Wandering Adventure Party

@pteryx Pretty much, I don't need the full Hays BS, I'm just sick of Karma Houdinis. If I wanted rEaLiZaRmZ I'd just watch the news.

The trouble with auto-generating your ad emails' subject lines based on common search surveillance data: sometimes you get results like "Best Spring Allergies".

My take on the #DnD 5.5e relabeling "controversy":*Well, it's about damned time!*Refusing to distinguish between what popularly wound up being called "5e 2014" and "5e 2024" was clearly a decision made by marketing nimrods who have never built a physical object in their lives deciding that editions, and changes thereof, are "bad marketing".Trouble is, edition labels are not only, or even *primarily*, marketing labels, but compatibility statements.1/3

@pteryx People stopped protesting so MS never removed it. The silver lining is that it has MONSTROUS hardware requirements, so it only activates if your machine is super good and super expensive.

@smitty I like to demystify my dragons somewhat, after having had the pleasure of playing several D&D campaigns that featured neither dungeons nor dragons. So my dragons tend to be like that movie where a bear had too much cocaine, except the dragon is high functioning, can fly, talk, breathe fire, and possibly do magic. So... Grizzly bear-sized, usually? Elephant-sized if I'm feeling feisty. Blue Whale-sized if I want to make *a point*

@pteryx Islands of Terror had an anti-paladin who was similar - really just a paladin who went too hard and still thinks she's a paladin, trapped by demonic entities.

It is often said that a key component of toxic masculinity is that men aren't allowed emotions, that they're supposed to be perfectly stoic except for anger, and women are "freer" because they get to express emotions.I don't think it's as simple as that for women. Not with the life I've experienced.Women are allowed *the appearance* of positive emotions, but we're not allowed to actually follow through on *feeling* any emotions, except for love. It's a much more insidious trap.1/3

(Context for anyone curious: reflecting on how an attempt to crowdfund a "public" purchase of an "IP" from a distressed company would play out in our deeply ridiculously unequal society. Seems like the crowdfund would end up raising $1M... and then a billionaire would swoop in and bid $100M, rendering the entire attempt profoundly moot.)

@pteryx He was the young dweeb who was never invited to the gaming tables because he was too much of a basket case even for the roleplayers (and I'm talking about times when roleplayers were mocked as freaks EVEN AMONG OTHER NERDS, thus the subculture was comprised of the rejects' rejects).

Months ago, I heard rumors of an impending wheat shortage....Today, while browsing #prep stores (something I still do for the sake of convenient price monitoring even though I'm pretty much set by now), I saw a pretty troubling indicator.At one, a sale on a case of fortified pancake mix for $20 is ending today.At another, a sale on the exact same product for $51 is *starting* today.If this is a leading indicator, this is gonna get *ugly*.

Wish I could just casually afford one of these. A tapestry is just a rug hung from a wall, right? #Eberronhttps://design-trend.com/products/dd1019-dungeons-dragons-the-continent-of-khorvaire-eberron-map-area-limited-edition-rug14418

I find myself remembering an old animal video that, unfortunately, I think was on the hellsite, and wondering if it exists anywhere else.It involved a series of clips of a woman trying to film things outdoors, only for a particular ostrich, emu, or the like to approach. In most of them, she'd warn him away in a scolding tone: "Emmanuel, don't do it..."The final clip of the video involved a resigned, "Emmanuel... you know what, do it," followed by the bird knocking the camera over.

I'm not fighting for the "right" to be commanded to smile instead of being commanded to kneel. I'm fighting for a world where smiles come genuinely. Where everyone gets what they need to thrive, because others are empathetic enough to actually recognize what that is.You can take your flower-bordered list of happiness commands and shove it. You want to motivate me? You want me to think positively? Show me evidence of people being awesome to each other.

In Roll20 yesterday: dramatic discussion of one of our party member's adventuring struggles with a sympathetic NPC adventurer.In our game's Mattermost server, at the same time: Discussion of the possible properties of enchanted dildos.

Oh, and I also listed out ourselves and all the NPC adventuring parties we know, with each party's advantages and disadvantages, because the to-do list has gotten *so* sprawling that we *clearly* need to delegate.We intend to try to get actual adventurers' guilds pulled into this, too.This actually feels far more realistic for a save-the-world situation than "this single ragtag bunch of misfits does literally everything".

I’m never going to learn. I come across this kind of obtuseness painfully often in rpg discussions, and I’m always – and I mean always – caught off guard by it. I just expect TTRPG fans to be into things like world building and the deeper questions of setting, and they keep telling me that the only thing they’re cognizant of is stat blocks and rules interactions. To the point where I’ve been told that everything but grid-based combat and roll resolutions is just empty set dressing. I’ve come to, but seem incapable of holding on to, the conclusion that most TTRPG fans just want an XCOM game they can bully in order to get their way. Which is a shame, because @juergen_hubert@mementomori.social has a lot of interesting things to say on RPG settings, and the stories that inspire and underpin them, and having almost everyone completely talk past the prompt was disheartening.

@ScenderaI have, at least, wondered from time to time whether looking into Stop Cop City would be an appropriate starting point from which you could figure out the right thing for you to do. It's kind of old news by now, and I'd assume too late to do anything more there in particular, but I'd think the kinds of people who'd tie themselves to construction equipment to stop it from being used would be the kinds of people with ideas.

@SJohnRoss...Thinking about it a bit more, it may be that she's simply assuming that she has to shove every plot hook and lead directly in our faces, when if we're really short on things to do we can go looking for them. The way things stand, the end result has been a case of feeling like there's simply no time to breathe because *yet another* thing that seems unwise to let languish has come up, when for OOC *years* we've wanted to just stop and craft certain items...

"Living with moderate to severe temporal distortion syndrome? Ask your doctor if Probabyl is right for you."#NoContext