#especially the dnd one...

[beryllineart]

Rambling about Asriel/Flowey

Lots of headcanon stuff and personal interpretation here, but I think Asriel enjoyed acting. You know, before he died. And I bet he was good at it!

This is a looooooong post, and I uh... don't explain my reasoning as well as I could because I kept going off on tangents, but uhhh, it might be interesting? I don't know, this all came from me trying to decide whether Asriel or Flowey would be more of a dice goblin (it's a D&D thing). Anyways, you have been warned....

Let's start with the first and most obvious reason. Flowey's ability to mimic others. He can imitate voices really impressively, and he does this in the game, imitating Toriel's voice with an echo flower. He also calls you using a voice you've "never heard before" in the elevator. This voice is the same as Asriel's adult voice, not his child one, which is interesting to me. He thinks you're Chara, why the heck would.... wait, look at Tape 4. "I... I don't like this idea, <Name>. // Wh.. what? N-no, I'm not... //... big kids don't cry." Maybe Asriel/Flowey is using his older voice to show Chara that he's not that little kid anymore, that little kid who was too cowardly to go through with the plan of killing the humans. He looks up to Chara and so this is his way of telling them that he's grown up? I don't know, I may be reading too much into things.

Talk about a rabbit hole... I just wanted to talk about Asriel/Flowey's acting skills. Anyways, Flowey is really good at pretending. He's done hundreds of resets, befriended people and killed them hundreds of times, and yet no one really seems to notice. I may be giving him too much credit since he can reset and all, but come on, it must be really hard to pretend you're meeting someone for the first time when you know every detail about their lives.

That's not a good argument. I've got a better one. Flowey doesn't freak out when you take away his ability to reset. Instead, he does his best to shift the unease to you, taunting you about Toriel's death (if you killed her), taunting you about the other human's deaths, and always stating the "kill or be killed" phrase. He does his best to make you feel uncomfortable about the choice you made, whatever it was.

"You'll die and you'll die and you'll die." "Somebody is dead because of you." "You kind of remind me of myself." "I know what you did." "Enjoy that power while you can." All of these pieces of dialogue from after Toriel's fight are an attempt to make you not want this ability to reset, because Flowey wants it back. And he acts so nonchalant about it too, like come on. He was a god, and suddenly he's mortal again and not in control for the first time in a long time. There is no way he is not furious over losing the ability to save and reset. And later in the game, he makes that clear. But right now, he's hiding any fear or anger he has and making you unsteady on your feet with his acting skills. He's taking control of an unexpected situation (much like a good actor might, improvising when different outcomes than expected are thrown their way.) He's cautious, because you're the one person in the Underground who a. he doesn't know and b. has the ability to reset. And yet he still gives these awesome speeches perfectly designed to make you uneasy because he's a drama queen who can't help himself.

He's bluffing with no cards (aka no real advantage) and you need to be a good actor to bluff successfully.

Okay, so Flowey's good at acting. He's had lots of time and lots of resets to practice. But I think his acting ability actually comes from Asriel, and this is where I get into major headcanon territory because I only have the tapes to go off of and my own wishes for Asriel and Chara's sibling relationship.

...

Imagine this. You're Asriel, and you just helped your sibling poison themself. Buttercups nearly killed your father, a big, strong boss monster. And now they are killing your closest friend in the world. They smile at you and say it's not that bad, but you know that they must be in pain, so much pain that the smile leaves their lips as soon as it arrives. But you smile back, pretending that you're fooled by their weak reassurance. And you stay there, pretending that you're not worried, that this is all just part of the plan, until they let out their last breath.

Only then does the mask break, the mask you've been wearing ever since you agreed to this stupid, stupid plan. You hid your doubts and you hid your tears because this was Chara's plan, and they only wanted what was best for everyone. They were going to free everyone. But now, with no one around, you whisper in a shaky voice, "I don't like this plan anymore." The truth is, you never did. But you never told them that because of that look in their eyes, that look that told them they'd come up with another idea, with or without you. And if there's one thing you know, it's that the two of you need to be together.

As you stand up and take the soul, you force yourself not to cry. If anyone alive were in this room, they would think you didn't care that your friend, your sibling, is now dead, but you care so much that it hurts. But big kids don't cry. Big kids aren't cowards. You know you aren't a big kid, not really, but you have to act like you are. You have to pretend you still believe in the plan that you never believed in anyway. You have to, otherwise...

