ass that she died and went to hell like half the rest of the cast >:( SHE COULD HAVE STOPPED IT

Something I associate with them: LEMON_DEMON_MY_TRAINS.MP3

[boy-bug-ghoul]

Things in take me back to eden that make me go feral

so it's my first time listening to tmbte fully after putting it off bc i knew i would be so excited i wouldn't be able to regulate my emotions HDSKSHD

and my ttrpg discord server had to witness me have very very live thoughts and reviews about the album and vessel's voice and vessel's new mask (which i plan on making!)

so here's some of those under the cut!! (i might continue to edit this as i listen again and again)

(i hope this is how you make a cut this is my first post)

Chokehold:

I was listening to per aspera ad inferi by ghost and plugged my ears so that the music was like fully reverberating around my skull and it was. such a good experience.

my hands over my ears, like rattling my eardrums

i did that with chokehold. fucking incredible bro it was. insane. so good.

the light piano noises?? juxtaposed with the SUDDEN HARDNESS AND THEN THE VOCALS AND AHSKDJHFS

The Summoning:

i don't have much to say about the summoning /pos. it's a classic. i think the first song i listened to from sleep token.

I've been listening to it a little more recently. the whole thing is so good especially like the middle bit where it goes so hard and the guitar goes "bleep bloop" (i read from somewhere,, the blog name evades my memory), THEN transitions into the ethereal flowy bit before iii starts bassing the house down

OH AND MY LOVE, DID I MISTAKE YOU FOR A SIGN FROM GOD

i love listening to the drums in ST songs as well. this is one of those crispy delicious drum songs

Granite:

i sing this pretty angrily. "if you had a problem then you should have told me" etc etc yk?

after that part it's sooooo easy to vibe to because of that underlying melody, its so satisfying i listen to it over and over again

"abstract toxicity" ben says

has been in my on repeat playlist for a while now haha

Aqua Regia:

i'm such a nerd about aqua regia. the first verse goes hard. the second verse goes hard. it all goes hard without having to go musically hard.

BECAUSE THE LYRICISM IS SO GOOD. "between teeth on a broken jaw, following a blood trail, frothing at the maw" "putting down the roses, picking up the sword" "oxytocin running in the ether" JUST TO NAME A FEW

THE ENTIRE BRIDGE. THE ALARM BELLS LYRIC. yeah.

also on my on repeat

Vore:

it's like the "gods" of tmbte yk? (it's because he starts out screaming. and i love it.)

but after that like, "will we remain stuck in the throat of gods" onwards,, it has something to it that makes me want to cry.

"there is always something in the way, i wanna have you to myself for once" there's so much yearning

so good. i feel bad for ignoring vore for a while before tmbte came out bc it really is. so good

Ascensionism:

i like the "oh woahs" at the start of vessel rapping

"half of a rhythm, half deity, glitches in the cold or gaps in a strange dream" HIT ME IMMEDIATELY. I HAD TO PAUSE IT BECAUSE IT WENT SO HARD. because it is basically what vessel is. oh my

"make it real" he sounds so good singing this fml!!!

"lipstick, chemtrails" onwards is SO VIBEY like all the lyrics as well!! the blood references interest me!!

vessel whispering "diamonds in the trees, pentagrams in the night sky" gave me chills. in a gay way? yeah probably

I DO APPRECIATE HOW THE SONG IS 7 MINUTES!! LONG SONGS CHEF'S KISS

Are You Really Okay?:

i had many. many feelings about this one. it's still hard to put it into words right now

i said to my server, "im gonna start violently sobbing actually. bc its SO VERY CLEAR what it. hrgh"

it was a lot. cried, definitely. i bet it hits close to home for a lot of people.

also weird music moment i was like. noticing shdfkd i was like "damn they did this song in C major and I'm still crying" (or at least i think it's C major, it was so odd bc that's one of the brightest key signatures yk)

The Apparition:

gave me twinges of high water in emotion, but it's because i am projecting too heavily onto the first verse sdhfd

the instrumental after the first verse fucks.

the chorus as well!! the lyrics i keep talking about THE LYRICS on this one "let's make trouble in the dream world, hijack heaven with another memory"

i love the instrumental the whole time, again with that underlying melody

DYWTYLM:

THIS SONG MAKES ME SAD GO AWAY HDFSHDF

i read this descriptor on fake out by fall out boy, but i feel like this song is so "grit your teeth and smile"

"can you ever forgive yourself?" comes for my kneecaps.

