#docswiss

[prokopetz]

Hey, got another question related to The Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality from itchio. You mentioned the video games you recommendeded (and I definitely agree with the recommendations for Pyre and Bleed), but which of the TTRPGs would you recommend? Because the themes for quite a few of them are interesting, but I don't know which of them are particularly fun.

(With reference to this post here.)

Could do. The Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality’s contents are considerably heavier on video games than tabletop games, and I’ve already covered solo/single-player tabletop RPGs in a previous post (and won’t replicate them here), so this is necessarily going to be a somewhat shorter list than the previous one; hopefully folks will find something in here that catches their eye all the same.

A few personal favourites:

Anomaly - A SCP Foundation inspired investigative RPG based on Avery Alder’s The Quiet Year. Its sequel is also included.  

Atomic Robo: The Roleplaying Game - A Fate Core-powered RPG based on the webcomic of the same name.  

Blades in the Dark - A tightly engineered supernatural heist caper game that plays a lot like tabletop Dishonored.  

The Bloody-Handed Name of Bronze - A Bronze Age tragedy whose dice rules partly inspired my own Olaf Hits the Dragon etc.  

Corvid Court - A game about terrible people doing terrible things. Also, you might literally be birds?  

Costume Fairy Adventures - Exactly what it says on the tin. This inclusion is purely self-serving, as I’m its lead developer!  

The Curse of the House of Rookwood - A gothic urban fantasy game with a focus on family -- for better or for worse.  

For the Honor - A She-Ra and the Princesses of Power inspired setting hack of the Firebrands framework.  

Glitter Hearts - A rare example of a non-grimdark magical girl tabletop RPG. Uses the Apocalypse Engine.  

Godsend - A diceless god-game hack of Legacy: Life Among the Ruins (the base game is not required to play).  

Hello, World - A Blades in the Dark setting hack (see above) about immortal digital intelligences in a post-cyberpunk utopia.  

Ironsworn: Delve - A huge dungeon-crawling expansion set for the free Norse-flavoured travelogue RPG Ironsworn.  

Lancer - A crunchy mecha combat simulator from the creator of Kill Six Billion Demons.  

Mausritter - An old-school D&D retroclone with a novel papercraft inventory system, in which the player characters are all mice.  

Michtim: Fluffy Adventures - An emotionally driven political fantasy game about tiny hamster-like critters.  

One Last Fight - A GMless card-prompt game about a group of heroes on their way to their final battle.  

Stand Up - A lightweight Persona 5-inspired hack of Avery Alder’s Belonging Outside Belonging engine.  

Strike! - A fun little exercise in trying to re-create D&D4E-style tactical depth while keeping the math a little simpler.  

Troika! - Surrealist road trip fantasy with table-based character creation that can easily pull double duty as a prompt generator.  

Visigoths vs Mall Goths - An LGBTQ-friendly tabletop dating sim about time-travelling Germanic warriors hanging out in a mall.

[commandervisor]

Hey, just figured I'd let you know that the RWBY v7 soundtrack's out, so you might wanna finish watching the season soonish, unless the possible minor spoilers aren't a big deal.

[good-sapphicrwbyaus]

I don't know what the ship's called, but could you do Weiss/Nora for the ship thingy?

I believe that it’s called Nordic Winter friend! I’m so sorry for responding to this late! Here are my thoughts…

Honestly, they’d be cute together.

A very underrated ship in my opinion.

Weiss: *is getting attacked*. Nora @ the Attacker: GET AWAY FROM MY GIRLFRIEND!

I’ve noticed that I’ve only done one post for this ship and that is an absolute crime.

I hope that we get to see them interact more in Volume 7.

💕 Send me a ship and I’ll tell you the first 5 things that come to mind when I think about it 💕

[whatwelearnedinfreeplay]

docswiss replied to your post “Oh right, this was a thing I was doing again wasn’t it?”

It's Ready Set Show now

Yeah I saw. Good thing I didn’t change the blog yet.

