man having your life even a little bit together will really make you realize how chronically sleep-deprived and poorly fed and under-enriched everyone is and then when they turn to you to implicitly agree that that’s just the natural state of existing you feel like the asshole for being like “actually I think you might benefit from eating breakfast regularly and picking up a new hobby”
i once searched roblox inflation. because. robux used to hold more purchasing power when I started playing compared to now. and I was wanting to see a graph or data I could turn into a graph. but that was. Not. what I saw
every so often i see a post about someone who wanted to look up the entomology of porn because it was a weird word. so they looked up porn to see if there was anything talking about it. they did not find the entomology
i mean looking up the entomology of porn isnt gonna do much either, thats just bug sex. they probably should have looked for the etymology instead
update from the discord group courtesy of one of my mutuals;
do not trust that damned survey. change your discord password. utilize 2FA.
I use 2FA on every website I log into, and it didn’t ask for any details when I took the survey, but I still don’t trust that thing at all. One can never be too safe.
to be clear, the one that is a scam is the one that asks for your Discord login information. there is a legitimate one that does not ask for ANY information and that one is a legitimate qualtrics survey from Discord. make sure you always check sites and links before you click on them fellas!
The legit survey has been closed down as of yesterday.
The phishing scam is taking advantage of the high emotions about AI, but if anything online asks for your login info (that is not on the actual verified website that belongs to that login that you navigated to yourself (not a link from an email or post!)), that is a huge sign to STOP.
some of the things that are recommened for vaginoplasty are so funny like. there’s a four week period where i’m “encouraged to sensually explore the area” but “not allowed to climax” like okay doctor-mandated edging. if you say so lmao
once everything settles i’m encouraged to “share vaginal microbiome with someone who already has one set up” like. scissoring? are you talking about scissoring? fuckin. doctor-prescribed lesbian sex.
If you are going to be an author you have GOT to read books.
If you are going to be a TTRPG designer you have GOT to play or at least read the rulebooks for TTRPGs.
PLURAL. You have GOT to experience MULTIPLE, MANY examples of the artform you are attempting to create.
Every (real, not fanfiction) book you read adds a new color to the metaphorical set of paints you are using to paint your story, and every TTRPG you read or play adds a new color for the rules-design for TTRPGs. If you have only read or played one single example of the artform you are trying to create, your “painting” will only be one color.
Whys are you singling fanfiction out as not counting for real writing?
Like whats a “real” book? Does 50 shades of grey count? Thats twilight fanficton. Do self published books count? Do amazon published ones? Whats your cuttoff point for “real books”?
Think for a moment instead of flying off the handle with the most paranoid possible reading of my post.
Fanfiction is, pretty inherently, self-referential and incestuous. At best the only skills you’re going to learn from reading lots of fanfiction is how to write more fanfiction which, if you’ve ever tried to read an original work by somebody who only ever reads fanfiction, you know they’re basically starting out at level 1 like an author who has barely read anything.
If you’re going to introduce and “sell” an original idea, you need to read books that also had to introduce and sell original ideas to an audience, which the vast sweeping majority of fanfiction does not. Like, nominally.
[character you already know and like] in [setting you already know and like] does [trope you already know and like because it was specifically tagged and catalogued by this trope for you to find it that way] does not by and large demonstrate to the reader the authorial technique required to convey original story concepts to a reader, such as characters the reader doesn’t already know and like, settings the reader doesn’t already know and like, etc..
In this post about having a wide variety of different experiences with an artform before seriously trying to create in that artform, thinking that fanfiction is a good substitution for original fiction for these purposes, as many are inclined to think in the groups I know this post is going to reach, will lead you astray and render the help this post is trying to convey moot.
For equivalence I should probably also say “not Pathfinder or another D&D5e or PbtA hack” about the TTRPG angle but I figured that would be taken more implicitly (and it has).
By the way there is no reason for anyone to “pick a side” in this disagreement we are friends and already talked it out and any perceived hostility is unintentional and I won’t appreciate any disparaging comments even in my defense.
