siderealdei

[siderealdei]

Joking aside, the Millennium Falcon is not the space fantasy equivalent of a busted-ass old panel van.

The Millennium Falcon is the space fantasy equivalent of a busted-ass old panel van that's inexplicably been hot-rodded to have a top speed of 300 miles per hour, which is substantially funnier.

#star wars #cars #millenium falcon

[siderealdei]

heidiwranglescats

#cute animal vid #cat #kitties #they're so cute

[siderealdei]

#ao3 #ao3 tags #fandom #the fandom experience

[siderealdei]

#d&d #that's how we get you

[siderealdei]

Honestly it's weird that roleplaying as we know it evolved from historical wargaming.

Like for example DBA rules contain some suggestions for running campaigns with narrative and "propaganda" so I wouldn't say that it's something incompatible, and 0E looks way more like wargames than say PbtA games do, but storytelling games were a feature of artistic salons for way longer and they appear much closer to roleplaying than rulesets for reenacting ancient battles on tabletop.

Salon games didn't have skill checks but neither did wargames and it's strange that nobody came up with simplistic skill checks to add uncertainty and realism to the game

I think the line is a lot clearer when the role of dice and rules in tabletop roleplaying games is correctly understood.

"Uncertainty" and "realism" are, at best, secondary to what the dice are actually doing. Even most tabletop RPGs get it wrong when they try to explain themselves – they'll talk about the rules as something to fall back on to prevent schoolyard arguments (i.e., "yes I did!/no you didn't!") from derailing the story, when in fact it's the exact opposite.

If we look at freeform roleplaying as an illustrative parallel, we see that, while newly formed groups may in fact fall to bickering when a consensus can't be reached about what ought to happen next, mature and well-established groups tend instead to fall prey to excessive consensus-seeking: the impulse to always find an outcome that isn't necessarily one which everybody at the table can be happy with, but at the very least one which everybody at the table can agree is reasonable – and that's a lot more constraining than one might think.

In this sense, the role of picking up the dice isn't to build consensus, but to break it – to allow for the possibility of outcomes which nobody at the table wanted or expected. It's the "well, this is happening now" factor that prevents the table's dynamic from ossifying into endless consensus-seeking about what reasonably ought to happen next.

Looking to the history of wargames, this is precisely the innovation they bring to the table. Early historical wargames tended to be diceless affairs which decided outcomes by deferring to the judgment of a referee or other subject matter expert, but the use of randomisers increasingly came to be favoured because referees would tend to favour the most reasonable course, precluding upsets and rendering the outcomes of entire battles a foregone conclusion. This goes all the way back to the roots of tabletop wargaming – people were literally having "rules versus rulings" arguments two hundred years ago!

(This isn't the only facet of tabletop roleplaying culture which has its roots in wargaming culure, of course. For example, you can draw a direct line from the preoccupation of early tabletop RPGs with punishing the use of out-of-character knowledge to historical wargaming's gentleperson's agreement to refrain from making decisions based on information that one's side's commanders couldn't possibly have possessed when re-creating historical battles.)

To be clear, I don't necessary disagree that salon games could have yielded something like modern tabletop RPGs. However, first they'd have had to arrive at the paired insights that a. excessive consensus-seeking is poison to building an interesting narrative; and b. randomisers can be used to force the breaking of consensus, and historical wargames had a substantial head start because they'd figured all that out a century earlier.

#gaming #game design #ttrpgs #wargames

[siderealdei]

A brief moment of rationality from the bird place.

#life

[siderealdei]

words cannot express how much i love the cosmic horror trope of "character gets too close to The Horrors but instead of going insane or being blinded or otherwise physically scarred or cognitively impaired they just lose their emotional capacity completely, becoming an anhedonic shell, which doesn't seem like it should be such a terrible fate compared to what what else they could have lost until you remember that your feelings also govern your basic self-preservation and survival instincts, ability to make choices, consent, etc."

#tropes #horror tropes

[siderealdei]

If you're reading this...

go write three sentences on your current writing project.

#writing

[siderealdei]

Last Line Challenge

Rules: in a new post, show the last line you wrote (or drew) and tag as many people as there are words (or as many as you feel like). 

I was tagged by @wanderingjedihistorian - thank you for the chance to share!

From the next fic in my vizsla and praeliator series: “Mm, yes,” Jango agrees, smirking across the table. “Needs and wants are very important considerations."

If you want to say I tagged you - for any fandom, since I'm actively writing for several right now ^_^; - please feel free to consider yourself tagged.

#last line challenge #my writing #star wars

[siderealdei]

newbie fic authors, shooting themselves in the foot: This fic is bad haha I suck at writing lol I am being mean to myself in the hopes that you will be nice to me but actually am dissuading anyone from even clicking on my fic because all I have done to advertise it is tell you why you shouldn't read it

me: I am King Big Dick of Fanfic Mountain and I have arrived in your fandom with the Express Intention of writing my Very Favorite Fics, which I will generously allow you to read. You're welcome.

#fanfic #fanfic writers #but seriously! do not do the first thing! #you don't have to do the second but DO NOT do the first!

[siderealdei]

#art #witch

[siderealdei]

May Writing Challenge

This May I want to get back into writing. I’m not at all consistent. I’m at a point where I don’t feel like I can work on bigger things, because I can’t guarantee myself to keep working on it in a week from now. So I will take this month as a training month to get back into the habit of writing. I will do this by writing (or trying to write) 200 words every day. Topic is irrelevant. How great my writing is that day is irrelevant. Just 200 words written down. A habit taking 21 days to form was debunked, it does take a lot longer, but 31 days are a start I would say. These are already 140 words, so 200 words every day are hopefully manageable. You're more than welcome to join me if you like 😊

#writing #writing challenge

[siderealdei]

I LOVE THIS

#fashion

[siderealdei]

i keep thinking about that one blogger on here who mentioned applying to 80+ jobs and still not getting a single callback

#employment

[siderealdei]

i wanna see rex in between these eras. i’m talking scruffy rex, five o’clock shadow rex. why not give this man a patchy salt and pepper beard?? what is stopping us???

#star wars clone wars #star wars fanart #rex

[siderealdei]

he sit

#star wars video games #star wars fanart #cal kestis #bd 1

[siderealdei]

i love the interpretations of jaster mereel. hes a nerd. hes a jock. he has elaborate plans to break into the jedi archives but theres an evil witch who lives there and she has the spell gun. he wrote the supercommando codex which has evolved from "how to be a hired mercenary without being a raging dickhead" to the very base standards of mando society. he has a man with a hate boner for him and you will see his scathing peer review personally and preferably full of holes. he has a pacifist sect trying to blow him up with their minds. he has his best friend trying to actually blow him up but keeps looney tooning his way into failure every time. hes the most aesexual whore to ever whore. he keeps bringing home ankle biters. he was a cop who killed another cop because that cop was crooked and well if no one else was going to fix it then he will permanently. he probably has a doctorate for every past mand'alor regime. hes eaten things that werent meant to be eaten because he read it in a book once. he probably has an entire library of random trivia in his brain and will tell you one without prompt. hes adhd. hes the epitome of that meme with the dog gazing worryingly at a mini pineapple. hes been banned from 14 sectors because he knew law loopholes before they could even loop. his enemies want him both carnally and dead. his friends want him to stop hiding in the rafters at night reading in the dark so all they see is the light reflecting off his eyes like a cat when they pan their flashlights up and scaring the newbies. he would be classified as a cryptid if he wasnt on the mandalore sectors most eligible bachelor list. he probably has cake under that armor.

#star wars #jaster mereel