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Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

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burning text gif maker

heart locket gif maker

minecraft advancement maker

minecraft logo font text generator w/assorted textures and pride flags

windows error message maker (win1.0-win11)

FromSoftware image macro generator (elden ring Noun Verbed text)

image to 3d effect gif

vaporwave image generator

microsoft wordart maker (REALLY annoying to use on mobile)

you're welcome

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spin this wheel of all the pokemon. you now have to fight this pokemon. just you and it, bare-knuckle

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The Quandrary Of Pokemon As A TTRPG

Pokemon is a really cool game.

Pokemon is also a really cool anime.

These are two dangerous things to present to a TTRPG player, because typically speaking, anyone who plays a tabletop roleplaying game, anything you see that you think is cool, you can immediately find a way to play with in a creative way. The example I was shown when I was a lot younger (shoutouts to BigAngry) was that any anime became a menu, and you don’t need to know how to ride a bike to drop an Akira Slide into your TTRPG.

Pokemon is a 25-year old anime franchise with a hugely expansive game place and numerous different ways to explore and express its particular conceptual space, and seemingly necessarily, people make TTRPGs that follow in this space. And yet, despite relentless attempts to create something that connects Pokemon to TTRPGs, I have yet to see someone actually present a way to make Pokemon a playable TTRPG experience, for a host of reasons, which I will now present as a form of numbered list.

#5 — Power Application Problems

In the main, standard Pokemon games, there’s a single player unit, a trainer. That trainer then goes about the world and approaches it in terms of structured Pokemon battles, where they use their Pokemon to fight things and those fights are turn-based, tactical, and reliant on learnable mechanics a child can handle. In the normal process of the game, players play with a simpler pool of options, and the competitive environment coalesces around the smallest, best pool of those options.

When a player takes the best options and plays like, you know, an adult and not a child learning to read, though, these games are pretty trivial. Enemies in the world are easily regarded as laughably weak, because they’re not there to be real representatives of difficulty in the real world, they’re speedbumps on a path in a dungeon that’s navigable by children.

How do you get players to make mediocre choices? What fiction constrains the players to the weakest options? And how does that make sense?

#4 — Randomness Problems

Here’s another problem: Pokemon is not a game without randomness but it is an extremely deterministic game. Most moves hit most of the time. Moves don’t have a ‘to hit’ check like you might imagine in most games but just a flat chance to land, and making yourself better at avoiding being hit is rare. This is to facilitate fast turn-absed play where the important thing is a player making the right choices about what and where to attack and then the response of what and where to use to absorb that hit. It’s a really great game, mechanically.

It also barely rolls dice. Pokemon moves have a damage range, but those ranges are pretty small – sometimes less than 10% variance on the overall attack. Not nothing but for the material world of people hucking dice and adding up damage values to sort out on paper, it’s a fine distinction that’s not really worth rolling.

This isn’t to say ‘all TTRPGs are about rolling dice,’ but don’t kid yourselves, rolling a bunch of dice is cool and fun. Why wouldn’t you want to do that?

#3 — Ecological Scope Problems

Pokemon are really varied! What’s more, shockingly, they’re really distinctive. Across a thousand Pokemon while a lot can be lumped together as doing different jobs, within those lumps there are still major differences. Some Pokemon are designed to fulfill the same basic genre as one another – like Ratata and Zigzagoon and Patrat are all meant to live in the same part of the game experience for a player, but they’re all still distinct to one another. Ratata has a unique move, Zigzagoon can give you material over time, and Patrat is horrifying.

If you want to present a world with Pokemon in it, you need to present a world with a lot of interesting and varied pieces in it. That’s hard to do, and it can get a lot worse if your system doesn’t have ways to make things meaningfully mechanically distinct to one another. Even if you just steal Pokemon’s Pokemon, you’ve got to stat up a thousand things to dump into your game system.

God help you if you use a point based system, too, because nothing gets as slushy and nonspecific as a point system.