Running D&D in 2024 is like, the player community collectively convinced each other that dungeon crawls, resource management and attrition are bad, so now everyone runs games where characters can expect to get into one or two fights a day and characters are never stretched for resources, and most Reddit threads about D&D are GMs asking for help challenging their groups because of said ignoring of the resource management aspect and getting told that a good GM could make it work so obviously they must be a bad GM.
I should start making DM advice videos.
The title: “How to keep your party challenged and engaged”
The thumbnail: “Do this one weird trick!”
The content: “Grind them into paste in your meatgrinder.”
“This forgotten method could save your D&D campaign” and the thumbnail has a guy thinking ponderously and the words “Dungeons & Dragons” are on the screen with the word “Dungeons” circled
With an arrow pointing to it.
“This forgotten method could save your D&D campaign”
These tags just demonstrate the issue that this post is about: people think D&D is a completely unopinionated game that you can just take whole systems out of without altering the gameplay. But D&D is a game that is opinionated about many things, resource management being one of them, and once you remove the resource management out of it you end up with a worse game with no tension and DMs suddenly having to fix a bunch of new problems that arise out of that, like having to suddenly figure out ways to challenge their party when tracking resources (this includes stuff like spell slots and daily uses of abilities) is no longer an issue except on a per-encounter level.
And honestly “DMs can change anything” is not unique to D&D. If I wanted to run a game that doesn’t care about dungeon-crawling and resource management I would much rather run a different game. And I wish people in the D&D playerbase realized this as well, because not only is it bad for their game and its play culture, it also stifles creativity within the hobby.
All of which is to say: if you don’t like resource management there are hundreds of games out there that don’t care about resource management.
This sounds a whole lot like “You’re having fun wrong!”
You can totally change any rule you don’t like. In D&D, or any other game. You can change the rules in Sorry! if you want. You don’t have to play Chutes and Ladders instead.
I’ve noticed over the years that WotC and Hasbro have changed the game from encouraging players and DMs to change rules they don’t like, to severely discouraging them. (I assume this is to sell more minis, and now D&D One subscriptions.) We used to call people like that rules lawyers, and most of us stopped inviting them to our tables.
By all means play another game. I haven’t given Hasbro any of my money since 3.5, and I don’t intend to start. But don’t complain about the way others are playing. The only way to do it wrong is by NOT having fun!
I’m sorry but this is such a pissing on the poor reading comprehension take.
This post is about observations of a play culture where people clearly are not having fun, as attested to by hundreds of GMs trying to run the game in a way it’s not optimized towards and suddenly having to do a bunch of work to patch over those newly discovered issues! That’s what the first post in this chain is about: people have self-inflicted a playstyle onto themselves which simply does not harmonize with D&D, but because the current play culture of D&D doesn’t consider the GM’s fun a factor they need to deal with toxic memes like “a good GM can fix it” when they shouldn’t, in fact, have to fix things if the game were fit to purpose!
So yes, this post is about people who clearly are, by your definition, having fun wrong while playing D&D, because they have made the job of running the game way too stressful for themselves! And the purpose of this post is to say “You don’t have to run the game like that. You can just take the game at its own word and let the game take the reins. That way you, the GM, will also have to do less game design on the fly.”
Also while this old post is going across the dash: the idea that WotC is somehow trying to discourage people from changing the rules they don’t like is demonstrably false. The current culture of play of D&D is very much based around the idea that the latest edition of D&D very much gives explicit license to people to change the rules they don’t like and treats this as a somehow unique feature. Meanwhile the emergent player culture of the game sees the license to change the rules of the game as their first line of defense against any criticisms of sloppy game design or lack of clear design goals. WotC and the D&D community both cultivate the idea that it’s okay to change any rules you don’t like and the fact that you can means that any issues you have with the game are your fault.