I can work with this... :3

[anneapocalypse]

How would you go about making Donut (and maybe Doc as well if you wanna) relevant in the later seasons?

Great question, thank you!

As my canon review of Donut has progressed I’d like to modify my statement a little further: since bringing Donut back from the dead, none of the writers have known what to do with him.

I wouldn’t change much about Recollections. I like Donut’s role in season 7, in relaying Tucker’s message and giving us a flashback to a debrief with the Counselor. Both of those things are pretty vital to the plot. Even Wash shooting him serves its purpose and delivers the impact it needs to.

Season 9 has no “real” Blood Gulch so we’ll bypass that for the purposes of this post (but ask me sometime how much better it would have been to make Epsigulch a four-part miniseries between seasons and actually show us the break-in mission to retrieve the memory unit onscreen, showing us the reveal that Carolina is alive through Wash’s eyes instead of Epsilon’s with her iconic “You’re gonna help me kill the Director” line delivered to Wash instead). Season 10 is where Donut returns, and by then it’s so late in the Freelancer saga that there isn’t time to do very much with him, though I do like the fact that a) they have at least a cursory explanation for Doc saving his life, b) he and Doc are chilling together in Valhalla and growing vegetables because that’s cute, and c) he does go with them to the final battle.

I do think Donut is underutilized in season 15, but I think nearly all the Reds and Blues (with the exception of, ironically, Grif) are underutilized in season 15, and that’s more a function of making Dylan and Jax the protagonists and letting them drive the plot entirely; more on that here.

Where I really think Donut specifically could’ve been better utilized is in the Chorus Trilogy, and here’s how I think that could’ve been done differently. (Sorry, folks, I’m incapable of brevity. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ You knew who you were following here!)

First: Is there any real reason why Donut can’t crash land on Chorus with the rest of them? I mean… it actually makes more sense if he does, because unlike Doc he actually went to Offsite Storage Facility to find the Director and he’s in the Hargrove photo op, so… I mean, I get dropping him off at Valhalla with Doc because they’re married now and all. I don’t even necessarily dislike that. And when the two of them show up and send away their ride–it’s not that it doesn’t work, Donut’s main joke since season 1 has been his obliviousness (yes, it���s that more than the gay jokes actually, I know, I was surprised too) and Doc’s joke is that he’s… well, not good at anything. So for them to show up for the express purpose of being blithely useless doesn’t not work, but it would make just as much sense for Donut to already be there, and since Doc arrives only to disappear and be forgotten for a season and change, I’m not sure what purpose his arrival at that time even serves.

But here’s my real question:

Why can’t Donut be a Captain?

There is legitimately no story reason why Donut can’t be put on the New Republic side of things in the first half of season 12. In fact, character-wise, it makes more sense for him to be with the other Privates (bow chicka) than with the COs. Sure, it makes the teams uneven, but in the New Republic sequence it really doesn’t matter because the whole point is the Reds and Blues are no longer acting as Reds and Blues; they’re acting as captains of their own respective teams. 

For Donut to be the fifth captain of Lightish Red Team and part of the New Republic shenanigans opens up endless possibilities for character and relationship development. We get to see how the other four function as leaders; why not Donut? We get to see Tucker and Grif wrestle with their own sense of identity; why not Donut? Caboose learns what it’s like to be taken seriously; Donut occupies a similar place on Red Team where he’s used to no one ever really listening to him except to tell him to shut up, so what’s it like for him to be put in a position where people respect him and look up to him? There is so much that could be done with Captain Donut that if he was That Character for me I’d probably already have written an AU for it.

But let’s say you don’t care for Captain Donut. You like four on each side, it’s nice and symmetrical, so Donut goes with Wash and Sarge and Lopez and lands on the Fed side of things.

Why do both Donut and Wash act like season 7 never happened?

Yes, Wash’s Casual Whistling was a funny joke at the end of season 10, I will give you that. As was Donut not actually recognizing Wash–a joke that worked, I would like to point out, because Wash changed the color of his armor.

