#like. the random patchwork of knowledge goes both ways

[dirt-grub]

Dan and Elise’s interactions are so funny because like. There’s some mutual agreement not to fuck with each other too hard because they both fully acknowledge the other is on some unhinged shit that could end in fucking world war three if they were to truly have beef

[jawsandbones]

if i remember correctly you run some campaigns for dnd, i’ve been trying to dm a campaign for a few years and i’ve finally found a group. do you have any advice for new dms?

Hello anon! I do indeed run some campaigns. 

I’m currently running my second major campaign. I will fully admit that the first campaign I ran was basically my first experience with DnD and it was 100% a shit show BUT I learned a lot, and now you get to benefit from my blunders!

There’s a lot involved in preparation for a campaign or even a session, but these things are so personalized to the style of each DM. I, personally, like to be overly prepared and took a few months to really brick up lore and details of NPC’s, cities, environments, major homebrew elements, potential story beats, etc etc... I will say that if this is your first experience DM’ing, I recommend staying away from homebrew. I really regret not starting with a pre-made module as they give a lot of great advice and show different aspects to quests and checks. But again, that’s just opinion so I’ll stay away from the prep aspect aside from one golden rule: as the DM you are not the sole arbiter of the story. 

You’re building that with your players. This isn’t a book and you must bend to your players character’s decisions, even if it goes entirely where you don’t expect. This is a team game that definitely includes the DM. So with that said: that respect goes both ways. Talk to your players, and they’ll talk to you. Respect their character decisions, they’ll trust and respect your story decisions. If a DM is doing their job correctly, all of this is pretty moot, because if your players have the correct resources, hooks and information, chances are they’re going to do what you expect/want anyway. It’s just up to the DM to give them those correct resources, hooks and information. If there’s a disconnect, it’s because that was broken along the way. 

All that being said! Here is my list that I keep stickied to my monitor

The players never miss. Failure needs active opposition, be in combat, during dialogue or a check. Even from level one, player characters are absolute badasses compared to the rest of the population. It sucks when the game doesn’t reflect that. So instead of “lol you miss”, what happens if that becomes, “the bandit is just barely able to block your blow, gasping as they reel backwards out your reach - for now”? Feels a lot better.

Along those lines, if your players are adding combat flavor to their attack rolls, don’t punish them for participating and make them do checks for it. Not everything needs a roll. Let them be cool. 

Answer “will this work” from the perspective of the character asking. This could go for anything a player asks. Try and answer in a way their character would understand. Someone from the cold regions of the north and someone from the swampy regions of the south will have differing thoughts/opinions/knowledge of things. PC’s live in the world. Put their lived experience into their rolls.

Insight also follows this. Insight shouldn’t just be, “he’s telling the truth” or “he’s lying”. If the particularly perceptive bard who is the charismatic face of the party is doing an insight check, they might pick up the twitch of an eye, the sweat on a brow. If the distracted monk holding the party’s adopted kenku is asking the question, they might not notice these things. 

Let your players talk and interact. Don’t be in a hurry to move things along if the party is bonding or looking into things. This doesn’t mean let them linger forever - if you find things have stalled, then of course a “so, what would you like to do now,” never hurts. I mean in the way of interjecting to participate. A DM is a part of the group but isn’t, yeah?

The less you share/hint to your players the better. Don’t let them know what they got or what they missed. What they have is what they have. Sometimes it’s fun to let them know of a potential thing that could have happened, but generally... don’t be an active participant in those conversations. Essentially, with your players, be ‘excited for Vague Future Stuff and Things’ (literally I just copy paste that into the chat when I’m planning out stuff and can’t repress the need to blurt out excitement), not next session’s x event. 

The internet is your friend. There are so many resources, everywhere you look. I am particularly fond of the subreddits /r/DnDBehindTheScreen and /r/DMAcademy. Don’t be afraid to pull inspiration from your favourite media as well - bring the The Trouble with Tribbles to your adventuring crew, you won’t regret it. You’re going to burn yourself out fast trying to out-do yourself as well, and there are a lot of pre-made drop-in adventures. This is a patchwork quilt you are making with your friends, go fucking wild. 

A list of my favourite resources!

Treasure Generator

NPC/Merchant Generator

Town Generator (seriously this one is god-like)

All Shops and Items (base things)

Random Generator and D100 lists (this one also fantastic)

Besides that: take good notes, communicate openly with your players, discuss sessions after they’ve concluded to find what worked and what didn’t for everyone. Don’t be afraid to say no. A lot of other things, it’s just going to take time and experience.

Good luck, have fun, roll well!

[actuallyschizoid]

[1/4] Hey, this is the anon with the empathy overload theory. I wanted to try to explain it at little better. I think a better way to describe it than empathy is “pattern recognition”. For example, I see a person acting a certain way, and I recognize that pattern of movement, facial expression, and content and tone of speech as “angry”, and I also take the pattern of “event happened, person was adversely affected, now they are angry”, and fit “person is angry because of event” into the pattern.