Also also: someone in the tags was like “sometimes people really don’t want to play a dungeon crawl and it feels unfair to jump one on them, so what do I do” and my personal suggestion is that you run something other than the dungeon game for them. Seriously, if you take D&D out of the dungeon it gets uncomfortable. There are hundreds of fantasy games out there and while many of them do feature dungeons a lot of them are much more conducive to non-dungeon-related gameplay than the dungeon game.
D&D 5e is capable of running a political game in the sense that the game won’t actively prevent you from doing so, but this is the absolute bare minimum in terms of actually having support for running a political game. In the context of a political game D&D characters can fall back on a bare bones social skill system and if your gameplay is mostly politicking you will have to suspend disbelief for the fact that the player characters will be largely growing in terms of combat effectiveness. In these ways, yes, you can absolutely run a political game in D&D 5e, but the game itself will end up doing very little of the heavy lifting and such gameplay will ultimately end up being something where the group (and most likely the GM) does most of the work to make it function at all.
You know what D&D 5e does have lots of mechanical support for so that the group won’t have to do most of the work? Fighting monsters in dungeons. There are other games that will serve you much better if you want to run a political game.
Like, due to the nature of the possibility space in TTRPGs, there is very little that TTRPGs can actually prevent you from doing. I could run a dungeon crawl in Monsterhearts. It would be extremely silly and shortsighted of me to do so when games that much better support that playstyle exist and if I were to argue “I do think Monsterhearts is capable of running a dungeon crawl” people would think it’s a really weird statement to make. This statement, however, is taken as gospel by many D&D player when applied to D&D’s supposed flexibility, which is, I’m sorry to say, mostly a marketing lie.
D&D players are still out here in 2025 metaphorically trying to run every possible video game as a DLC for Bloons Tower Defence.
EDIT: found the post
Even the discussion on encumberance being accountancy is very funny in this conversation because there are other games that do dungeon crawling and do that in a more straightforward manner too if you don’t want to get into decimal weighted coins and shit. Torchbearer, Cairn, and probably a few other games do discrete ‘inventory slot’ methods where your accountancy is reduced to 'does it go on the drawing of my character’ or 'can you count to ten’. Into the Odd is even more svelt and says 'you’re encumbered when you have three Bulky items’, saying treasure should be bulky, and leaving it at that.
Like, if you’re chafing against half the rules of the system because they’re too bitty, perhaps there is something with lighter or more focused rules you could have a look at, right?
Yeah this is a wonderful addition! I’ve found that making inventory easier to track, especially with visual indicators for equipment slots and equipment, is a really straightforward way of making the resource management easier but also enjoyable in a fun, toyetic way. The games you mentioned are all great for it, but for me personally Mausritter is the top dog (or mouse) in this regard, specifically because its slot-based inventory system combined with equipment cards and a little inventory section on the character sheet makes the system a fun toy to play with.
Now, that’s not to say that more granular inventory management doesn’t also have its place: I’m of the opinion that in early editions of D&D (OD&D and B/X specifically) weights and carry limits being expressed as “weight in coins” really sells the coin as the smallest meaningful unit of weight in a way that really supports the intended playstyle of old-school D&D.
Arguably BLM and Dimension 20 as a whole are probably at least a little responsible for legitimizing this culture of play for a subset of the fan base. I love Brennan as a DM and D20 as a show, but they should really have a “PROFESSIONALS ON A CLOSED COURSE: DO NOT TRY AT HOME” banner go across the screen every so often.
Partially this manifests as players thinking DMs should be able to make DnD do backflips to tell whatever story they want, and partially it manifests as DMs believing they’re failures for NOT being able to do that
Nearly blocked someone for a vaguely annoying reply they made in 2017 then remembered 2017 was 9 years ago. They will live. We can change *opens their blog* nevermind they got worse. Guards
Unironically I think the early to mid 20s age group in America has unbelievably bad consent boundaries on all levels and so much language to defend it but this makes me sound like elon musk if I say it however the commonality of someone who will be like “I had 47 panic attacks and it’s your fault” if you tell them no is insane
I rejected someone and got called “the scariest person I’ve ever met” with so much therapy speak interspersed like alright okay alright okay alright okay
“You just say whatever you’re thinking and I don’t know how to handle it” was verbatim part of this conversation. Also everyone hates to see an autistic bitch
When I was in this age bracket, there was a huge emphasis on improving consent culture via graceful rejection, and it’s gone by the wayside. Which sucks.
