msviolacea - Tumblr blog

[msviolacea]

this is purely for fun and I've certainly been guilty of a few of these things myself in my years of fic writing. don't be weird in the notes and don't use this as an excuse to insult someone's writing.

[msviolacea]

all my damage dealing characters died in the second phase so i ended up fighting him with my sole survivor fu xuan and they had a preservation-off

sorry.. sorry.... i am the reason they nerfed aventurine boss fight

[msviolacea]

[msviolacea]

HENGJING IN PENACONY???

[msviolacea]

[msviolacea]

the fact that Stardew Valley is a $15 indie game that came out almost a decade ago with zero microtransactions and is still receiving free DLC updates to this day is absolutely bonkers. There are $50-60 AAA games with paid DLC that have come out more recently and aren’t nearly as actively supported or updated.

[msviolacea]

i need to be more annoying about my OCs.

[msviolacea]

AVENTURINE the golden touch

[msviolacea]

# 113

Pretty happy with how my first Sunday turned out! Hope you guys like it! ♥

[msviolacea]

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.

[msviolacea]

the whole likes/reblogs shit has some like, I Get It We're Trying To Get More Eyes On Our Stuff All The Time nuance to it, but attributing malice or laziness or 'YOU DONT CARE ABOUT ME, YOU HATE ME' to people who only hit like on the work you make is the number one way to make your brain start screaming in pitches only known to black holes and never stop. Don't do it. That is a short slope to hell and brain gremlins the likes of which you have never seen before. Dont assign a Moral Value to likes or assume that you know or understand why people choose to reblog or like (or don't).

[msviolacea]

I’m bored and nosy. Please reblog this with the book you’re currently reading.

[msviolacea]

I suppose it's time for a moment of cranky old person - or just cranky internet/tech literate person, ages of the people referenced below vary wildly - but I just saw an exchange on blue sky that went:

Person 1: Why doesn't this app have [accessibility option?] Some of us need it!!

Person 2: It does? It's right in the settings under "Accessibility."

Person 1: Oh. I hadn't checked the settings.

And I'd write it off as just one random person bitching without cause, but there are plenty of times my work team seems constitutionally incapable of remembering that there are written work instructions for most of our tasks in our shared Google Drive and would rather ask me to type out/copy and paste the instructions into private chat for them. (I love my team, I have an excellent team and mostly wouldn't trade them for the world, but man. This is my pet peeve.)

Maybe it's because I would rather die than have someone tell me "actually that answer is right there two clicks away," no matter how nicely they say it. And other people just don't have the same hang-up. But still. Sigh.

[msviolacea]

if I forgot your favorite subgenre or misclassified a band feel free to argue in the replies 👍

[msviolacea]

There should be a fanfic writing game called the showrunners challenge where someone writes a story and partway through someone else can play things like "actor leaves after 4000 more words" or "topic now too politically sensitive due to unforeseen world events" or "lost rights to that reference"

[msviolacea]