Of course, the way I’m describing it sounds pretty deliberate and intellectual, but the “empathy” I’m talking about is different, it’s a subconscious, automatic thing that people do. NTs would do this naturally, but schizoids and ASD people might end up having to teach themselves to do it rationally instead of emotionally. 

So, basically, schizoids who have a hard time interacting naturally with other humans is because you’re not tuned into their patterns of speech and behavior in the way that NTs are. Because when you’re tuned in with other people, you risk feeling their pain, or getting hurt, or simply becoming over stimulated. So what I mean about schizophrenics doing this TOO much is like, someone with paranoia for example might see someone looking at them and form a pattern where that person is part of a conspiracy to harm them somehow.

Or, they have strange ideas of reference and fit random words in a newspaper into a pattern where someone is sending them an encoded message. Or, one part of their brain sort of suggests a voice and another part says “yeah, let’s go with that. We’re hearing that right now” and an auditory hallucination happens. So it’s possible to me that the schizoid brain has shut this whole show down as a way to avoid psychosis.

Link to the initial post.

Yes, I think I understand what you mean, anon, thanks for elaborating this. 

And indeed, pattern recognition — in everything, not just psychological stuff — is something I’m actually damn good at. Like, objectively better than anyone I know (aside from one fellow schizoid I know for years who might be about as good at it as I am). 

It is something that goes into the core of most of those things that usually surprise people, making them go “omfg the fuck you’re this smart, that’s just insane”. Like coding on a language I never learned off the bat, or learning new human language ten times faster than most people, or writing a solid pro-looking business agreement despite having zero education in legal area, or finding patterns in music, writings, drawings, etc etc. It might seem like i have good memory or some crazy high IQ, when in fact all I do is just juggle some patterns here and there. 

Even this very post I write on a language I never used in practice in real life — it’s just a patchwork of phrases and meanings that I’ve seen in random places in past years. I don’t even need to know how to read many of those words to use them properly. Or the fact that some words I recognize meaning of by hearing, but then end up surprised when I see them written — I’d have no idea it was the same word, despite knowing that meaning of both would be about the same. 

Same with emotions and stuff. I see lots of patterns of people behaviors. Too many, if I may say. If I interact with same person for a long time, I end up with a massive collection of way too specific patterns with more or less definite meanings behind them. I don’t even have to consciously process it to know for sure that’s how I understand emotion things. Ofc it’s not some kind of conscious mental library with items and indexes, like #34343 yawn & eyes wander around & !_tired = bored. No, but I know if I had any reason to write it down, I’d have very little troubles to recall most of the observed stuff and systematize it. I just don’t need to coz it’s usable as is.

But here’s the tricky part: since I still can’t relate to them, there’s this annoying dissonance thingy. Like, let’s say I see my dad showing his angry pattern. I know what it means, but I’ll be like “srsly? you can’t be fucking angry with this, come on, that’s just so wrong! There must be mistake somewhere, I probably read this wrong, I can’t imagine being angry for this ridiculous reason, no human in the world should ever get angry about this because... because just that’s obvious, isn’t it? Nah, there must be different explanation, something rational... oh, now you show even more stuff that I recognize as angry — now WTF is wrong with you?! Am I seeing things that aren’t there or are you some kind of alien and I didn’t know it?” 

It’s absolutely futile to explain to myself that most people would get angry at different things than me. I *know* that. But I don’t really feel that. I can’t understand that no matter how many examples or patterns I collect, no matter how much I analyze them, no matter how many articles about human psychology I read that explain that this is perfectly normal reaction. I’ll be the first to say that “it’s perfectly normal to be angry in this situation”, but I won’t ever relate to this. Not enough to say “yeah, I feel ya, dad, I’d be angry too in your place”. 

And yes, it is 100% rational and deliberate for me, something I had to learn intentionally. Or at least the way to apply my pattern recognition skills to recognizing stuff that has to do with people being the emotional mess they are. 

Returning to the subject (yeah, I did it again), while I can’t say for sure that’s the case, it might be possible that I, indeed, shut off from most part of this input subconsciously. Not sure what exactly I might be filtering out, though. I doubt it’d be voices or some kind of paranoia stuff. Schizoids are unlikely to have psychosis, and I never experienced it. Or any kind of hallucination, at least to my knowledge. Ok maybe aside from the weirdness that happen occasionally when I barely woke up, but most people have it and I think I’m even less likely to see weird non-existing shit than most people. I can literally count those occasions by fingers... and half the cases it was mosquitos that may or may not existed... >.>

Also probably worth to note that I seem to block much less input than I used to. Even within the timespan of this blog, if you dig deep enough, you may notice that the tone of my posts used to be slightly different few years ago. Like, even what I describe now, with the example above. Sure, I can describe it now. And that’s more or less how it was all along. 