Twice in my youth (once in high school and once in college) I was in situations where I was asking someone out and I could tell they were calculating in their heads the risks of rejecting me, and both times I said, out loud, “you can say no, I wouldn’t have asked if I wasn’t prepared for either answer.” And then they said no. This wasn’t some spark of special wisdom I had - I knew to do it because feminist conversations among my age group brought it up regularly. This isn’t happening nearly enough anymore.
More recently, I was really glad when we got to “rejection sensitive dysphoria” in my IOP program and it was one of those symptoms where the therapists really emphasized how it affects others. Because it does.
Being someone who cannot handle rejection makes you much more likely to violate boundaries, and yes, that includes sexual ones. Yes, you, reader who has never hurt a fly. If you don’t want to stumble backwards into sexually assaulting someone, fix your RSD meltdowns. If you keep them up it’s only a matter of time. Because if you’re nice enough to interact with, but are known to have RSD meltdowns, guess what happens when your friends and acquaintances need to reject you?
Because scientists have studied it and they’ve found insufficient evidence to prove that it’s real. It’s really quite simple.
There are literally scientists who went into these studies genuinely believing in porn addiction who were eager to study it and its effects who came out no longer believing in it. Why? Because they’re good scientists who changed their minds in the face of new evidence.
The key point in studies like this is that they always expect porn-related problems to go up as porn use goes up, and you would expect that because that’s how every addiction works from gambling to cigarettes to alcohol to crack cocaine, but what they actually find is that the people with the most distress over their porn use is actually related to how religious they are, not how much porn they’re watching. This is significant, because it means people who identify as “porn addicts” are not actually watching more porn than the average person; They just feel worse about it because they think they shouldn’t be watching it AT ALL.
I really can’t stress this point enough; Are there people whose lives are badly impacted by watching 22 hours of porn a day? Sure, they do exist and they have my sympathy, but the majority of cases of “porn addiction” are completely religiously motivated and have nothing to do with how much porn people are actually watching.
The key takeaway here is that shaming people for their sexuality is harmful. It’s bad for people’s mental health to make them feel shame over something they have no control over, like how horny they can get. It’s wrong to force people to suppress their emotions and make them feel guilty for not harming anyone. As Drew of Genetically Modified Skeptic once said; You can’t shame someone out of feeling horny any more than you can shame someone out of feeling hungry.
Christianity often does this as a form of control by selling you the sickness and the cure; We are created sick and commanded to be well.
People who do consume excessive amounts of porn are not considered addicts because the compulsion is so linked to other mental illnesses that it’s classified as a symptom of those problems…not an addiction disorder on its own.
Depressed people can engage in compulsions because they are extremely dopamine starved. People with OCD can engage in porn compulsion because OCD compulsions can be linked to ANY behavior. (not just washing hands!!)
Someone would also need to be engaging with porn in a way that is damaging their life outside of personal shame with the activity. Are they doing it for many hours a day? Are they choosing porn over spending time with friends and family? Are they missing work or school?
When you actually measure it, compulsive porn use is actually a relatively rare symptom. Far from the “epidemic” that far right zealots are propagandizing about. For puritans, the only acceptable amount of porn use is none.
Needless to day, shaming people who experience compulsive porn use is extremely psychologically damaging to them and can contribute to making the problem worse.
idk why people are still trying to do “hear me out"s on tumblr
you could talk about wanting to fuck the space needle on here and people would still call you a poser for insisting on fucking "conventionally attractive architecture” as if that’s a coherent, easily-recognizable category
I want to fuck Antoni Gaudi’s unbuilt Hotel Attraction skyscraper design
“hear me out” and it’s a picture of the most fuckable building you’ve ever seen. c'mon now.
ALT