"i cannot hope to give you what i cannot give myself" wrrrr shut up bro shut up D:

"smile back at me, please" SEE THIS SONG DOESNT GO TOO HARD MUSICALLY BUT THE LYRICS GO SOOOOOOO HARD

Rain:

the first song i listened to off the album! it is. not because it shares a title with a ghost member... i swear...

THE ENTIRE POST-CHORUS. "refracted in light, reflected in sound" really hit me the first time!!

i love how it gets INCREASINGLY HARDER

ben, to his discord server: "darling will you saturate?" 1. CALLBACK TO AQUA REGIA 2. saturate my [redacted] vessel

i listened to rain for an hour on repeat. it slaps so hard.

Take Me Back To Eden:

right off the bat, 8 MINUTES AND 20 SECONDS. AND ALL OF THEM ARE SO GOOD.

the first take me back to eden refrain when vessel does that high note. ascending.

i love the chorus so so much. i had so many feelings relating to the chorus. and the harmonies ohhhh my god.

"THE CHORUS KEY CHANGE MAKES ME LIKE SHAKE" "theres so many key changes im freaking out right now im going insane right now" "THE CHORUS IS SUNG 3 TIMES AND EVERY TIME ITS A DIFFERENT KEY IM GONNA LIKE CRY IM GONNA FUCKING CRY"

i had many feelings related to the key changes. the first time i experienced all three choruses i had to pause. hyperventilate for a bit.

"and i don't know what's got its teeth in me but I'm about to bite back in anger" very high water!!!! the mouth of infinity fr

WHEN I REALISED THAT NOT ONLY WAS THERE A LYRICAL CALLBACK TO CHOKEHOLD BUT THE INSTRUMENTAL AS WELL.

and the ending goes so hard i love it when vessel just starts screaming

clearly. my favourite. there's a lot of thoughts abt this.

Euclid:

the lyrics again. all so good. the night terrors. the yearning and reverence. this is my shit

the "call me when you get the chance" etc. initially i was like "this sounds so much like the night does not belong to god AND OH BOY! WAS I IN FOR A SURPRISE

"euclid is fucking insane,,, and they call back to their first ever ep AND their first ever lp and imlike hrgndnksfnrhsn" this was me before the ending right

when i heard "the whites of your eyes" my jaw dropped. i was overcome with emotion.

"THEY CALL BACK TO THE NIGHT DOES NOT BELONG TO GOD AND I ALMOST STARTED CRYING. THEIR FIRST ALBUM!!!!! oh god oh jesus"

every time i listen to it i feel like crying. I'm like gonna cry. it's so good. what a perfect ending.

good lord. what a trip this album was. thank you for reading i still have to recover from this hahahaha

[youngster-monster]

i DO live like this and my discord wips are a mess, i have to literally tag names onto the end of them because my writing style makes me not use names for like 300 words so i have to keep shoehorning the characters names in so that i know which snippet it was and it is Awful you would not believe the sheer state of that snippets channel

sometimes rotting is a very necessary part of the creative process!! on occasion you just have to grow moss and become nothing but bones and after a while it’s like Okay i can write now :)

fic writing is so EASY compared to all the context and lore and world building and character growth nd MAN i just wanted to write my silly guys being silly but now i have a doc open to the lore of how gods work so that my stupid guy will make a little more sense!!! what IS this!!!!!! when i write fanfiction i just sit down and recount wow lore to myself for 30 minutes while making beastly noises and then i’m normal again and can write fanfiction!! obviously fic writing is still difficult because of.. the horrors.. but at least i can blame the faults in my fic on blizzard :)

i was about to fight for the honor of my Totally Organized Discord WIPs but then i thought about it and yeah.. yeah. they’re kind of. messy… they all have individual channels and i am too scared to look thru them lest the spirit of my old work come alive to kill me or something

my ships are always so stupidly niche i can almost guarantee you my wip would be the first fic in MONTHS if not EVER for some of these anime fandoms i had one for a ship that didn’t even have a TAG i didn’t even know what to do i was so startled!! on the bright side though by virtue of simply posting a fic it could potentially spur other people to write about it which would be a net gain so… perhaps!

