#These two are my favourite NPCs...

[achlysfx]

Viago & Teia argue...for fun. 😄

[imsodishy]

man alive, if you're surprised that The Bad Kids are just straight up killing The Rat Grinders in the finale during the climactic final battle (when they have spent the entire season loudly hating on them) then like... I think that's on you bud. It's dnd.

'but they redeemed Aelwyn!' yeah, in the next season, like a full in game year later, not during their knock-down-drag-out fight with her, where they did very much try to kill her. also, it was her sister, with a deep personal connection to her, who chose to do that.

'but they redeemed Ragh!' they very much did kill him first though. during the fight they straight up killed him. he got his second chance later.

it's dnd, sometimes you kill 'em first ask questions later.

also, not for nothing, but they just straight up killed Penelope Everpetal and Dayne Blade, who were also high school students... then they killed them again in hell. sometimes baddies do just get got. Ragh and Aelwyn were never primary antagonists, they were peripheral. the rat Grinders have been front and center fucking with the PCs all season.

[voiceemporium]

Nathaniel Howe in Dragon Age Origins: Awakening voiced by Simon Chadwick

[teamcapwasrightandishouldsayit]

hello, lu fandom. i've got... a thought experiment? i suppose?

the short explanation is that i'm outlining a fic where the chain defeats dink in post-totk hyrule but no portals arrive to take them home, so they're just stuck in wild's era forever. i want to have at least one of the chain form a new relationship in the botw era (besides wild, who will be with flora), but i'm having trouble thinking of who would be interested in who.

so, thought experiment. if you had to ship each member of the chain with a botw/totk character, what would your ships be and why?

[iivari-ii]

DMing is so hard because I’ll draw stuff and then not be able to show it to my party until it becomes relevant and not spoilers :[

I’m in hell actually

Instead I’ll just have to show it to my friends who aren’t in the dnd group BUT MAJORITY ARE

[luvsavos]

*Aiden Anon slams her fist down* i DEMAND you show me EVERY GIF you HAVE of him. (And Leader-kun if you have any)…PLEASE. And…yes, he…got so lost he didn’t know where the Third Fleet’s Research Base was. You know. The one floating in the S K Y

i do have gifs of ftl as well<3 he's very pretty (he looks like he's wearing eyeliner in some and it is VERY distracting) fair warning the gif quality is not the best bc Very Old Ps4 (derogatory) BUT i have Lots

also HDJAHDKFN YEAH.... i think he has like three separate lines asking the player for directions on how to get to it/where it is😭 aiden honey my darling beloved please just look up

ANYWAYS! a Selection of my favourite of the gifs (however many tumblr will let me upload)

[shorthaltsjester]

bell’s hells fandom: what’s compelling about bell’s hells is their npc-ism and the way that they’re treated as nobodies

bell’s hells fandom when bh is treated as nobodies by the mighty nein: this is the cruelest thing the cast could’ve done to bell’s hells and their fans.

[sa-reverie]

Rushed fanart of Ji

[fierykitten2]

Really starting to think I should have thought harder about raid prep than just “haha it’s an antifurry therefore I’ll beat it with a sexy humanoid”

[saltwaterembolism]

only a matter of days before a fistfight breaks out between the auditory hypersensitive autistic guy who spends all day every day walking in and out of traffic in town centre pretending to drive a bus and the old guy who spends all day every day cycling a circuit around town centre while blasting reggae and eastern european folk music from a bluetooth speaker

[jpegcompressor]

i'm so normal and fine about the dawntrailer i'm totally and absolutely 100% average. absolutely fucking john doe over here.

[mrkdicey]

Bro, I thought this game was about scuffling, why they got drawing and alien yaoi??

[arytha]

"Hey, wait a minute." Chu Tian said, "There's something on your face." "Wh-what?" He didn't expect Chu Tian's movement to be so fast. Before he could react, the other's fingers had already touched his face. He could feel his face, being picked up and pinched by the man. "It's a bit skinny." Chu Tian said, and quickly backed out of the toilet, "For the second test, I'm going to eat, bye." After saying that, he hurried away. Lin Huai: I think you are very skinny.

lin huai's comebacks are like mine. "no you"

[rosietheillustrator]

Arcanist Allura Vysoren

I'm meeting Matt in two weeks (😭😭😭) and I had to draw something for him to sign, so I went with one of my favourite NPCs.

[sky-scribbles]

Next up on Things I Liked About Veilguard: the faction leaders. We all know some of the factions and their NPCs did not get anything like the amount of content and character that others did (Strife and Irelin I'm so sorry, I still love you), but sometimes I take a step back and realise how wonderful the stuff we did get was.

