dukeofriven

[dukeofriven]

what farming items in mmorpgs has taught me: i used to think using ice trays to make ice cubes was free but after thinking about it i have to pay the electric bill to power the freezer so every moment that i’m not freezing new trays of ice cubes is a moment that i’m underutilizing the freezer and increasing the cost of ice cubes. i have to constantly swap out ice trays for new ice cubes on an hourly rotation on a 24 hour basis or else i won’t produce the maximum amount of ice cubes possible and will underutilize the full potential of my electric bill. i need to stop using all other appliances and utilities in my home to make more ice cubes

[dukeofriven]

Girl's Dress

1885-1890

Paris, France

The MET (Accession Number: 2009.300.993)

[dukeofriven]

Try backing up and running them over a third time, maybe that'll get the message across.

[dukeofriven]

eleventh plague. emails. 

[dukeofriven]

I find games often devolve into freeform RPs when the mechanics of a game prove a poor fit for the story the players and GM find themselves trying to tell— a lot of D&D games fall into this simply because people have wildly incorrect beliefs that D&D is a 'one size fits all' system and they've asked Reddit for homebrewing options to do their steampunk western in 5e rather than look for something designed for steampunk westerns. And because there's such a fundamental disconnect between design and goal, you roll less and less and consult the rules less and less because D&D fundamentally isn't designed to give you a satisfying high-noon standoff, a train chase, or a saloon brawl, and the techno-steam skin you've slapped on D&D's already idiosyncratic Vancian magic feels hopelessly mismatched, and you can put a big black hat and a mustache on a Tarrasque but at day's end 'Lair Actions' just don't feel right for a corrupt local sheriff and his posse of goons whose "lair" is the clapboard back room of a brothel. Best RPG I was ever in was a Lancer campaign, but as the years went on we touched Lancer less and less because outside of the robot fights we kept negotiating ourselves out of fighting, the mechanics gave us nothing to play with in the complex social/political/intra-party stories we were telling and loving (and that the worldbuilding is seemingly designed to encourage, but that's a different gripe)—indeed, the mechanics of Lancer were sometimes an active impediment to anyone having fun. You'd roll for the first time in several sessions, and be cross that the result was so mechanically unsatisfying, or worded so specifically that its use cases made it pointless. The "game" because an RP session because the mechanics didn't engage the players in furthering their own stories and sense of play. Whereas the Fantasy Flight Star Wars games I've run use a cumbersome, messy, hair-pullingly unituitive system - but when it clicks with my players they fucking love not just rolling dice but building their dice pool, leverging every square inch of their character sheets—skills, talents, past experiences, inventory, cunning schemes—that make roles tenses, engaging, fun, wonderful. It's not great at selling its full self to players (I think its a failing of density and layout from an editing standpoint), but man the parts that click really click, and I've had players with no TTRPG experience have a great time both RPing and getting into the mechanics of the system - because the mechanics, the system, and the story we're telling all align.

I think a lot of folks in indie RPG spaces misunderstand what's going on when people who've only ever played Dungeons & Dragons claim that indie RPGs are categorically "too complicated". Yes, it's sometimes the case that they're making the unjustified assumption that all games are as complicated as Dungeons & Dragons and shying away from the possibility of having to brave a steep learning cure a second time, but that's not the whole picture.

A big part of it is that there's a substantial chunk of the D&D fandom – not a majority by any means, but certainly a very significant minority – who are into D&D because they like its vibes or they enjoy its default setting or whatever, but they have no interest in actually playing the kind of game that D&D is... so they don't.

Oh, they'll show up at your table, and if you're very lucky they might even provide their own character sheet (though whether it adheres to the character creation guidelines is anyone's guess!), but their actual engagement with the process of play consists of dicking around until the GM tells them to roll some dice, then reporting what number they rolled and letting the GM figure out what that means.

Basically, they're putting the GM in the position of acting as their personal assistant, onto whom they can offload any parts of the process of play that they're not interested in – and for some players, that's essentially everything except the physical act of rolling the dice, made possible by the fact most of D&D's mechanics are either GM-facing or amenable to being treated as such.*

Now, let's take this player and present them with a game whose design is informed by a culture of play where mechanics are strongly player facing, often to the extent that the GM doesn't need to familiarise themselves with the players' character sheets and never rolls any dice, and... well, you can see where the wires get crossed, right?

And the worst part is that it's not these players' fault – not really. Heck, it's not even a problem with D&D as a system. The problem is D&D's marketing-decreed position as a universal entry-level game means that neither the text nor the culture of play are ever allowed to admit that it might be a bad fit for any player, so total disengagement from the processes of play has to be framed as a personal preference and not a sign of basic incompatibility between the kind of game a player wants to be playing and the kind of game they're actually playing.

(Of course, from the GM's perspective, having even one player who expects you to do all the work represents a huge increase to the GM's workload, let alone a whole group full of them – but we can't admit that, either, so we're left with a culture of play whose received wisdom holds that it's just normal for GMs to be constantly riding the ragged edge of creative burnout. Fun!)

* Which, to be clear, is not a flaw in itself; a rules-heavy game ideally needs a mechanism for introducing its processes of play gradually.

#D&D #Lancer #RPGs #RP #Fantasy Flight #Star Wars

[dukeofriven]

Going to tell my kids this was Glee.

X (2022) dir. Ti West Pearl (2022) dir. Ti West MaXXXine (2024) dir. Ti West

#Glee #Ti West

[dukeofriven]

mom, dad… i’m…. RANDOM!! LOL XD

[dukeofriven]

most important thing to remember about being a woman is if youre married you have to go under the covers with your husband and laugh cutely and play wrestle so when you die to progress the narrative he can remember it in slow motion montages

[dukeofriven]

[dukeofriven]

PLEASE JUST SHOW ME THE CASSEROLE RECIPE

[dukeofriven]

once you realize its all saying the same thing. water spins generators in dams, car engines spin to make wheels spin, the earth spins in a circle and then spins around the sun which spins around the galaxy once you grasp that its all about spinning you realize why beyblade is so important

[dukeofriven]

Ahoy !⭐

[dukeofriven]

"Pearl & The Infinite Sadness" A larger painting I did over the week. A waterfall of sobbing Pearls. The original is available in my poshmark shop:

[dukeofriven]

"Undertow" A Lars painting I did in acrylic. Tears full of anger and sadness.

[dukeofriven]

TFW you accidentally snap the Cammy doll in half and then hastily tried to glue her back together before M. Bison gets home.

(Cover of Street Fighter: Sci-Fi and Fantasy Special, Udon Comics, submitted by anonymous)

[dukeofriven]

During the Cold War countless Garden Chairs of Solitude perished attempting to reach the West.

[dukeofriven]

As it is Passover again, it is time for the annual debate as to whether the frog plague, which thanks to a quirk in the Hebrew, is written as a plague of frog, singular, rather than the plural, plague of frogs, was in fact, as generally imagined, a plague of many frogs, or instead a singular giant Kaiju frog. This is an ancient and venerable argument that actually goes back to the Talmud because this is what the Jewish people are. If we can't argue for fun about this sort of thing, what are we even doing.

In that spirit, I would like to submit a third possibility, which is that in fact it was one perfectly normal sized frog, who was absolutely acing Untitled Frog Game: Ancient Egypt Edition. One particularly obnoxious frog, who through sheer hard work, managed to plague all of Egypt.