You might not be able to go through with it.

...

Hey, maybe the reason Asriel idolized Chara so much was because Asgore kept saying Chara was "the future of humans and monsters." That same thing could have given Chara a savior complex where they thought they had to sacrifice themself for the good of everyone, because honestly, how can a child save humans and monsters? They felt responsible for something that was completely out of their hands and roped Asriel into it because he trusted them (or at least acted like/ convinced himself he did) and I realize Asgore's not the sole reason for either of those things, but come on, talk about putting a kid under pressure! I might have heard this from someone else but I don't know who...

Okay, so part of the "Asriel is good at acting" stuff comes from comic ideas I had of Asriel making Chara laugh with little skits and impressions after they fell into the Underground and were frightened and confused. I didn't really do a good job of explaining how any of this necessarily makes either Asriel or Flowey an actor. At the very least, I think I've shown that both Asriel and Flowey are able to mask their true feelings, fool others into believing certain things, and pretend to be something they're not. And that sounds like acting to me, but honestly, that's my opinion, and I don't know much about these things so whatever you want to think is fine.

Oh, oh, I just thought of this. During the Asriel boss fight, he gets increasingly desperate to keep you and breaks his character as the god of hyperdeath, in control and all powerful, to his real self, a scared little kid who just doesn't want to be left alone again. He tells you to just let him win because he truly has no power, and he knows that. He did a pretty good job of acting like he did have power though, not gonna lie... Same sort of thing Flowey did in the beginning of the game after you beat Toriel. I love when things go full circle like that.

And now I'm really done. I promise.

[bunnieswithknives]

The animatic is done!! 💕

[lazylittledragon]

genuine question: is elden ring supposed to be basically fantasy survival horror or have i just been wrapped in cotton wool my whole life

[tomurakii]

I just love clerics. I just love explorations of faith and devotion in a world where gods are provably real and also provably not omnipotent. I love obsession I love devotion I love giving your everything for an ideal or the approval of a higher being who can't or won't be devoted to you in return

[dewwshi]

i liked the sparring scene from the start of siege of darkness a normal amount

[miramelindamusings]

BG3 has taken over my personal life haha so here's a sketch dump of my Tav! She's a half-elf Rogue with a Sage background. I wanted to go for an archeologist/explorer background - like a mix of Evelyn and Rick from The Mummy :)! I stole lots of paintings and it always made me laugh the animation of Tav stuffing a huge painting into her inventory so I had to do a comic of her actually trying to sneak one out haha

[icarusdiesatdawn]

..do I really start listening to rusty quill gaming again

[lucifer-kane]

Seeing audio drama creators be very on board with people making original characters for their thing is so very good and it makes me, a chronic oc maker, so very happy.

[tagamantra]

Tactical Combat, Violence Dice and Missing Your Attacks in Gubat Banwa

In this post I talk about game feel and decision points when it comes to the "To-Hit Roll" and the "Damage Roll" in relation to Gubat Banwa's design, the Violence Die.

Let's lay down some groundwork: this post assumes that the reader is familiar and has played with the D&D style of wargame combat common nowadays in TTRPGs, brought about no doubt by the market dominance of a game like D&D. It situates its arguments within that context, because much of new-school design makes these things mostly non-problems. (See: the paradigmatic shift required to play a Powered by the Apocalypse game, that completely changes how combat mechanics are interpreted).

With that done, let's specify even more: D&D 5e and 4e are the forerunners of this kind of game--the tactical grid game that prefers a battlemat. 5e's absolute dominance means that there's a 90% chance that you have played the kind of combat I'll be referring to in this post. The one where you roll a d20, add the relevant modifiers, and try to roll equal to or higher than a Target Number to actually hit. Then when you do hit, you roll dice to deal damage. This has been the way of things since OD&D, and has been a staple of many TTRPG combat systems. It's easy to grasp, and has behemoth cultural momentum. Each 1 on a d20 is a 5% chance, so you can essentially do a d100 with smaller increments and thus easier math (smaller numbers are easier to math than larger numbers, generally).

