#this is not the dungeon of good decisions

[lu-fic-recommendation-of-the-day]

Any good Legend and Sky fics? I love their polar-opposite relationship!!

Duty Versus Heart by @occasionallyprosie

Summary:

Most Sheikah swore fealty to the goddess, and eventually the royal family, from an early age. Those who trained to be in service of either would have an official ceremony where they swore to give their lives to serve the goddess and protect her bloodline.

This was the duty that Legend had, but that duty had nothing to do with the decision he made.

---- Febuwhump 2024 | Prompt 24: "I'm doing this because I care about you."

Blueblood by Sillus

Summary:

Twilight hums, walking around them to approach the Loftwing again. It coos in greeting, but does not attempt to smother Twilight like it did with Legend. Twilight frowns in confusion, looking at Sky and Legend, back to the Loftwing, and then at Sky and Legend again. Sky mumbles something under his breath, no doubt puzzling over the actions of his Loftwing. Twilight catches Legend’s eye, blinks, then smirks.

“That’s weird. We’ll probably never know,” Twilight says, not taking his eyes off of Legend.

That son of a fucking bitch���

“Well, we can’t just sit here on this island all day,” Legend states, glaring at Twilight. Don’t say a fucking word, wolf boy.

Sky, once again oblivious, turns to face everyone else. “I can fly to Skyloft and see about getting some help in bringing everyone over.”

“Maybe you should take Legend with you,” Time suggests from Legend’s side—wait when did he get there? “Get a head start?”

Wait what?

If I Am Not Afraid to Die by EmiG42

Summary:

While cleaning the dishes from lunch, Legend starts singing to himself. Unwittingly caught by Sky he is convinced into singing after dinner. After all, who could have guessed that the vet has such a lovely singing voice.

My Blood-Stained Legacy and Jailbreak by @bokettochild

Summaries:

Sky and Legend end up in a dungeon. Not the normal sort though, not the monster ridden, tunnel filled, search for keys kind. Or, actually.... there are all of those things, but the difference is that they're prisoners, not adventurers, and the prize for escaping the dungeon isn't a tool, it's the veteran's life.

Sky and Legend escape their prison, although not without incident. (Continuation of Day 3: My Blood-Stained Legacy)

The Stars Came Crashing Down by @marsnoodlesoup

Summary:

“Do you ever have dreams?” Sky asks. Legend is quiet as Sky stumbles over his words, hands twisting themselves into knots. “I mean— not just dreams, but like. Like you're not— Like you aren't where you're supposed to be? Like you're someone else, but you know you're still you?

Sky glances back at Legend. Legend doesn't look over at Sky, he only turns his ring one, two, three times. It's an emerald ring. Sky wonders how much it cost.

“I don't dream about things I don't know,” Legend says carefully. “It's all things I've seen before.”

[thedungeonofbaddecisions]

Are you telling me this ice monster has no bones??

Me, to the DM. It did not.

[monotcchi]

dragon roast dreamin' 🍖💨✨

[scribz-ag24]

Everyone go play PMD Seven Symphonies, it's a sequel for both Explorers of Sky and Special Episode 0 and it's making me fall in love with a bunch of teams i had never thought twice about!! i cant believe im saying this but i actually wanna draw team raider.

[nomouthtospeakof]

hey gale. gale.

halaster? the halaster? halaster fucking blackcloak?

you not only personally know halaster blackcloak --

you chose HIM --

-- as your CAT SITTER??

[cosmicterrorthe8th]

Do you think the kiddads listened to Monster from epic the musical and felt it in their bones?

Lark was willing to do anything, even throw an infant off a wall to kill the doodler for a long time. Do you think Lark felt like he became a monster in the process but was willing to be worse to undo his mistake.

Sparrow literally doomed a world for his family like Odysseus was willing to do for his family. The rest of the kidadds were about to have the sun burn the doodler away killing almost everyone but their families

Do you think they had to kill doodlerized children or people they knew like a child who went to grants library or terrys student and do you think that broke down their morals?