that is so real of you.. i don’t have any right actually i just remembered i used to try to read fanfic on my 3ds and it was terrible it wouldn’t even load the page half the time and i frequently had to mess with the internet because my 3ds hated staying connected to wi-fi

They Are In Character To Me (putting a blanket over canon characterization) in my heart this Is how they are in canon and if you try to tell me otherwise? well uhhhh uh (i explode)

staring in fascination and dread at whatever you're doing with your fic organization. i cannot stress enough how insane it sounds. compels me though

you're 100% right. i don't write i mostly Shamble and Crawl, shedding moss and fungi after myself,

be careful anon. the line between "quick lore to make things make sense" and "oops! all worldbuilding!" is very thin. then again if you go over too much you can just turn the whole thing into a ttrpg campaign for your friends or something :)

independant channels of discord wips 🤝 one gargantuan wip document in your notes app striking the fear of god into the writer's heart at the thought of digging through the damn thing

being the one (1) person to write for a ship is Better Than Drugs actually and you should definitely do it,

[honourablejester]

I know the point of this thread is to show how D&D is a combat game and, by comparison with one of its literary inspirations, show the wonky narrative consequences of that. When the mechanical focus of your game is to let players have fun killing things, you have to narratively justify that being the primary base of their story, which historically has led to some extremely unfortunate (and for a long time unexamined) implications.

There is still the problem, though, that D&D is a game. Not a novel. It’s mechanical chassis is intrinsic to its existence. LotR was written to be read, and at least half its point, given what Tolkien lived through in WWI, was to show that war, while sometimes necessary, is never glorious, that it kills people who should have lived, that even those who survive will be forever marked, sometimes in ways that mean they can’t live normally ever again. D&D is a combat game. There’s a reason it just took the trappings and none of the ethos of LotR. They are actually antithetical. Which is fine.

If you have a game that provides a fun experience in a certain area, that is the point of your game. For its players to have fun with the thing the system is good at. The problem with D&D, or with people’s perception of D&D, is not that it is a combat game, it’s that it’s not acknowledged as primarily a combat game. Expectations are not being set properly going in. Partly because when you’ve existed for so long as the default experience, knowledge of what exists outside of you, as well as examination of you, tends to fall to the wayside.

D&D has mechanical limitations in how it approaches combat. It’s not a horror-of-war game, combat is the part of it that’s supposed to be fun. It’s also not a horror game, so death is NOT supposed to be fun. And very much isn’t. Death in D&D (5e at least) is a hell of a hassle and feels like a cruel waste of all the effort put into a character. So of course encounters are going to be balanced to protect said characters. Death is not a fun part of the game.

And one of the reasons I say this is because I’ve recently been reading (not playing, yet, though I would dearly love to) Heart: The City Beneath, which is a ttrpg, even an adventure party, dungeon crawling ttrpg, where death is not only fun, but the whole damn point. The aim of the game is to take a doomed character down into a fun eldritch hellscape beneath a city, and try to get them the most spectacular death possible. Death is the fun part. As is ‘damage’, because damage can mean going insane, transforming into something hideous, cruelly achieving your goals in the most pyrrhic way possible, accidentally causing the destruction of settlements, etc. Heart’s system is designed to incentivise exploring cool, gnarly consequences for your character. Death is the fun part, because by god, there are some spectacular goddamn deaths in this game.

