advancedcorpsematerials - Tumblr blog

[advancedcorpsematerials]

JERK SESH = COMPLETED

[advancedcorpsematerials]

Antediluvian. Before the flood and after the fall of man.

[advancedcorpsematerials]

[advancedcorpsematerials]

[advancedcorpsematerials]

a compilation of Weird Al begging George Harrison not to drink rat poison

[advancedcorpsematerials]

@txttletale's recent post about media criticism is really good and it actually spoke to me about something I've been thinking about with regards to D&D.

So okay D&D's whole gameplay doesn't actually frame the player characters in the best possible light. That's okay in my opinion, cause I don't think media needs to be morally correct for me to engage with it. When playing D&D I'll just accept some of the premise and then go with it.

But in recent years I've been seeing a lot of takes about trying to reframe D&D's gameplay through a positive lens. "The average D&D party is a found family trying their best to survive outside the status quo, trying their best to help people, etc." and it kind of rings hollow when what the gameplay still revolves around is grave-robbing, killing acceptable classes of people (under this framing "monsters" get replaced with cultists, bandits, and other folks society has deemed acceptable to kill), and often in the service of the status quo.

Like the framing of a lot of D&D adventures is "the poor village inhabited by good normal people surrounded by evil wilderness is under attack and because the power of authority doesn't extend this far into the wilderness they need your help to save them from the bad people," which is like basically forming a posse of vigilantes to enact frontier justice.

So when people try to put a positive spin on that with like "no we're just real scrappy strangers trying to do a good thing to save the world when society rejects us" it makes me go really?

[advancedcorpsematerials]

Craig Nelson’s 1988 Crime Zone poster

[advancedcorpsematerials]

we're fucked

[advancedcorpsematerials]

this wouldn't leave my brain

[advancedcorpsematerials]

god forbid 5000 year old girls do anything

[advancedcorpsematerials]

[advancedcorpsematerials]

my lord i fear i must inform you that you have reblogged a post made by the general whose forces encircle my fortress. please delete it posthaste

[advancedcorpsematerials]

OUT NOW: It's Oops All Sketches 2! The Sickos come bearing eleven killer sketches that will make you hoot and laugh and go nuts. Join us as we travel through time, meet god, become Michelin reviewers, count cards, and more. If you don't listen to this, go to hell!

[advancedcorpsematerials]

hey sorry we gave your boyfriend a stat block and his challenge rating was actually really low :/

[advancedcorpsematerials]

Upcoming show at an undisclosed location in west philadelphia, we are not fucking around about the armor and the robes arcane. Also hey if your or someone you love is a dungeon synth artist trying to play philadelphia get in touch

[advancedcorpsematerials]

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.