We're the kiddads at a point where they thought that they had killed so many people but that the only way they could undo the world and make it worth it was to continue killing and trying to throw their guilt away like in the song? They felt that they couldn't save the world by becoming healed and better and that they have to stay in the fight or flight state(?) where they are desensitised to violence or what they have to do and double down on that and become worse to undo the doodler

Do you think any of them saw the parallels and like used to listen to this song to get themselves ready for a day of slaughter? Idk. Also I think Terry would love it because he's a theatre kid enough to introduce it to them all to it. I think this song upsets them all but grant especially

[space-writes]

Chapter Eight

In which Ashenivir enjoys a night out

[ID - a purple decorative divider]

Snow crunched beneath Ashenivir’s boots. The main thoroughfares of the Castle Ward were clogged with sludge and slush already, and thin snow flurries swirled intermittently from the iron-grey sky, flakes catching in his hair. Cold bit at his nose and cheeks, but he left his hood down. He liked the sharp edge it gave the morning, so unlike anything he’d ever experienced in Mythen Thaelas.

The cobbles of the market were slick beneath his feet as he wound through the bustling crowd. He hoped the bookseller would be out again today; the bazaar back home had some stalls that were permanent, but others depended on the day, and he didn’t yet know if Waterdeep’s market worked the same way. It took him a quarter of an hour to find her, stamping her feet and rubbing her gloved hands together behind the carefully organised chaos of the mound of books heaped over her stall.

“Back again?”

“You could have warned me there was a cliffhanger,” Ashenivir said.

She grinned, then plucked three slim volumes out of the pile and handed them to him. “Hard in Hightown, right? That Tethras fellow really knows what he’s doing.”

“Are these going to have me back again tomorrow?”

“Probably, but that’s all the parts that are out as yet.” She tucked a spring of orange hair back from where it had escaped her thick woollen cap. “You’ll just have to wait like the rest of us.”

Keep Reading - AO3 / Dreamwidth / Neocities

[ID - a purple decorative divider]

Obedience taglist: @foxboyclit @belovedviolence @thegreatobsesso (ask to be +/-)

[ermineadoptera]

i just have one voice acting request for the second cour

[constantnever]

two paths lie before me: rewatch buffy or rewatch the magicians. I know which is the correct path & yet for some incomprehensible reason I'm still unsure of my choice

[pankomako]

suddenly kinda tempted to play Hades. however im kinda thinking of waiting for it to go on sale bc 25 bucks feels like a lot. not sure though bc i might forget by the time it does lmao

[thedungeonofbaddecisions]

We're fighting an alchemist in an enclosed room. He is in the room. We have not yet fully entered.

DM: Crondak smirks. He takes a potion out of the pocket of his coat, just smashes it on his skin, and he fades from sight.

Tex: Oh, shit.

Me: I should've taken See Invisibility!

Sean: We could always close the door and wait one minute.

Me: This is true! Is that metagaming?

DM: Amity, your turn.

Jennifer: Amity's going to move [directly in line with the door] and then loudly suggest "We could always close the door."

Iska: Could he not open door?

Turuk: But we would know if he opened the door.

Iska: This is true. Let's close the door.

Jennifer: I cast Shield and end my turn.

DM: Okay.

Sean: I'm going to delay till after the KitKats.

DM: I'm gonna give everyone a chance to say what they wanna do.

Tex: Turuk is gonna close the door.

Me: This is so stupid. This is so stupid.

Tex: This is the dumbest strategy we've ever done.

Me: And the worst part is, I think it's actually going to work, because this guy's like "Aha! I'm sneaky! I'm gonna hide in the darkness!" and we're just like "Okay."

DM: So you close the door.

Me: What happens?

DM: Well, you hear movement inside.

Saturn: The KitKats are going to ready an action to, as soon as there's any activity on the doorknob, run the door straight through.

*everybody readies actions to attack as soon as the door opens*

*the full minute passes. nothing happens. the door remains shut.*

Sean: Well, uh, who wants to open the door?

Saturn: Okay. The KitKats are gonna kick down the door.

DM: You kick open the door. You don't see anything.

Saturn: Okay. Second action, advance ten feet.

DM: Ah! As you walk in the door, you see a much larger dwarf, with a reach of five feet, take a swing at you with his hammer. You take 21 damage.

KitKats: Oh, fuck, he's gotten real big. What are we gonna do?

Iska: Stab him!

KitKats: Easier said than done. Well. Wait. He's too big to fit through the door...

Saturn: The KitKats are going to come back out and close the door behind them.

Me: This is so stupid!

DM: This is the best fight ever.

*the party confers once more. We decide to wait him out, again. Though we leave the door open this time, and fire on him every time he comes into view. I hit him with a Purifying Icicle. He telekinetically hurls a rock at the KitKats. He misses. Amity hits him with Magic Missile. Turuk and the KitKats move into the room. Crondak is eventually killed.*

[thelazyaesthetic]

Question for people who understand the Japanese comics industry: why is this so much worse than the published comic?