And that highlighted for me how much death is not the fun part of D&D. You can get a spectacular death in 5e, of course, it can even be a fantastic and fitting and memorable end to your character, but it is also the end to your character, and if it happens before the campaign end, you then have to start from scratch with a new one, which is a lot of effort to get you back up to where everyone else is, and costs you all the relationships your previous character had built up.

D&D isn’t designed to be able to replicate LotR’s knowledge of the consequences and horror of war. And that would be fine, if people were aware of it. Once you’re aware of where the limits of your system are, you can start to design the narrative around them to work with its strengths while hopefully also not putting the most racist possible gloss over it to disguise its weaknesses.

If people are aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the system, then they can choose to play it for the parts they’re actually looking for, and know to look elsewhere for things that it can’t provide. They can also, within the system, tailor the narrative of the game to work with the limits of the underlying mechanics instead of trying desperately to fight them. But all of that depends on awareness of what the strengths and weaknesses of the system actually are.

Encounters in D&D are going to be designed to protect player investment in their characters, because 5e does not have a good system for how to protect that investment should said characters die. Combat is going to be the most fun part of the game, because it’s where the bulk of the rules and the fun abilities are concentrated. So if you’re working within D&D, you have to design your narrative to work within those parameters.

Because I don’t … It doesn’t feel good to make people feel like scumbags for working with the basic realities of the game they enjoy. Violent video games don’t make people violent, etc, etc. D&D is a combat game, and people can have fun playing it. It doesn’t make them terrible people. The game world is a game world. Yes, how it has been structured has implications, and historically D&D has had some really unfortunate implications. But people are (in most cases) not playing it because they secretly want to dehumanise and murder real people. Mostly they just want to have a cool combat fantasy where they’re badass and have cool magic or abilities.

Work has been ongoing for the last few years on decoupling some of the worst implications of old-school D&D. Not always well, but people are at least more aware now of some of what needs to happen. Removing the embedded morality element of combat, trying to tone down the alignment (particularly racial alignment) and ‘your enemies are intrinsically evil so it’s okay to kill them’ ethos is something that at least the player base is more aware of. Combat can be morally ambiguous and still fun. It’s an ongoing process, but it’s there.

And there is also more awareness, in fits and starts, of options that exist outside of D&D, if people don’t want to have to work within the mechanical limits of that system. Though yes, it’s still early. I’m only now browsing some options I never would have heard of before, and that mostly started from things like Pathfinder and other close-to-D&D games. There are a lot of cool things out there that I have no idea about, and systems that look very weird and alien to me because I started on D&D 5e. But it’s fun exploring! And it’s also fun to go back to the familiar with fresh eyes as well.

But yes, to loop back around, there are a lot of expectations, both known and unexamined, built into D&D and that have filtered into the wider ttrpg player base because of it. And yes, it is a very good thing if more people are examining those expectations, both to realise where they’re not actually represented by D&D itself, and also to realise that there are so many other options outside of it.

I've talked a lot about the specific types expectations that post-TSR D&D encodes in its players and I do think it's funny how some of the stuff I talk about sometimes seems to feel, like, huge and revelatory to people.

"What do you mean not all RPGs assume the player characters to be an adventuring party that goes on adventures together? What are they even supposed to do if there's no adventure?" Assume that D&D is like an Avengers film, about a group of heroes assembling and going up against adversity to save the day. A lot of games are soap operas, where the players create the central characters, pro and ant agonist alike, and then they're thrown into a powderkeg together.

"If there is no challenge rating or similar mechanic, how is the GM supposed to know if a given combat encounter is something the player characters can overcome?" A lot of games don't have combat encoded into the game as an activity that characters are expected to partake in just to demonstrate their strength. In fact, if combat does happen in lots of games it's usually as a last resort and something that requires an active player choice for it to happen. You won't get ambushed by bandits who are willing to fight to the death for no discernible reason just so your characters can demonstrate their strength and get one of their daily intake of five combat encounters a day (or whatever number games assume these days idk).

"Wait, there are modes of play besides combat that can have deep and granular rules? How can such a thing even work?" It can and it rules.