I’m sorry, what did Wash just do at the end of season 11? Oh right, he went back to his gray armor. 

I owe this point to my good pal @tuckerfuckingdidit, who just today pointed out to me that Wash is alone with Sarge and Donut more than once during the Chorus trilogy–and at no point do either of them address what happened.

Now, I won’t say there’s no way that Donut still doesn’t realize who he is, because again, Donut’s central joke from Day One is his obliviousness. But if that’s gonna be the point, then do something with it. Lampshade the fact that Donut still doesn’t realize the guy who put a Magnum round in his gut (obligatory joke about Donut having Wash’s Magnum inside him goes here) has been chilling with the Blues for two seasons now. 

Note that this doesn’t have to be serious, or angsty–you can keep Donut primarily a comic character and still build off past canon. Hell, you’ve got Lopez right there, you can bring him in on the joke too, as it’s been established that Donut can only understand Lopez occasionally, and only at the most inconvenient times. Lopez keeps trying to tell Donut, “This is the guy who shot us,” and Donut doesn’t get it, chattering blithely about how much better this is than the last time he was held hostage.

As for Wash, he absolutely knows who Donut is, and the lack of any visible discomfort over the prospect of Donut realizing who he is–not only is that a missed opportunity to create tension, it kind of undermines Wash’s Vaguely Remorseful Fever Dream if he never expresses any of that remorse to Donut himself. I will accept that Wash has some vague residual Bad Feelings about what he did, but it seems to me that it’s more about what kind of person Wash is and how he sees himself than it is about actually feeling bad for what Donut went through.

And from a story standpoint, that’s fine–that’s the kind of person Wash is. But the potential for tension between himself and Donut, building on past events and both characters’ established temperaments, is really interesting, and it’s just not utilized at all. As I said above, I would ultimately have preferred Captain Donut, but if you make the deliberate choice to stick him in close proximity to the guy who shot him, at least… do something with that that involves both characters.

And finally, we come to Doc. Poor Doc.

Look, you can’t give me Doc saving Donut’s life and returning to live with him in Valhalla and grow vegetables together and fly out to Chorus together for a failed rescue mission and then have Doc just disappear and Donut not notice. Not when Doc has been basically the only person in Donut’s life for such long periods of time offscreen. I don’t care if Docnut is canon; I don’t care if you ship it, I don’t care if I ship it. Doc’s Joke is that he’s not good at his job, or much of anything else, and that neither team really wants to claim him. But Donut is the exception. Doc successfully saves his life. They live together.

If Donut’s Joke is that he’s oblivious, it doesn’t work if everyone else is also oblivious, because there’s no joke, it’s just… everyone forgot about Doc. But what if you turn Donut’s Joke on its head, make him the only one who does notice that Doc is missing? Let the joke be that even though everyone else forgot Doc, Donut just assumed they were all searching for him this whole time. Why were we flying out to all these remote outposts if not to find Doc? Space pirates? Alien temples? What are you guys talking about? And thus, you can still use the obliviousness joke while maintaining relationship continuity, which is something that Donut out of probably all the Blood Gulchers desperately needs to feel like a full character.

(And I’m sorry I didn’t get to how to make Doc himself plot-relevant, but this post is already long enough, so that will have to wait for another day.)

You don’t need to have every single character perform some major heroic act to feel relevant to the story. You do need maintain some kind of emotional continuity, and actively look for moments to carry their established character beats forward, and that takes more than just repeating the same jokes over and over.

[rwby-theater]

docswiss replied to your post: So, is YouTube pushing Logan Paul videos on...

So, there’s this extension on Google Chrome called Video Blocker and you can use it to make sure channels don’t show up on your Youtube. It’s great and I’d definitely recommend it.

are you a saint?

[dmdumouchel]

You might be interested to know that tumblr just got a thing to filter tags without needing tumblr savior anymore. It's in Account Settings under Filtering right below the thing to turn safe mode on and off.

