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...you know what? I'll bite.

I don't think I've heard a lot of claims that PbtA games are for character-based games. I've heard them talked about for narrative-based games, but not so much characters.

Yes, PbtA does give you specific archetypes to play as. It's also very upfront about that. PbtA games areall trying to invoke different types of stories nd gives you the potential types of characters that occupy that space. Again, PbtA is concrned with serving the type of narrative it's going for, not necessarily to be an open character space.

So first of all, I don't think that I've seen a playbook that gives multiple choice options for character relationships. Most of them have prompts to ask other players, but those are open ended not multiple choice. Also, what games were you playing that allowed for no Session 0? In most PbtA games it's a requirement because a lot of character/world building has to be done as a group.

First, every system has flaws and anyome who pretends otherwise is wrong. Second, every game has some degree of rule restrictions. Third, I'm surprised someone made this defense, because PbtA is usually pretty good about allowing you to take whatever actions you want (Act Under Pressure is a general catch all move, for example, that can cover a wide variety of actions) as opposed to systems like D&D where you are generally much more regulated (action, bonus action, etc.).

This...isn't an actual complaint.

I'd aegue that advancements can give you plenty of benefits, and I'd say that gaining experience whenever you fail a role encoutages taking more risks, since even if you fail you still gain something out of it.

bored, so ttrpg hot takes based on random saltiness.

Despite its dickriders' claim to the contrary, pbta is the world's worst system for character-based stories on the planet.

To elaborate; nearly every game in that system's 'class' requires a set of severely restricted backgrounds for your player character. Nuance, orgininality, and subversion of tropes is something you have to absolutely fight to incorporate into one of these games

Also, the fucking. mechanic of forcing you to adapt a multiple-choice answer of preselected questions as to how your character apparently relates to the rest of the party before the game begins is absolute bullshit. A newcomer has NO way of knowing this and is forced to rapidly alter their own backstory to include pc's they've just met and don't understand, with no session 0 to make it smooth. fuck your ideas, story, and chance to meet in-character, I guess.

pbta dickriders' only defense for their system's shit mechanics is just "well not everyone WANTS story depth or freedom what about THAT" which just tells me none of them have good taste in like. Anything.

d6 are ugly boring cubes, who the hell wants to do ttrpg with solely the fugliest cubes

their 'level up' system grants you functionally no benefit and is solely based on failing other rolls, so there's literally no incentive to take risks

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What I would like in a Reload-style remake of Persona 4

MAKE THE GUYS DATEABLE! (Okay, I know this isn't going to happen, but please let me date Kanji!)

Have the Shadow bosses before the boss fights have full cutscenes when they turn monsterous, similar to the Ruler bosses in Persona 5.

Similarly, put some nice effects when the characters get Personas.

I know it wouldn't work with Rise, but have Naoto show up more around town and have her hang out with the party more. As is, until all the sequel games she's just kinda there to solve the mystery most of the time. I'd especially like her and Kanji to have more interactions, because the game seems to want them to be a pair similar to Chie and Yukiko, and there isn't enough there to establish it.

...please do SOMETHING with the school festival. Between the beauty and cross-dressing contests and the hot springs afterwards, it's just so much of characters beinv horrible and not funny.

Give the boss fights something similar to the Persona 5 bosses. Like, give us opportunities to turn the fight to our favor. This might be trauma from Shadow Yukiko, but most of the bosses were mitigating problems rather than creating advantages.

Playable Marie.

I get that we're a silent protag, but give us more character moments for the MC. Like, maybe your party makes a point to check up on you when you're staying alone near the end.

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So first of all, this isn't an ironclad trend or cliche. Procedural detective stories, for example (Bones, High Potential, Law & Order, etc.) tend to have a large variety in the morality of their killers and victims, I assume because they are episodic tv shows, and if every episode had the same payoff the audience would not be tuning in every week. There are trends and tendencies too, of course, depending on concept. The show Cold Case, for example, followed (fictional) detectives looking back to solve (fictional) cold cases. Because this approach was a lot more about telling the untold stories of the victims, said victims were generally portrayed in a sympatgetic light, with the variety there being the setting of the original murder (could be a few years ago, the 80's, or the 50's).