#2 — Deabstraction Problems

Now, for now we’ll set aside what people assume a Pokemon game should be like as a TTRPG (but tune in for #2), and instead ask the question: How should the game be built for players? Are we assuming everyone is going to use the best choices? What actually infringes on people’s abilities to learn? Are there specific limited pools of powers and if so, what makes that limitation meaningful? In the context of Pokemon it works fine because it’s a fantasy fiction modelled on a computer game with limited rules and inputs, but when you translate that to a TTRPG you’re presented with the problem of players who don’t live on grids. They can avoid people, they can come up with alternate solutions to problems (especially with Pokemon’s special abilities), and of course, there’s no reason that a person who’s actually training Pokemon in a world with wide communication and study sources would have any difficulty finding the best moves and teach them – training! – before they ever go out and get kicked in the face.

These are all the problems that flow from when you take a game that’s made out of pieces for a gameboy system and then try to extrapolate them out to a bigger world, or when you take a world for an anime designed to appeal to 9 year olds and start asking questions like ‘okay, but what’s the tax system like?’

And how do you stop Pokemon breeding turning into conversations about eugenics?

#1 — Fantasy Misalignment Problems

In Pokemon, a player has a number of subordinate Pokemon and right there we have two different ways players approach this experience. Some players imagine themselves as being the trainer, and some imagine themselves as being the Pokemon.

But even in those groups, some people want to play Pokemon who are humans transformed into Pokemon, and some people want to play Pokemon who are born this way and can express and examine a wholly Pokemon view of reality. That’s right there a huge problem, because Pokemon as critters that are agents on par with people creates a lot of questions about how the world is organised and you might not be prepared for that.

But what if you’re a trainer? You want to play a trainer with one Pokemon and that’s their main way of interacting with combat? Or do you want to play a trainer with a squad of Pokemon they release one at a time? Or do you want to play a trainer who behaves like a sensible person would in a time of combat and stress, and pop out all the army of helpers you can when you’re under stress? Those are three really distinct kinds of fantasies. One treats Pokemon like a disposable or flexible resource, the other treats them like a small specific toolkit that needs maintenance and one is more like a specific pet class.

Also, if the adventures are meaningfully dangerous or fit standard combat adventure narratives (like, god help you, any attempt to jam this system into something like Dungeons & Dragons), then the question follows of what is the trainer bringing to this story? The trainer could be engaging with a weapon of their own, and all ideas of sportsmanship and fair play would go out the window when the battle is about contending with real material threats. And what’s the point of the trainer? Are they somehow improving the Pokemon if these ideas work alongside each other? How do you balance the time demands of a player character who can deploy six sub-sections and indeed, what do you do when players need to be doing things during combats that aren’t just waiting for this combat to end?

Do you go to a tactical combat form? That can work, of course, but now you’re looking at this same multiplying entities and time loss!

Conclusion

The way Pokemon works is fine because Pokemon is set in the Pokemon universe and that’s a pretty silly place and that’s fine. But when you start to engage with that world at large, you hit problems, and you need to know what the game is going to be about.

It’s not that it won’t work, but the thing that’s going to look the most like Pokemon is treating a world that’s like Pokemon like Pokemon games. Have a turn based game, make the combat simplified, make it fast, make it so players can have one-off battles. Maybe limit the combat to only the sport of Pokemon and get rid of ‘wild’ encounters, or, find some other way to make ‘exploring’ award XP to the system and not frame it as just ‘going into the bushses and beating up wild animals.’

I don’t have a solution but man, am I far too familiar with the problems.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

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The bean jar

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It is almost five centuries ago, and the girl who will one day be a swordswoman is lying in the red-tinged mud. She can't get up—broken bone? severed tendon? She can't tell. She's yet to cultivate her palate for pain. Her enemy towers over her, a cataphract mailed in screaming steel and poisoned light. His warhammer falls, and it is death, forever death, death unconquered and unconquerable.

"No," says a part of her. She is not even seventeen years old. Her body is mangled and broken, wound piled upon wound piled upon wound. A dull kitchen knife is her only weapon, though she lost that in the mud the second her grip faltered. Her enemy is no thing of this earth. And yet—

"No. It is not death, forever death, death unconquered and unconquerable. It is only a hammer, falling. It is only 'an attack.'"

And the girl understood.

~~~

It is the better part of three centuries ago, as best the swordswoman can reckon, and she is beset on all sides by foes. They are not monsters—just mountain bandits, or highland rebels, as one cares to see it. But they outnumber her by dozens, and even an exceptional swordswoman might struggle against but two opponents of lesser skill.

From in front of her, beside her, behind her they advance, striking from every angle with spears and blades and axes. Others fill the air with arrows, sling stones, firepots. It would be effortless, to parry any single blow. It would be impossible, physically impossible, to defend against them all.

"No," says a part of her.

"You are not outnumbered. You do not face 'multiple' foes. It would be impossible to defend against every attack — but there is no 'every' attack. Only one."

"Oh," the swordswoman said. And it was, in fact, effortless.