Ok just found it! Thanks for letting me know. 👍🏻

[pyrepalaver]

docswiss replied to your post: “real question here but does volfred have teeth? would a tree need...”:

Side Question: Does Volfred eat?

i have been wondering this a long time. does he have an esophagus? a stomach? can he digest food? how do saps work

[critter-of-habit]

docswiss replied to your post: The National’s new album is out T_T please have...

Dude, it’s so good. What’s your fave song on it?

I’ve only got through it the once, but I love ‘Guilty Party’ and ‘Nobody Else Will Be There’ most so far.

[sakura-fraust]

Dude, you saw Caravan Palace live? What are they like live? They're, like, one of my favourite musicians and I really wanna see them some day and I'm a little jealous of you right now.

YOOOO IT WAS SO HYPE?!? Like I had no clue what to expect going in but holy shit, like... it was so fucking pumped, the whole crowd was jumping and clapping and dancing and like??? Every single band member was playing like 2-3 instruments EVERY SONG??? Like seeing them effortlessly flow between instruments was fucking astonishing, and then some of them would also be fucking like SWING DANCING on stage at the same time! 

They put on such an amazing live show! You should definitely see them whenever you get the chance!

[rnjrsupportsquad]

A pancake addict and her dealer (for that badly described OTP thing)

thats a renora if ever i saw one

(describe your otp and make it sound as shitty as possible and i will try to guess)

[whitemageyuna]

i’d fuck Canary too dont doubt me

[miimibun]

Hey, your link to your art blog and your OCs in your blog description thingy isn't working. Just thought you'd want to know, unless they're not meant to be links, in which case they're doing great.

!! oh dang that’s not how it’s supposed to be-

thank you for giving me the heads up! i’ll fix them now

[hiyururi]

HELLO!~ I would like just to say to all that I'm still thankful and grateful to those who wishes my birthday IRL or in online . My birthday is on 11/3 (March), and I spent my birthday with my family.

I'm happy that I'm making new friend in Tumblr @squash ❤ (tho not much.. HAHA!) I hope that we will stay friend and my vision in 5 years time is that I will have lots of other artist friends and cosplayers around the world. (And yes Madison too, I haven't forgotten about you )

Tho I don't have much followers yet, BUT!! I also want to say thank you over the years who give likes to my RWBY's fan art despite my inconsistent update and to those who followed me up until today ❤ Thanks to these people>> @ruansteyncc @ghostkenny12 @headphone-actor-takane @unholy-law @gilly747 @vitt-99 @fullmetalquest @starlight-opera @grimm-fox-reaper @grimmslayingdolt @docswiss @weaponscomplex @memyselfandpony @sharkpride808 @blondemoo1234 @sir-waffles0 @mangaido @yang-xia0-long @whoruntheworldmisha @kidface1028-blog @big-fabe @godzillavsmazingerz @myrcbossblog @el-devora-pan @manahasu @derpybronythevorelover @el-yee @chara4255frisk @rwdude @colorfulscissorsfarmoperator @maf27 @viscosity69 @renreika-wr @originallandscissorsdeputy @retroastronaut @awildsavvy

Thought I didn't notice you guys eh? Ofc I do~

This is my quick draft using @medibang in my Samsung Tab Galaxy Tab A using my FREAKING FINGERS! 🤣

日本人がまだ不足している場合は申し訳ありませんが、Tumblrで日本のアーティストと友達になることを願っています ❤

[primordialwhale]

Here's a song rec: still alive. by half•alive

couldn’t listen all the way through | not my thing | it’s okay | kinda catchy | ok i really like this | downloading immediately | already in my library

ok i was def enjoying it but the chorus TOTALLY sold it for me hell yeah hell yeah hell yeah!!

[coffee-pyrrha]

docswiss replied to your post “OHHH ITS TUESDAY TIME FOR SOME SPOILERS Spoiler #1: poor emerald. so...”

Tuesday means that non-paid RT accounts can watch it on the site

lol thanks. I’m not new-ish to the fandom and have no clue what I’m doing or anything like that....