There's also the type of murder mystery that might result in generally having irredeemable victims and/or sympathetic villains. Noir detective stories, for example, tend to have darket, grittier, more gray casts, so bad guys being killed and "good" people falling into vice are just part of the genre. Cozy mysteries are generally "cleaner" stories where there isn't a lot of blood and gray morality, so most of the murders are crimes of passion rather than diabolical plans and only bad people get murdered because then the audience doesn't need to worry about being offed themselves. Similar with murder mysteries aimed at younger audiences like the manga Detective Conan.

I think the primary reason, however, because often in mystery fiction authors want the ultimate solution to be a surprise for the audience. Mysteries in their vase forms tend to be puzzles that the audience is expected to try to solve alongside the characters. As a result, in a lot of ways who the victim is doesn't matter because they're just a starting point (in a lot of mysteries literally, since they often start with the victim already dead and therefore no longer an active character outside of flashbacks). Conversely, the killer is often the endpoint/solution, and an author wants the audience to get their the same time as the characters and tries to convince that they aren't the killer without actuslly saying it. One common way is to have the killer be sympathetic, because an audience wouldn't want them to be the killer and try to convince themselves that they aren't, while being given several more probable suspects who act like potential killers as red herrings. The are even some mystery series like Murder She Wrote where you can figure out who the killer is by looking for characters that seem to be completely out of suspicion in the plot.

Maybe I am not well read but why do mystery murder stories have irredeemable victims and sympathetic murderers I don’t remember the last time where i read a story where the victim was an innocent person who didn’t deserve their fate and the murderer an irredeemable evil man

Idk I don’t read/ watch a lot of mysteries, the last mystery I watched was Glass Onion where the victim is innocent and the murder is evil. Ig writers just want to be subversive when trying to switch these roles but it got to the point where the subversiveness became cliche.

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So, with the new Rememberance path focusing on summons/memosprites, I thought it would be interesting to theorycraft which characters might have alternates on this path, although I definutely focused on theidea of "summons" more than "memosprites":

March 7th - Okay, let's be honest; we all know how much of a link that March has to the Garden of Recollection. There's no way she doesn't get this path at some point.

Black Swan/Reca - Looping them both together because they would both be on this path for the same reason: they're memokeepers.

Seele - So, a main feature of Seele's combat is creating afterimages, so what if an afterimage of her became a summon?

Clara - She clearly has more plot that could be gotten into, including how this barefoot child ended up with a bunch of old war robots. Also, since she repairs a lot of the robots, I think it would make sense if Pascal or another bot became her summon, and her skills are around healibg and enhancing them.

Yanqing - Basically his flying swords.

Jing Yuan - So I'm saying this mostly because I saw a Hoyofest video focusing on Jing Yuan and his departed lion, Mimi. It included that Mimi used to fight alongside Jing Yuan in battle, so it made me think of a Rememberance Jing Yuan with a Mimi memosprite, him figjting with the memory of his former companion.

Huohuo - With Mr. Tail as the memospriten which leads me to-

Literally any Xianzhou character with a heliobus - So we've establisjed that not all heliobi are malicious, and the Laofu has a whole map dedicated to them. Who's to say that a heliobus can't team up with another Xianzhou native to form a character?

An Annihilation Gang/Sanctus Medicus member - Basically a former/current member that would summon a void ranger/mara-struck, respectively.

An Aetherium Wars player - Because summoning aetheric copies of creatures (which considering the special trotter we get are capable of personalities) doesn't seem that different from calling on memosprites.

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WARNING TO ZENLESS ZONE ZERO PLAYERS!!!

Just a warning, but if you haven't done the 1.4 story content, then don't look up the Notorius Hunt. It has the new boss AND ITS NAME there which I am fairly certain is a spoiler for Chapter 5 itself.

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Gonna be honest, I'm kinda disappointed that she's Ice Erudition still. Would like a little more variance, especial since we already got so many copies of the original 4-star Ice Erudition Herta.