I mean - Evka and Antoine. Everything about them is so heartfelt. I hadn't read the supplemental material, but they barely needed to interact before I understood why this sweet, smart guy and this tough, smart woman loved each other. They affirm each other constantly. They respect each other so deeply. They have written letters for the other to take to their Callings: a cipher only Antoine could read. Je t'aime. Je t'aimerai toujours.

I love how Myrna and Vorgoth are introduced, suddenly and unsettlingly there in the Lighthouse. I love Vorgoth speaking in all caps. I love the fact that nobody knows what they are. I love that they raised baby Ingellvar. I love how Myrna is calm and polished while every so often coming out with the absolute wildest shit. They're fun.

The Viper and Tarquin? Top tier. They might be my favourites, just because of how much they have going on. Each of them has a backstory, and you can see exactly how those backstories produced their personalities. Ashur has a secret identity you can piece together from notes and codexes (and it's the funniest identity possible). I love their argument over Ashur's paranoid investigation into Tarquin, because it shows that the world goes on when Rook is not in the room, and the NPCs have relationships that go through ups and downs.

I'm mildly insane over the level of devotion, with Tarquin's desperate letters to the Wardens if Ashur is blighted, begging for a cure Ashur won't take. Him standing over Ashur to defend him in the final mission, or else his devastating reaction if Ashur dies: 'It should have been me!' God, these NPCs are alive. (fun fact: I wrote most of this post, and then Sheryl Chee confirmed these two were written as being in love with each other and stupid about it. I'm so happy.)

Speaking of NPCs who love each other: Teia and Viago, my beloveds. Again, I was coming in without the supplemental material, and I was sold on them so fast. The way Viago tenderly cradles Teia from behind as they mourn Caterina. The way they're so involved in Lucanis's personal quests - they're his family, they're there for him, they love him. I love Teia's fierceness and her heart. I love their banter - so much mutual understanding, exasperation and affection mixed together. 'We know each other too well to be strangers.'

Isabela is as wonderful as she always is - I especially appreciate how her depiction in Veilguard makes it clear just how loving she is. But can we also talk about Rowan? (I don't know if she's technically considered a faction leader, but meh.) I love her poetic speech patterns; I love that she's a scholar who wrote a bunch of codex entires; I love her calm, soothing voice. I love getting to see a Rivani Seer at last. And I love how she'll suddenly turn around and say, still calm and soothing, 'Spirit of Determination: may your enemies die bitter and in pain.' Perfect, no notes.

Strife and Irelin, sadly, drew the shortest straw when it came to being fleshed out in-game. But what I do love about them is their relationships with your companions. I love the tiny detail of Irelin, Bellara's ex, helping her pack for the Lighthouse; I love how she writes to Bellara to beg her to take care of herself, because she still matters to her.

And while I am a profound Emmrook lover, I appreciate Emmrich/Strife so much too. I love their shared curiosity and sense of adventure; I love thinking that Emmrich might give Strife tenderness that his life has lacked, while Strife could help nudge Emmrich toward boldness. I love the idea of two older men who likely think love has passed them by suddenly going, oh. If the Veil Jumpers didn't get a deeper relationship with Rook, at least they got relationships with Rook's friends.

Dragon Age games always give us a fun roster of companions, but honestly? Veilguard got me invested in the non-companion NPCs more than any other game in the series. Yes, there should have been more - but what we got was so much fun.

tl;dr: Faction leaders, my beloveds.

[prokopetz]

While we're on the subject of AnyDice foolery, let me show you one of my favourite fucked up dice rolls that you wouldn't necessary intuitively expect to have a fucked up distribution:

Any guesses? (Answer below the cut.)

It's the distribution of total successes for rolling a pool of five dice in Exalted 3rd Edition while using an effect which grants double 8s. It's fairly easy to reason about why this happens – each individual die has a 30% chance of yielding two hits, but only a 10% chance of yielding one, so even totals are much more likely than the intervening odd ones, yielding the roller-coaster-like curve of the graph – but it's fun to see just how extreme the effect is when the dice pool is small.

You can try it out yourself with the following AnyDice code:

output 5d{0,0,0,0,0,0,1,2,2,2}

(As the preceding remarks suggest, this isn't a huge problem, because the peaks smooth out when the number of dice is very large, and player characters in Exalted 3rd Edition will almost always being rolling very large dice pools. It's when TN-manipulating fuckery is applied to NPC-typical pool sizes that shit gets weird.)