umbralreactor

[umbralreactor]

I was in a game once that tried using Tri-Stat (the genericized version of the system that BESM ran on) to do DC superheroes. It went pretty poorly, given that "man the creators of this thing really liked Ranma 1/2" is pretty deep in the bones of that system.

I always thought it was really obviously "an anime RPG" as made by people who thought anime consisted of Ranma 1/2, Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z, and Neon Genesis Evangelion. And they never said Legend of the Overfiend, but man. You could tell they knew.

One of the keystones of the myth of the universal tabletop RPG is the conflation of genre and milieu, citing the fact that a given system can be adapted to multiple settings as evidence that it's unopinionated about what kinds of stories it wants to produce.

When extended beyond putatively setting-agnostic systems, this conflation of genre and milieu can – and often does – lead to the misconception that if two non-setting-agnostic RPGs have roughly similar settings, or centre roughly similar types of player characters, then those two RPGs must be basically interchangeable.

It's from this thought process that you end up with posts like the one I bumped into this morning which, in response to the same proposed premise, proceeded to recommend both Bunnies & Burrows and Toon.

(For the unacquainted, the principal media touchstones for Toon are Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies, and to a lesser extent, The Tom and Jerry Show. Bunnies & Burrows, meanwhile, is an unofficial but more-or-less direct adaptation of Watership Down. These games will both let you play as talking cartoon rabbits, but in very different ways!)

[umbralreactor]

you know when you get Autism Mad. like something happens in a non-ideal way and in your brain you know it literally doesnt matter but in your other more autistic brain youre like screaming & scrying & shitting the bed etc. i think you should be able to go into settings and opt out of that. i have better things to get upset about than failing to put up a decoration on the optimal day or being too stubborn to solve a problem via simple communication

[umbralreactor]

I wonder how many of the current problems are "these systems were never sustainable and the wheels are starting to come off."

[umbralreactor]

Well, fuck.

[umbralreactor]

Sorry for infodumping about my special interest out of nowhere, you said a keyword and it activated my unskippable dialogue

[umbralreactor]

this specific frame of jack black from the minecraft movie trailer looks like he just realized he threw his best friend under the bus because of a cheeky political joke just so he could keep getting booked for shitty kids movies for the rest of his life

[umbralreactor]

dungeon meshi is about the power fantasy of being in the exactly perfectly correct situation for your personal brand of autism to be an essential, lifesaving asset

[umbralreactor]

That's not just JRPG classes. That is specifically doing Wizardry and its classes. "Lord" is basically paladin-esque in that it's got Fighty Bits and Holy Magic Bits, and Bishop is a hybrid caster that has Blasty Stuff and Healy Stuff. Falin is just a straight up Priest in this interpretation.

While looking for something I found an older Ryoko Kui Blog and there's some proto-dungeon meshi art there. I've seen these around before but didn't know the source!

I'm not sure if the last comic is related but it was in the same post titled ダンジョンRPG的な (Dungeon RPG-Like according to google) from 2012

[umbralreactor]

Anyone: Hey (asks about a special interest of mine)? Me: Becomes an unskippable cutscene

[umbralreactor]

Hi I have a question about Pacific Rim. Given that the sparring is just A way to test for drift compatibility and any activity that requires people to collaborate and anticipate each others moves works, including stuff like multi player video games

Can you test for drift compatibility via improv comedy

[umbralreactor]

"Hey guys, we know everyone is already is mad at us because we're throwing the book at trans women while letting their harassers roam free, but we've decided to alienate what few of you dumbasses are left by partnering with the planet-burning plagiarism engines everybody hates so robots can steal all of your shit! Wait, why are we losing enormous piles of money?"

Enshittification marches on.

[umbralreactor]

[umbralreactor]

"Turn-based roguelikes going graphical is bad because old school ASCII user interfaces are so much more transparent and accessible" yeah, I love guessing which of three or four completely different things a given ASCII character represents this time. Having the screen transform unrecognisably between one turn and the next and trying to figure out what the fuck just happened by combing through a log file which somehow manages to be both cryptically terse and exhaustingly verbose at the exact same time is fun and enriching. Being forced to choose between navigating a menu system that puts hyper-specific commands you will literally never use at the top level while nesting commands you'll be using constantly four layers deep, and resorting to non-rebindable hotkeys whose semantic mappings were evidently designed by someone whose native language is Klingon? Genuinely the highlight of my day.

[umbralreactor]

love reading late 90s/early 2000s scholarship on the potential of the internet. "hey we shouldn't let venture capitalists get in on this" And Then They Did

[umbralreactor]

one of my favorite things about my job that i can say to people that sounds utterly ridiculous but is technically 100% true is that one of our sea turtles keeps trying to get me to commit a felony on her behalf and gets SUPER cranky when i won’t do it

[umbralreactor]

Listen, if you interrupt me with a new task while I’m midway through another, you aren’t allowed to be mad when I switch to the new task immediately. You clearly thought the new task was important enough to interrupt me with it!

I am just a little pikmin! You’re the one with the whistle!!