thydungeongal

[thydungeongal]

im really glad i found this tumblr account. i dont even remember how or why i did, but it and your ttrpg book club opened me up to a whole new world! ive never enjoyed dnd because i prefer roleplaying social/investigative/etc situations to combat, and for a very long time i thought i just didnt like ttrpgs that much. i hope that more people will break away from the monolith that wotc has built because of the work yall do.

Thank you so much! That’s exactly what we’re trying to do!

It’s often said in the TTRPG industry “a rising tide raises all ships,” implying that all the people flocking to D&D5e is good for the entire TTRPG industry, but that isn’t really true, not when a monopoly and a walled garden are involved. D&D5e doesn’t actually “bring more people into the hobby,” it waits at the door with a net to snatch newcomers and make sure they don’t get any further in. What we do is stand there with a knife and try to cut holes in that yet. This actually benefits the wider TTRPG space, including us.

Everything about WotC’s marketing (and they have so much more marketing than you realize) is engineered to keep you ignorant of your options and present D&D5e as the only, or at least the default, TTRPG. This is how you get people who think that if they don’t like combat they don’t like TTRPGs, or, more often, thinking that if they don’t like combat they can just play D&D5e and cut out all the combat - it’s also how you get people thinking that “combat isn’t roleplaying,” or that rules in general get in the way of roleplaying. To those people I say no, D&D5e’s rules just get in the way of roleplaying for you because 90% of the rules are about combat and you don’t like combat so you stop roleplaying and just try to push through it as fast as possible. Play a game that doesn’t emphasize combat like D&D5e does, or play a game with better combat rules. (D&D5e, for being a game that emphasizes combat so much, doesn’t actually have great combat rules.)

Me personally, I love combat roleplaying. Even though Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy gameplay is mostly not combat, one of the reasons the combat rules are so crunchy is because I love a good combat system and the characterization and expression that can come from it.

In my personal group’s AD&D2e campaign which I have posted about before here, a bunch of my characters are Fighters, and even though combat is both simpler and rarer in AD&D2e compared to D&D5e, there’s still plenty there to provide support for characterization through combat.

[thydungeongal]

wow the mountains are old? that';s crazy. a geological feature of the planet is old. insane. nothing else is that old. hey did you see this deer moving weird? yeah it's so weird it's like an old god ro something lmao it's so unusual to see deer doing this. hey wanna try some of my chili? it's made with Ancient Grains. it's soooo mystical and old world and stuff. it costed $17 dollars

[thydungeongal]

Have you played ANIME CAMPAIGN ?

By Brendan Blaber

The game was made by Brendan Blaber, aka JelloApocalypse, and friends. The core mechanic is a random word generator-based character builder. The first big session of it was recorded, then turned into Epithet Erased, a cartoon and book series.

[thydungeongal]

as a communist i think that that "conservatives can't make good art" is pure cope whether coming from liberals or other commies but "republicans aren't funny" is just kinda true

[thydungeongal]

Is it just me or does Sunny give tgirl vibes

[thydungeongal]

Dungeons & Dragons is a collaborative storytelling game wherein players may explore such important questions as "how many times does one need to hit a goblin with a sword before it dies" and "how many enemies can my wizard fit into the area of a fireball"

[thydungeongal]

And like let's be fair, an adventure path where most of the gameplay is a gauntlet of prewritten combat encounters many of which need to be completed to progress the narrative is not a bad structure for gameplay in and of itself. Now, having said that, it might not be the best gameplay structure for exploring concepts of good and evil and just war and so on and so on and so on

I think the people going to bat for Wrath of the Righteous, the adventure path, being some great case of handling the topic of good and evil with any nuance are funny. Maybe this is a case of grading on a curve and it's like "oh it's about as good as can be expected from an adventure path that takes place in the 'Good and Evil are objectively measurable cosmic forces' universe" but like, even so: Pathfinder as a game gives characters very few resources for actually wrestling with those issues. At the end of the day it's still an adventure where the party might run into a demon with challenge rating (a numerical measure of how difficult this demon is to defeat in a fight) and with the note of "This guy is irredeemably evil" in its statblock and the main verbs available to the characters for tackling with the moral nuance at play are "make an attack roll" and "cast a spell that rearranges the demon's guts."

[thydungeongal]

And also the adventure basically railroads the party into that encounter and tells them that "hey so you gotta defeat this demon because we need to meet a quota of enough combat encounters per adventure and how else could this adventure progress"

I think the people going to bat for Wrath of the Righteous, the adventure path, being some great case of handling the topic of good and evil with any nuance are funny. Maybe this is a case of grading on a curve and it's like "oh it's about as good as can be expected from an adventure path that takes place in the 'Good and Evil are objectively measurable cosmic forces' universe" but like, even so: Pathfinder as a game gives characters very few resources for actually wrestling with those issues. At the end of the day it's still an adventure where the party might run into a demon with challenge rating (a numerical measure of how difficult this demon is to defeat in a fight) and with the note of "This guy is irredeemably evil" in its statblock and the main verbs available to the characters for tackling with the moral nuance at play are "make an attack roll" and "cast a spell that rearranges the demon's guts."

[thydungeongal]

I think the people going to bat for Wrath of the Righteous, the adventure path, being some great case of handling the topic of good and evil with any nuance are funny. Maybe this is a case of grading on a curve and it's like "oh it's about as good as can be expected from an adventure path that takes place in the 'Good and Evil are objectively measurable cosmic forces' universe" but like, even so: Pathfinder as a game gives characters very few resources for actually wrestling with those issues. At the end of the day it's still an adventure where the party might run into a demon with challenge rating (a numerical measure of how difficult this demon is to defeat in a fight) and with the note of "This guy is irredeemably evil" in its statblock and the main verbs available to the characters for tackling with the moral nuance at play are "make an attack roll" and "cast a spell that rearranges the demon's guts."

[thydungeongal]

You know that not being white doesn't excuse you from being a participant in the imperial core, right? You live in England. You directly benefit from the suffering and labor of workers in the countries which England oppresses, you do actually have to reckon with that inherent complicity in the imperialist machine. What practical action have you taken to recompense those countries? Solely posting about theory infinitely on the internet while you enjoy your cozy global north benefits - regardless of whatever level of racism i'm sure you do experience in that life - and maybe donating to fundraisers sometimes is not good enough.

very odd ask. i'm not christian, i'm marxist. i don't think that the role of someone living in the imperial core is to, what are you even implying here -- loudly proclaim their own guilt while giving alms to the disadvantaged? it is to organize and militantly politically oppose the imperialist entities they live within & while that is something i do it is also something i don't post details about on tumblr to appease strangers. anyways i am in no way secretive or in denial about how i experience tons of privilege from living in the imperial core -- one of my most popular recent posts is about how i personally experienced an extremely black and white case of passport privilege protecting me from racism innit -- so this kind of seems like it's not coming from a place of good faith and is instead you having a whine at me because the sum total of your politics is encompassed within posting online and you assume mine is too.

[thydungeongal]

[thydungeongal]

that one bots of new york post about cocaine is unorincally one of my favourite pieces of writing ever

[thydungeongal]

I’m so sorry has everybody seen this bots of new york

[thydungeongal]

"my son turned out just fine" your son literally got hit by the son killbeam and died

[thydungeongal]

your unreliable narrator fucking bit me

[thydungeongal]

"we just dont know why the Iraq war happened!!" is an unbelievably stupid take even for this website