~~~

It is eighty years ago, or thereabouts. A coiling spire of stony flesh and verdigrised copper throbs like a tumor on the horizon, coaxed from the earth by spell and sacrifice. It is the tower of a sorcerer-prince, and a birthing place of abominations.

Seven locks of rune-etched metal are opened with her single key. Wretched shapeling beasts, grown by sorcery in vitreous nodules, flee wailing from her, absconding before she even draws her blade. Demons sworn to thousand-year pacts of service find the binding provisions of their agreements unexpectedly severed.

These things dissatisfy the sorcerer-prince. He waxes wroth. He makes signs of power and chants incantations. With a flask of godling's blood, he draws the binding sigil inscribed upon the moon's dark face. With cold fire burning in his eyes, he speaks the secret name of Death. It is a king among curses, all-corrupting, all-consuming, and it falls from his lips upon the swordswoman.

"No," she says, and she turns it aside with her blade.

The sorcerer-prince's brow furrows. How did she even do that?

"Parried it."

But—

"With my sword."

No—

"See, like this."

Stop—

"Well," the swordswoman finally says, "I figured that if I just...looked at it right, and thought about it, and construed your curse as a kind of attack...then I could block it."

That's not how it works at all!

"If you insist," says the swordswoman, shrugging, and decapitates him.

~~~

It is now. It is the end. Death couldn't take the swordswoman, not when she'd spent all her life cutting it up. At times, Death might sidle up to one of her friends, or peer down into a grandchild's crib, and she'd just give it a look. That's all it took, by then.

Heartache couldn't take her, either. Bad things happened to her, and they hurt, and she lived in that hurt, but if it was ever more than she could take...she'd just, move her sword in a way that's difficult to describe. And she'd keep going.

Kingdoms fell, and she kept going. Continents crumbled and sank into the sea. Her planet's star faded and froze. She started carrying a lantern. Universes were torn apart and scattered, until all that had been matter was redistributed in thermodynamic equilibrium. With one exception.

But now it is the end. There is no time left; time is already dead. The swordswoman has outlived reality, but there is simply no further she can go. This is not a thing that can be blocked. This is the absence of anything further to block.

"No," says the girl who will one day be a swordswoman. "This isn't the ending. And even if it was, it's not the ending that matters."

The swordswoman looks back at who she was, at the countless selves she's been between them. She looks forward, at the rapidly contracting point that remains of the future. She grasps the all of linear time in her mind, and sees that it is shaped like a spear.

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Okay okay I've got one I think will be fun!!

Spin this wheel of like 160ish fandoms of varying levels of popularity.

Extra points for telling me all about your thoughts in the tags :D

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Hi. Things are bleak, I know that. I know that we paid for Trump's last term with blood and it is likely the price will be blood again.

But listen to me. LISTEN.

You do not have to force yourself to witness horrors as an act of activism. It is not a form of activism. You can put your phone down, you can block that horrific video. We cannot win if you cannot fight and you will not be able to fight if you are hopeless.

Do not let them guilt you into this. People who are exhausted are easier to walk over. Take care of yourself, find community where you find joy.

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Not to go "if you have ADHD just go for a run" or anything, but I am so serious if you have ADHD you should regularly go outside, no headphones no phone no nothing and just stand and observe for a while until you've had enough. Not until you get bored, until you've had enough. Drink your coffee without watching tiktok. Have a bath without music. Turn down the volume in your headphones. I cannot overstate how much learning to be bored is cruicial with ADHD. Life is not just about pleasure, no matter what your dysregulated dopamine system thinks, and when you teach your brain to be okay with being bored, then boring tasks stop feeling like torture. By letting yourself be bored you are yoinking your system out of the high/low binary and allow for the highs to feel like actual highs and not just anything that isn't low. I am so serious go literally touch grass. Listen to the sounds in your flat. Stimulate your body the way it was designed. It lowers anxiety and makes you feel like you're real and best of all it's completely free

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truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.

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the curve

somehow ive found myself in a position where folks come to chuck in times of strife for encouragement. lets get the big part of this conversation out of the way LOVE IS STILL REAL and that is the thing to remember. that north star remains. today there is more to talk about though