Honkai: Star Rail CN | Character Teaser Artwork: The Herta

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So, this is making me think about a thinkpiece on the ending of Game of Thrones, and how a lot of characters act in the final season is more in service to the twist at the end. Like, Sansa is suspicious of Denerys not because of anything Denerys does, but because the writers know what's going to happen and having Sansa suspicious makes her look smart and with forsight. Circe is NOT terrorizing all of her people because then they would welcome Denerys with open arms and she'd have less narrative reason to burn them alive. Basically, the characters act in service of the twist ending that they should know nothing about yet.

It's making me think about DA2 because, aside from (if I remember right) Varric being the only person that got along with other party members, no one trusting Justice at all makes a lot more sense if the characters have some degree of the Writers' foresight as to what Justice is going to lead Anders o do.

Crying and throwing up at the VG crew's reaction and treatment of Spite vs. the KW crew's reaction and treatment of Justice. I love their mean little asses but mean little asses they were...

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So, here's the thing: I actually do want to play Veilguard, but I am still playing through Metaphor and I need to finish Trails into Daybreak before part 2's localization comes out in February. I just don't have the bandwidth right now.

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Okay, I'll reblog this, but I want to specifically point out that some fanfiction more than resemble novels both in length and quality, and I think that they deserve recognition for that.

reblog if you believe fanfics are as valid as books that were published and sold by authors who write as their main careers. I'm trying to prove a point

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So, asking this as someone playing Honkai Star Rail and Zenless Zone Zero, but not Genshin Impact: How likely are alternate characters like in other Gatchas to appear in HSR & ZZZ? I don't know enough about Genshin to know if there's already an established pattern for this. I know that the protag characters in GI & HSR effectively have multiple forms, Dan Heng got a 5* alt and March will start being able to change paths and elements too, but I don't know if other characters without as much direct screen time (the protags are the protags, and Dan and March are a part of the main "party" of the plot) could potentislly get similar treatment the way games like Fate Grand Order or Granblue Fantasy might. Like, could we get an alt Asta, Yanquing or Serval? What about an alt Nicole, Ben or Corrin? Or is the most I can hope for skins?

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the little storyboards are the best decision d20s ever made

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Probably not the best person to do this, but I did MC one of the adventures from the Tome of Mysteries for Monster of the Week. MotW basicalky organizes the adventure by listing out the Monster's ideal plan/ events to happen, as well as all the named NPCs and their motivations. I kind of purposely picked an adventure where a lot of the seven events to happen were caused by different people instead of all being the monster's actions so that the pkayers couldn't screw with it too much while investigating. The players wouldn't control the townspeople's panic, for example.

Anyway, I treated the events and NPCs described by the adventure as elements that I would try to push in the narrative whenever the players offered the chance. Oh, my players failed their role while investigating a location? This was a great time to impliment the "another body is found" event that was to happen next (bonus points that I was able to make it a character that I had created quickly because of a much earlier botched role). Players are in this location now? Might as well put these necessary to the plot NPCs right in front of them so that they can't be missed.

This might not be helpful (I'm not familiar with Perfect Draw at all and I'm not a regular dm/gm anyways). But I'm kind of like you where I wish the material had more structure while understanding why it doesn't, so maybe this will be a little helpful.

People who have GM'd PbtA games, would you have any advice for GMing a PbtA game (in this case Perfect Draw) coming from systems with pretty different goals? (5e, NOVA)

The pre-written adventures I've found are usually light on detail and mostly have a "Here's the general gist of what should happen, how the players get there is up to you and them" which I understand fits the system's goals but it also makes me afraid considering I don't like winging stuff too much in my games

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It for real concerns me what some of you consider "objectively funny crimes"

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I want to state first that this semi-rant isn't exactly because of the release of X-Men 97 and all the posts on Tumblr because of it. I don't even have a Disney+ account to watch the show. Most of my comic knowledge is from reviews and thinkpieces to keep up with what is going on. But this is something that's been in the back of my mind for a while, and all the posts have brought it to the forefront. And hey, now that I have a sort-of-blog, I might as well write my thought out.

One of the things that I don't like about how comic books are written and published is the constant need to return to the status quo.Regardless of what happens in a comic, any change that occurs will eventually be undone to go back to the characters' baselines. Even character death is constantly undone to the point that it's become a joke. This happens for a lot of reasons, some good and some bad, I don't want to get into that here. What I do want to get into is how not every status quo is created equal.