Some decisions, like moving Izutsumi's introduction to later and instead giving Marcille her trait of being openly horrified at eating monsters, definitely feel like something you'd realize after hammering out the first draft. But everything else is also just worse - the art is dull and devoid of detail, the characters feel flat, the pacing is off...

Is this the influence of an editor? Of having assistants? Is it just the natural result of trying to cram the entire premise of your comic into 8 pages for the proof of concept? Did enough time pass between this and the proper release that Ryoko Kui just had time to refine every rough aspect of the initial pilot into solid gold?

have you ever seen/posted the original dungeon meshi oneshot on here? the early dm stuff you're posting reminds me of it, but i don't know if i've ever seen it on tumblr. there's a few translations floating around! it has izutsumi in the main party, it's funny to look back at old posts online from before she was introduced in the actual manga talking about how they wish the party still had a catgirl in it lol

LOL YEAH

I assumed most people had read it since its the first chapter in mangadex, but I do have it saved!

[lunarsands]

Should I actually sleep all day today, or should I try to write and/or watch anime? Hmm...

[talietikasero]

i'm like 40 away from getting all 200 aloha links and i cannot get over how one of the dogs you can befriend is a very good girl named justice

[prokopetz]

"But doesn't having a notion of 'balanced' combat inherently imply that all combat encounters are expected to be fair and winnable" well, no – it implies only that the GM has the ability to know whether a given combat encounter is fair and winnable.

There's a story that's been going around for decades about a Dungeons & Dragons party who encountered a large room full of treasure while exploring a dungeon. Immediately suspicious, they asked their GM a series of detailed questions about the room, but no obvious dangers were identified. Satisfied, they moved into the room – and were immediately set upon and eaten by the dragon that had been sitting atop the pile of treasure the whole time, which the GM hadn't mentioned because the players never specifically asked about the presence of living creatures within the room.

While this is obviously an extreme and ridiculous case, it illustrates an important point: as GM, you're the group's eyes and ears. If you don't describe something, the player characters literally can't see it – that dragon was effectively invisible from their perspective. The trick is that active malice isn't the only way to invisible-dragon your players; a group can also find themselves invisible-dragoned because the GM simply failed to provide sufficient information for the risk in question to be identified. This can happen through neglect, but it can also happen because the GM themself was unaware that the risk was present.

Now, hold on, you might be saying: the GM "plays" the entire world. How is it possible for the GM not to know that a risk is present? Well, that brings us back around to the subject of combat balance.

A game in which "balanced" combat is a meaningful thing to discuss is typically going to be one in which both the players and the GM are actually making strategic, tactical, and/or logistical decisions, rather than merely producing a description of their characters making such decisions. Without a good handle on the interplay of these decisions, it's completely possible for the GM to be wrong about the level of risk the scenario they've constructed entails.

That's actually pretty critical, because even if you don't care about the game being fair and winnable (and that's a perfectly valid stance), your players are still depending on you to be their eyes and ears, and to give them enough information to make good decisions about whether the fight in front of them is one they can win. A game where not every fight is expected to be winnable needs to be a game where the players have the opportunity to walk away.

No matter how objective you try to be, your own sense of the answer to that question is inevitably going to colour how you communicate about it. You being wrong about the level of risk at hand inherently increases the chance that your players will make bad choices. The party eating a TPK because they made a stupid decision is one thing; the party eating a TPK because they made a decision that looked reasonable from their perspective based on your unwitting miscommunication of the level of risk involved is quite another!

Sure, once the dice hit the table I'm probably going to realise that I fucked up, and I can adjust things on the fly to bring the level of risk that's actually present in line with the level of risk I communicated – but that's extra work I don't need with everything else that's on my plate. And that's a best-case scenario; if I'm running the game for a hardcore let-the-dice-fall-where-they-may group (and such groups tend to have a pretty significant overlap with groups that are cool with not every fight being winnable), I may not be able to adjust the fight's parameters on the fly without violating the social contract of the table.

Basically, whenever I see an OSR game with tactically crunchy combat brag about how its author never even thinks about "balance", what that's telling me is that running this game is going to create a whole lot of extra work for me as a GM. This is not a selling point.

[anarchomoop]

"What if in order to not get killed in boss fights you had to sit and wait in regular fights and let the enemies hit you so you could have actual HP and defense?" "Oh, it's boring. That's a bad and boring idea."

Final Fantasy II’s grinding system is so funny, the dev team were just like “ok that sucked, we’ll never do that again ever”