This is how LANCER works, this is how ICON works, this is how SHADOW OF THE DEMON LORD works, this is how TRESPASSER works, this is how WYRDWOOD WAND works, this is how VALIANT QUEST works, etc. etc. It's a tried and true formula, every D&D player has a d20, it's emblematic of the hobby.

There's been a lot more critical discussion lately on D&D's conventions, especially due to the OGL. Many past D&D only people are branching out of the bubble and into the rest of the TTRPG hobby. It's not a new phenomenon--it's happened before. Back in the 2010s, when Apocalypse World came out while D&D was in its 4th Edition, grappling with Pathfinder. Grappling with its stringent GSL License (funny how circular this all is).

Anyway, all of that is just to put in the groundwork. My problem with D&D Violence (particularly, of the 3e, 4e, and 5e version) is that it's a violence that arises from "default fantasy". Default Fantasy is what comes to mind when you say fantasy: dragons, kings, medieval castles, knights, goblins, trolls. It's that fantasy cultivated by people who's played D&D and thus informs D&D. There is much to be said about the majority of this being an American Samsaric Cycle, and it being tied to the greater commodification agenda of Capitalism, but we won't go into that right now. Anyway, D&D Violence is boring. It thinks of fights in HITS and MISSES and DAMAGE PER SECOND.

A Difference Of Paradigm and Philosophies

I believe this is because it stems from D&D still having one foot in the "grungy dungeon crawler" genre it wants to be and the "combat encounter balance MMO" it also wants to be. What ends up happening is that players play it like an immersive sim, finding ways to "cheese" encounters with spells, instead of interacting with the game as the fiction intended. This is exemplified in something like Baldur's Gate 3 for example: a lot of the strats that people love about it includes cheesing, shooting things before they have the chance to react, instead of doing an in-fiction brawl or fight to the death. It's a pragmatist way of approaching the game, and the mechanics of the game kind of reinforce it. People enjoy that approach, so that's good. I don't. Wuxia and Asian Martial Dramas aren't like that, for the most part.

It must be said that this is my paradigm: that the rules and mechanics of the game is what makes the fiction (that shared collective imagination that binds us, penetrates us) arise. A fiction that arises from a set of mechanics is dependent on those mechanics. There is no fiction that arises independently. This is why I commonly say that the mechanics are the narrative. Even if you try to play a game that completely ignores the rules--as is the case in many OSR games where rules elide--your fiction is still arising from shared cultural tropes, shared ideas, shared interests and consumed media.

So for Gubat Banwa, the philosophy was this: when you spend a resource, something happens. This changes the entire battle state--thus changing the mechanics, thus changing the fiction. In a tactical game, very often, the mechanics are the fiction, barring the moments that you or your Umalagad (or both of you!) have honed creativity enough to take advantage of the fiction without mechanical crutches (ie., trying to justify that cold soup on the table can douse the flames on your Kadungganan if he runs across the table).

The other philosophy was this: we're designing fights that feel like kinetic high flying exchanges between fabled heroes and dirty fighters. In these genres, in these fictions, there was no "he attacked thrice, and one of these attacks missed". Every attack was a move forward.

So Gubat Banwa removed itself from the To-Hit/Damage roll dichotomy. It sought to put itself outside of that paradigm, use game conventions and cultural rituals that exist outside of the current West-dominated space. For combat, I looked to Japanese RPGs for mechanical inspiration: in FINAL FANTASY TACTICS and TACTICS OGRE, missing was rare, and when you did miss it was because you didn't take advantage of your battlefield positioning or was using a kind of weapon that didn't work well against the target's armor. It existed as a fail state to encourage positioning and movement. In wuxia and silat films, fighters are constantly running across the environment and battlefield, trying to find good positioning so that they're not overwhelmed or so that they could have a hand up against the target.

The Violence Die: the Visceral Attacking Roll

Gubat Banwa has THE VIOLENCE DIE: this is the initial die or dice that you roll as part of a specific offensive technique.

In the above example, the Inflict Violence that belongs to the HEAVENSPEAR Discipline, the d8 is the Violence Die. When you roll this die, it can be modified by effects that affect the Violence Die specifically. This becomes an accuracy effect: the more accurate your attack, the more damage you deal against your target's Posture. Mas asintado, mas mapinsala.

