Demons have no real traditions to speak of in the typical sense, but above the grey sky they like to use humans as a framework for how they want to be. They just like humans a lot. Every now and then after consuming enough of their own kind, they will mutate. They don't really have birthdays, so a lot of demons have adapted these sudden mutations as a form of growing up (in their case, gaining strength) One step closer to becoming a new dominant power!
comfortable, decent quality bedding will change your life I'm so serious
my needlessly aggressive opinions concerning:
you will fall asleep faster and have better-quality sleep if your sleeping space provides a good sensory experience, tailored to you (and your sleep partners) personally. and dear stars and devils do we all need some good sleep rn
there should be a tax that youtubers pay where 1.5% of all of their revenue goes back to Kevin Macleod for basically supplying YouTube with it’s own soundtrack.
who is this man and what music did he make???
if you hear a royalty free song on youtube, there’s approximately an 80% chance Kevin Macleod wrote it.
here’s some you’ve almost definitely heard:
for those wondering, yes, he also made THE generic royalty free song that was EVERYWHERE in 2014.
And he doesn’t even make a 1000$ per month!
also, his site incompetech.com also has graph paper generators, if you’re in need of that. It has any kind of graph paper - INCLUDING hex paper, you tabletop gamers out there! (or knitting paper if you’re into that)
HOHOHOHO?
Y'all, I’ve been a fan of Kevin MacLeod for YEARS. I can identify his music within two seconds. He’s a fucking genius and he deserves all the love and credit and money people can give.
He scored invader zim AND xiaolin showdown
The best compliments and insults are both just describing the person. Just describe whatever you can clearly observe about them. The distinction of whether that's an insult or a compliment is whether you're saying it with a pleasant tone, or if you're saying that like it's a bad thing.
Children, who make their observations in an utterly deadpan voice as neutral remarks, are capable of obliviously roasting people because they haven't noticed this.
the world needs more dykes
I keep forgetting that this means lesbian. I instinctively think of dams when I hear this word. Like. Okay yeah. Posts made by beavers I guess.
lesbians can we make this post about beavers for a couple hours every day? like 3-5am or something? i think that would be really cool thank you
it’s five forty one am so I’m not sure if it’s still within the time frame but I think it’s really cool how they’re “ecosystem engineers”
actually though. the Beauyasha is one of the best romantic conversations in all of critical role. it’s LONG which is good not in a bean-counting sense, but because it requires getting beyond rehearsed speeches or straightforward confessions; they really have to just talk to one another as characters. and when we see them together we can feel the chemistry and the history and see that they just get along! as people!
and they talk about their fears and their mistakes and their trauma, but also their relationships with other people (Caleb, Molly, the rest of the nein), how much they love dogs, how nervous they are… little details that sum up to the fullness of a relationship!
Beau’s planning of an evening that takes them into safety (when they’ve been constantly under threat!) and reminiscence (when the whole campaign and especially Yasha’s story has been an exploration of memory and history). The way that Caleb’s tower brings it to life with such love and gives Beau and Yasha both something to be surprised by and to laugh at, all in the security of a friend who loves them both fiercely.
“I wanna kiss you so bad” is THE BEST line in critical role for accomplishing the task of “get consent in this primarily audio format while also absolutely everyone at the table and in the audience can tell that these characters want to make out sloppy style this instant”
and that line is followed up by the all time banger: “Babe, I gotta handle these ninjas”
"do you want women competing against trans athletes" yes? I also want women competing against male athletes. and competing alongside them. because segregating sports by gender is extremely shitty actually?
this used to be an almost mainstream opinion btw, but then they remarketed "men are biologically superior to women" as Modern Feminism.
actual women athletes: we want equal pay and funding and opportunities, and the ability to have our achievements statistically measured alongside our male colleagues and recognized accordingly. and stop making us wear skimpy outfits and awkward useless breast armor this is insane
the patriarchal power structures that control society: scary TRANS athletes? you don't want to play with those icky TRANS athletes?you need to be protected from those TRANS athletes and their awful cooties??? fear not we shall rescue the girlies🤗
i wanna talk about this shot
if forum signatures still existed this would be mine
God fucking damn it
You've talked before about how "generic" ttrpg systems still contain hidden assumptions about genre, story, playstyle, etc. (e.g. gurps and military scifi/fantasy) how do you figure out what those assumptions are? what should you look for in the rules to find them?
That's a fairly involved question for which a full answer is beyond the scope of a Tumblr post (even my notoriously long-winded ones!), but I find that a good place to start is with the "who gives a shit?" principle.
For example, suppose that the first piece of mechanically significant information on a game's character sheet is a statistic called "Strength", rated on a scale from one to ten.
Who gives a shit?
That is, why do we care how strong player characters are? Why do we care about having a definite, codified answer at our fingertips to the question of which characters are stronger than other characters, to a fair degree of precision? Why does any of this matter? What assumptions are we making about the nature of the conflicts that will be present within the game's narrative?
That's a fairly trivial case, but the principle can be extended to more fundamental features of a game's rules. Let's consider the classic Dungeons & Dragons style skill check, for example: roll a die, add a stat, compare to a target number, pass or fail. What assumptions are we encoding about the nature of conflict in this game?
Well, for a start, these assumptions might include:
... and so forth.
If you're only familiar with Dungeons & Dragons and its very close imitators, these may seem like things you have to assume in order to have a functioning game, but there are a fairly specific set of conventions being expressed here. Why do we care about any of these things? Who gives a shit?
Even the first bullet point can easily be knocked down: one can imagine, for example, a game which simply assumes players can always choose to have their characters succeed at anything it's within the realm of possibility for them to do, and whose rules instead focus on providing a codified game-mechanical answer to the question of what that success will cost them, with the only uncertainty being whether the player is willing to pay that cost.
It's clear that a game which approaches conflict resolution in this way is expressing a strong set of genre assumptions. The trick is recognising that the industry-standard alternative (i.e., the D&D-style skill check) is equally laser-focused on a specific set of genre assumptions, in a way that's often rendered invisible by how common it is.
All of which is a very long-winded way of saying there isn't a simple checklist you can go down to identify a game's genre assumptions. But then, I warned you way up in the opening sentence that this would be the case – I hope I've at least given you a place to start!
A lot of folks designing tabletop RPG magic systems could really benefit from reading up on contemporary theology. "Oh, what if the rituals don't actually do anything, but sometimes trickster spirits fake the results just to fuck with people" like, I cannot emphasise strongly enough that this is what many American Protestants actually believe.
i still prefer my interpretation