A lot of these status quos are fine for the characters themselves, because the general premise of the book doesn't call for a lot of angst. Superman and Iron Man, for example, have a fair amount of respect and support in their daily lives. They don't have PERFECT lives, but Clark Kent has a strong support system of friends and family and Tony Stark is both wealthy and is happy to be considered a genius as far as I understand. But other characters don't get off so easy. Spiderman's status quo is that his need to be a superhero constantly wreaks havoc on his personal relationships while at the same time he is vilified by the press, so he continues to do a thankless job because it's the right thing to do. What this results in, though, is Spiderman constantly losing friendships and relationships to get back to this status quo. Batman, meanwhile, is the dark, brooding protector of Gotham, but to maintain that status quo, he is constantly angst-ing over his parents and keeping other people, including those close to him at arm's length so that he would never not be brooding and melocholy, and Gotham will never actually deal with the corruption and crime because then it wouldn't need Batman to protect it.

One comic book that gets really hit by this is the X-Men, because the basic premise isn't just "people with superpowers train at a secretive boarding school", but also people with powers that are constantly discriminated against at large, so that they both have to stop supervillains as well as protect each other from bigots, opportunists and mobs, trying to be recognized as people and not monsters. This is a good premise, but the problem is that this is also the X-Men's status quo that they keep returning to. Combined with the fact that Marvel doesn't do reboots the way DC does results in a situation where the X-Men are never going to make any meaningful progress and are constantly set back in terms of civil rights. To me, at least, it's gotten to the point where I can't really suspend disbelief anymore. To me, it's less "Magneto was right" and more "Status quo is god." There's always another hate group that doesn't have any resistance in the population despite how dangerous these have proven to be. There's always another sleezy politician with the same rhetoric, or making the same agreement with someone like Trask despite how they always spiral out of control. More importantly, there's never any progress, because status quo means we can't move beyond where we are, and where we are is hated.

And I know a lot of people could probably argue that just like the initial message of the X-Men, this too is reflective of the real world, especially now where I live where conservative politicians and organizations are still trying (and sometimes succeeding) in rolling back civil rights. But my problem with that is that this is not a realistic world. To borrow something once said by the reviewer Linkara, the worlds of superheroes have:

People with extra-ordinary and supernatural abilities constantly appearing and affecting the public for good or bad.

Technology that, if not commonplace, is still readily at hand and way more advanced than what it is in the real world.

Several non-human societies (Atlanteans, Martians, demons, genetically altered raccoons, etc.) constantly visiting Earth.

Magic as a provable and measurable existence.

To go a bit further, there are a lot of societal fantasies too, such as:

Billionaires that are ethical, albiet not perfect.

Justice systems that often function as intended, with corruption and villains getting off on technicalities considered not the norm for the world, to the point where being able to stay out of jail is almost treated like a superpower itself.

Cites and countries that just don't exist in the real world.

Despite the fact that all of these non-human societies have been interacting with humans, human society is still very much the same with very little influence of any non-humans.

The point is that these worlds are not realistic to start with, so there is no reason why they have to always act "realistically" except for the reason of "because Marvel/Disney/the author says so." Marvel could give the Mutants some permanently unalienable rights, but because they constantly return to the X-Men's status quo of "always prejudiced against", they never will.

I realize that all of this probably sounds whiny on my part and I probably didn't completely get my point across like I wanted to. It's just...Magneto doesn't have to be right within the context of Marvel's Earth. There could be actual societal change that permanently helps mutants. But again, since that would permanently change the status quo, it won't happen because of how comic book writing and publishing works, and I'm at the point where I can't help but see the hand of the author in it all.

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WARNING: SPOILERS for Honkai Star Rail 2.1!!!

So, it sounds like a lot of people are suddenly treating Adventurine as precious child that would never do anything wrong and needs to be protected. Don't get me wrong, he is made much more sympathetic after 2.1, but I think people are forgetting what Adventurine's actual goal is. He's not challenging Sunday and the family out of altruism, he's acting on behalf of the IPC, which is trying to take control of Penacony. I just think people should remember that, and not be surprised if he turns back around to being a dick later in the plot.

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Reblog if you have not been booped yet