#blackbottom

[walkingdetroit]

A beautiful day for a bike ride. 💙 11/10/23

[tubbsmccracken]

A great film about the life of Ma Rainey. If you haven't seen it yet, Viola Davis plays her. Fantastic.

[monkeyssalad-blog]

1931 paul & nino ghezzi by Al Q

[xoxoemynn]

ok but why hasn't Samba (or any of the other baking types around these parts) made a Stede Bonnet trifle yet?

[do-you-like-this-food]

Blackbottom cupcakes!

[ringogoboots]

wake up sheeple: blackbottom is the reality of the canon of this series

look at him. look at himmmmm.

[whataboutthekennedys]

WhatAboutTheKennedys new single "Blackbottom Woman (feat. Bum Pappano)"

[corful]

Valtari, my Fury Devil im playing in the current packet & The Fall of Blackbottom! She got infused with the Primordial Chaos and raised from the beginning as a guard for the elite of a crime organisation, her "family". After a long time of service, she was forced to take the heat for a mistake of the organisation. While in jail and up for execution, a lucky break allowed her to escape. Disillusioned and nowhere to go, she joined the Chain of Acheron and was stationed in Blackbottom. Im having a lot of fun with Draw Steel, very excited for whats to come!!

[sunbeargames]

I've been thinking about this issue a lot in the context of MCDM's Draw Steel, which is still in playtesting.

Draw Steel has a resource called Victories, which you earn when the party overcomes a significant challenge (either through combat, negotiation, subterfuge, etc). Victories make your characters a bit stronger by empowering some abilities and giving you more of your Heroic Resource to work with in fights, and then when you take a respite between adventures they get converted to XP. I like this as an incentive to keep going during an adventure instead of resting at every opportunity.

Victories can also be awarded for secondary objectives. For instance, in the opening encounter of the Fall of Blackbottom adventure included in the playtest, the heroes are in a collapsing inn that is being attacked by demons. If they save a certain number of civilians before the inn completely collapses, they can earn a bonus Victory.

I think it could also be possible to extend this idea and say that you could "win" a combat encounter but still earn no victories because you weren't heroic enough. In the above example, if you let a certain number of civilians die to the demons or the fire, you don't earn a Victory even if you defeat the demons and escape.

And conversely, you might be able to earn one or more Victories even without "winning" the fight because you did the heroic thing and achieved your goals, even if you had to retreat.

I'm liking Draw Steel so far because it seems like it will be better suited to the kinds of stories people have been trying to tell with D&D lately. I'm still waiting to see how they implement more rules for non-TPK fail states, because the players characters are still very hard to kill. I think if it can facilitate the party being defeated well without needing them to die, it will be really great for telling stories that are more true to the kinds of heroic narratives we love in fiction. Meaningful setbacks and losses are really important, and in a game that's still so combat-focused it'll be nice to be able to engage fully with those mechanics.

There were a lot of points when I was running 5e where I felt like I should have presented a more dangerous encounter, but doing so would have run the risk of ending the adventure prematurely. I think in a game that supports a wider variety of fail states, it'll be easier to truly challenge the party and tell more complex stories.

So like D&D isn't great for producing a conventionally satisfying narrative because in modern Western storytelling stories of the action genre (where D&D is firmly planted in) don't generally feature the main characters having an unbroken streak of victories against their opposition (a feature of modern D&D) but feature defeats and setbacks. When D&D is the most highly opinionated about combat and rules as written death is the main consequence of losing in combat and what you want is characters being able to suffer meaningful losses while not always being at the risk of death, you have tension between the needs of the narrative and the game mechanics.

But more than that, when a group does patch the rules to be more conducive to that and fudges the rules and manages to somehow force the game into producing a conventionally satisfying narrative, given that a lot of that was done in spite of D&D it feels like it would be giving credit where none is due to attribute that story to the game and not the group's efforts in spite of the game.

None of that is to say that D&D played on its own terms can't produce good narratives. In fact, I think the best stories related to D&D are not the sort of stuff you see in actual plays, but the sort of perfect alignment of system, fiction, and chance that can only happen in a medium that utilizes those three things. "A player figured out how to utilize the rules of the game in a way that made perfect sense in the fiction and produced an unpredictable outcome that significantly altered the course of events" is a much cooler story in the context of D&D than "The GM funneled the party into an encounter with the bad guy and the bad guy had an epic speech prepared."

And this applies to pretty much any RPG, to be fair. Even the weirdest, most obtuse RPG can produce lots of really cool unique narratives if taken at its own word. What that sometimes means is reconsidering what kinds of stories you think are good, and instead of forcing a game to produce the exact types of narratives you want letting the game take the driver's seat.

[maliboooyaa]

I was a star 🤩😛🤭

[the-orange-wizard]

I’m running a Draw Steel one shot next Wednesday, October 16th, at 7pm Eastern!

We still have a few slots left, so if anyone is interested in trying the beta of a new fighting-monsters game, come join us!

If you can’t make that night, shoot me a tumblr dm or a message on StartPlaying - I’d be happy to run another of these!

I’m also happy to answer any questions; I love talking about Draw Steel.

I am very excited for Draw Steel.

When it comes out I will be running so much of it you can’t even understand the level to which I will be abandoning d&d.

Assuming I can get enough players on board of course.

[walkingdetroit]

A walk through Paradise Valley 🌿

[elbuencacao]

Fresh out of the oven and made in house with love and care by Idyllwild’s hottest baker in town @sweetbeanbaker. @michaelbrownartist and @johnedmarin from @hunkydoryrecordsidy got dibs on our first run yesterday. Black Bottom Blueberry Crumble Pie made with our 80% Thailand. Get yours at opening as a limited supply are available, minus 1 for our faces. Be there or be square. • EBC’s 80% Thailand with notes of watermelon and tamarind are currently available at the shop. • Open from 10 AM to 7 PM for all your chocolate needs. . . . . . . #elbuencacao #beantobar #chocolate #singleorigin #organic #ethicallysourced #sustainablygrown #cacao #darkchocolate #unapologeticallydark #madeinhouse #madeinidyllwild #blackbottom #blueberrycrumble #freshblueberries #veganfood #vegansweets #vegangoodies #vegandessert #sweetsofinstagram #bakedgoods #eatchocolate #shopchocolate #drinkchocolate #craftchocolate #upinthemountains #sanjacintomountains #idyllwild #california #ebc (at El Buen Cacao) https://www.instagram.com/p/CbVJhBKLR2J/?utm_medium=tumblr

[sorasgeipron]

Where my black bottoms at?

[momen-alhoot97]

"...and when we were sitting there side by side flying down the streets in the open sun he took my hand and squeezed it, and I felt happier than I had been since I was about nine and running along the hot white beaches with my father the summer before he died.

I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.

After that—in spite of the Girl Scouts and the piano lessons and the watercolor lessons and the dancing lessons and the sailing camp, all of which my mother scrimped to give me, and college, with crewing in the mist before breakfast and blackbottom pies and the little new firecrackers of ideas going off every day—I had never been really happy again."

The Bell Jar —Sylvia Plath