You compare your Violence Die roll to your target's EVADE [EVD]. If you rolled equal to or lower than the target's EVD, they avoid that attack completely. There: we keep the tacticality of having to make sure your attack doesn't miss, but also EVD values are very low: often they're just 1, or 2. 4 is very often the highest it can go, and that's with significant investment.

If you rolled higher than that? Then you ignore EVD completely. If you rolled a 3 and the target's EVD was 2, then you deal 3 DMG + relevant modifiers to the DMG. When I wrote this, I had no conception of "removing the To-Hit Roll" or "Just rolling Damage Dice". To me this was the ATTACK, and all attacks wore down your target's capacity to defend themselves until they're completely open to a significant wound. In most fights, a single wound is more than enough to spell certain doom and put you out of the fight, which is the most important distinction here.

In the Thundering Spear example, that targets PARRY [PAR], representing it being blocked by physical means of acuity and quickness. Any damage brought about by the attack is directly reduced by the target's PAR. A means for the target to stay in the fight, actively defending.

But if the attack isn't outright EVADED, then they still suffer its effects. So the target of a Thundering Spear might have reduced the damage of an attack to just 1 (1 is minimum damage), they would still be thrown up to 3 tiles away. It matches that sort of, anime combat thing: they strike Goku, but Goku is still flung back. The game keeps going, the fight keeps going.

On Mechanical Weight

When you miss, the mechanical complexity immediately stops--if you miss, you don't do anything else. Move on. To the next Beat, the next Riff, the next Resound, think about where you could go to better your chances next time.

Otherwise, the attack's other parts are a lot more mechanically involved. If you don't miss: roll add your Attacking Prowess, add extra dice from buffs, roll an extra amount of dice representing battlefield positioning or perhaps other attacks you make, apply the effects of your attack, the statuses connected to your attack. It keeps going, and missing is rare, especially once you've learned the systematic intricacies of Gubat Banwa's THUNDERING TACTICS BATTLE SYSTEM.

So there was a lot of setup in the beginning of this post just to sort of contextualize what I was trying to say here. Gubat Banwa inherently arises from those traditions--as a 4e fan, I would be remiss to ignore that. However, the conclusion I wanted to come up to here is the fact that Gubat Banwa tries to step outside of the many conventions of that design due to that design inherently servicing the deliverance of a specific kind of combat fiction, one that isn't 100% conducive to the constantly exchanging attacks that Gubat Banwa tries to make arise in the imagination.

[ttrpg-smash-pass-vs]

On the left, Yuan-ti Malison! These actually come in three flavors: Snake head, Snake arms, or Snake legs! That is having snakes instead of arms, for those curious. Outside that, basically just a person that can plant a suggestion in your head.

On the right, the first thing we ever polled, the birds that DMs fear, Aarakocra! Roughly 5 ft (1.5 m) tall with a 20 ft (6.1 m) wingspan and comes in all sorts of plumage! The males are also known to be notorious flirts!

[doriyangrey]

More practice

[kyrup]

today’s episode of breaking news is your reminder to watch mice and murder because it’s criminally underrated and criminally good

[mayasaura]

For some reason, the dnd:hat movie has been living rent-free in my head for over a week. Xenk is just rattling around in there right now, having a long talk with Kira about morality, mortality, personal sacrifice, and being a child who saw the Beckoning Death unleashed on their home.

I feel like Xenk would have a lot to say that Kira needs to hear, and be a good listener for the things Kira needs to talk about that she can't tell her dad or Holga. He'd probably benefit from talking to her, too. Kira almost experienced the same tragedy he did when he was her age. It would be cathartic for him to help her through that, knowing he helped save her from ever experiencing what he went through

[elgarabelas]

After such a long break from drawing anything i present u yet another wip :)

[ninawolv3rina]

Fae expressions! I really, really love how he looks in this simple style. This is the most ‘him’ Fae has ever looked.

OC: Faedril “Fae” Silvarin (he/him)

[luna-the-cretar]

If I had the self confidence (and the ability to wear heels), i actually would straight up go as Lethica for Halloween this year (I have no doubt I’d be able to find a similar dress and similar parts). Either one of her forms, tbh (tho I think finding the right shirt for her pre-metamorphosis form would be difficult, but doable)