existence pushes towards love community and freedom, because CREATION is what we were built to do and creation thrives with these things as fuel. IT GETS BETTER. LOVE IS REAL. however this change comes in up and down waves. its not a straight line and should not be expected to be

some of these waves are short and small, and some of the slopes are years or decades long. there is no mincing words here, we are entering a massive downward wave. the implications are huge and it is okay to mourn that. FEEL THOSE FEELINGS. it is an important part of the ride

the most telling sign post on our slope is this: tromp won the popular vote (or likely will when the votes are done). we can talk POLITICAL STRATEGY all day about electoral college or who should court the center or the left and on and on but ultimately THIS is the real story

to me it signals a TRUE cultural shift. likely conservatives will have presidency, senate, house, and supreme court. WHAT A GIANT SLOPE. HOLD THE HECK ON because we will be riding it for a while, deep into the pit of the void. hold your buds tight, prove love at the local level

but heres the thing, MASSIVE waves have happened before. theyll happen again. mind numbing slopes into the abyss and great soaring leaps into the sky. in fact the inertia almost ALWAYS causes them to happen right after each other. hippies or punks back in the day, buckaroos now

politically we were trapped in a basically fifty fifty trot for a long time, but it was not always like this (just look at old election maps what the heck). to be honest, tromps map looks like one of those old maps right now. and DANG did COUNTER MOVEMENTS blooms from those times

in other words, THERE WILL BE A COUNTER CULTURE MOVEMENT THAT WE HAVE NEVER SEEN BEFORE IN OUR LIFETIMES. you are now a rebel for the resistance and the wave that will swing back towards love will awe us in ways we cannot even imagine yet.

but for now, feel those feelings, mourn, prove love, stay safe. do not let the hope i am espousing feel like a distraction from the very real, even deadly consequences of the terrible pit we are plummeting into. it is a horrible day, and FUTURE HOPE does not diminish that, BUT

get ready because that counter culture wave is coming and YOU are a part of it. if you want to shout HECK OFF DEVILS then shout it LOUD, if you want to cry then cry HARD, if you want to love then love with your WHOLE HEART. thats the start of the movement that we dont know yet

when that movement takes shape we will feel the inertia of the curve and it may make us sick from the rollercoaster turn, and that pressure will be uncomfortable and scary, but THEN buckaroo, we will soar, and ill be so dang glad to be holding on tight with you when we do

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200 Word RPGs 2024

Each November, some people try to write a novel. Others would prefer to do as little writing as possible. For those who wish to challenge their ability to not write, we offer this alternative: producing a complete, playable roleplaying game in two hundred words or fewer.

This is the submission thread for the 2024 event, running from November 1st, 2024 through November 30th, 2024. Submission guidelines can be found in this blog's pinned post, here.

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*doom music starts to play* I actually kindof like scheduling these kinds of appointments now...

but seriously Fellas, don't forget to schedule a pap smear every couple of years just in case. If you still have a cervix you can still get cervical cancer. ilu

this has been a psa

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Here's the link to the Kickstarter, since no else posted it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rodreel/radish-knights-tiny-nutritious-heroes?ref=android_project_share

Radish Knights - Tiny Vegetable Champions

I'm currently kickstarting Radish Knights, my 130+ page tabletop roleplaying game about chivalric vegetable tactics.

The thing about the indie scene is, you get to make games like this. You get to slap Final Fantasy Tactics into 4e and decide that the dice system is d10, roll middle, for some unguessable reason and you get to playtest for years, slowly adding bits and bobs to the system until you've made something that's as much Into The Breach as it is anything else, and then you take that thing onto kickstarter...

...and you remember that it's *always* a rough market for indie ttrpgs.

Genuinely, I think if you like strategy and you like heroic fantasy and you like worldbuilding that takes itself seriously even when the premise is ridiculous, you'll like this thing.

The art's all hand-drawn by Jonas Wittmann, who's worked on my other games Mendicant and Rod Reel And Fist.

The combat moves fast, and you have a lot of control over the dice.

I'd love to see this thing fund, and I'm hopeful that we can make Radish Knights a reality.

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millennial nerd bertie wooster for some reason

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