But what would I say few years ago for the same example? That I dunno wtf is going on in his mind, and don’t care to know, and won’t even look that way to not bother myself with futile attempts to understand this useless shit that has nothing to do with me. And, aside from phrasing, nothing really changed, tbh. I still can’t (and don’t care to, nor able to) understand what I see. I’m just a bit less reluctant to observe things (or at least to admit I do so). I still notice patterns and make up their meanings, trying to guess the correct one based on whatever info I have on hand. And perhaps once in awhile I’m not even that far off its actual meaning — thanks to all the knowledge I managed to acquire over the years. I still might be wrong a lot, and fuck knows how much of it just seeps past my attention because if it didn’t, it’d drive me to psychosis or worse. 

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: Firefly, Black Mask, Original Adventures Reincarnated

Anime (RMWC Reviews): By 1969, Japan had advanced quite far in terms of animation. Especially when a studio would put real effort behind a project, such as when Toei Animation released Sora Tobu Yuureisen in July of that year. Known in English as The Flying Phantom Ship or The Flying Ghost Ship, the film is a 60 minute full-color adventure into suspense, conspiracies, and super science with a few important creators involved.

T.V. (John C. Wright): We were discussing Joss Whedan’s late and lamented outer space horse opera FIREFLY. A reader named Sophia’s Favorite holds forth sharp criticism for the show: In my opinion Firefly is the JFK of TV shows: a mediocrity at best that gets ludicrously overrated solely because it was taken “too soon”. He goes on to list several reasons for saying so.

T.V. (Jon Mollison): If you’re into network action/dramedy shows, you’ll want to give tonight’s episode of Hawaii Five-O a look.  For one thing, the show has not been renewed for an eleventh season.  Ten years is a pretty good run for any show, and this revival is one of the few to come close to matching the original.

Writing (Pulprev): Conventional wisdom states that characters should be flawed. Nobody can relate to perfect people. Flawed characters are more believable, more likely to gain the reader’s sympathies. But the conventional wisdom doesn’t teach how. In the hands of lesser writers, this usually manifests as a grab bag of random negative traits. Alcoholism, smoking, minor but not debilitating mental illness, snarkiness, cynicism. Poorly handled, these traits add flavor to the story but they do not significantly influence the characters, and therefore do not influence the plot. The result is a patchwork person, a collection of traits and behaviors sewn together and little else.

RPG (RPG Pundit): “Adventure Paths” Aren’t Deep-Roleplay, They’re D&D for the Special Bus Today: “Adventure Paths” and story-mechanics are not ‘deep roleplaying’. For that, you need the freeform style of the OSR. Take off the D&D training wheels!

Horror Fiction (Wasteland & Sky): Today I would like to talk a bit about horror fiction. It isn’t brought up much on this blog because my knowledge on the subject isn’t too vast, but I have been reading a bit about it recently and would like to share some observations. This is because horror, like just about everything else, isn’t doing so hot these days. Though I suppose that isn’t much of a surprise.

Science Fiction (Washington Post): In “The Visual History of Science Fiction Fandom — Volume One: The 1930s,” David and Daniel Ritter — a ­father-and-son team — show us, through words and pictures, how a passion for science fiction evolved into a way of life for young people who couldn’t get enough of that crazy Buck Rogers stuff. The result is a sumptuous scrapbook of photographs, magazine covers, artwork and hundreds of articles, letters and typescripts, everything beautifully held together by the Ritters’ concise but enthralling text.

Cinema & H. P. Lovecraft (DMR Books): Entertaining adaptations of H. P. Lovecraft’s work are, in my estimation, few and very far between. While I’ve been pleasantly surprised by a few films over the years, for the most part movies tapping into Lovecraft’s work tend to feel like they’re miles away from the cosmic horror themes that saturate most of the author’s stories. Five years of working at a video store and taking home anything that promised to delve into the Cthulhu Mythos have, I confess, made my approach to these kinds of films rather antagonistic. They have to prove themselves to me.

Anime (Walker’s Retreat): Given the point-and-shriek swarming attacks done on other targets, this was inevitable. Amazon is vulnerable due to having SJWs in junior positions who are amenable to SJW swarm attacks, and one can likely assume that Ebay and other Western-controlled outlets will feel the swarm in the days to follow once Amazon’s seen to bend the knee. As usual, the SJWs in the media will reliably inform you that this is the play by making a big deal out of it once such swarming gets sufficient momentum to amplify in their outlets.

RPG (Karavansara): Fantasy AGE does not walk any extraordinarily original terrain – it’s basically a sword & sorcery engine, very similar in tone to the old classic D&D, but running on a system that’s both lightweight and cool, allowing for the creation of original, detailed characters rather swiftly. Clocking at a little over 140 pages, the Basic Handbook is beautifully illustrated, rationally arranged, and covers all the bases: the races and classes we expect from a fantasy game, combat and magic, and all the basic perks.

Pulp Magazine Fiction (Pulp Fest): Although a trailblazer as a specialty magazine, DETECTIVE STORY did little to further the development of the detective or crime story. That task would be left to its highly prized successors: BLACK MASK  — the pulp where the hardboiled detective story began to take shape — and DIME DETECTIVE MAGAZINE — where the tough guy detective became extremely popular. Call them what you will — flatfoots, gumshoes, dime detectives, or private eyes  — it was these hardboiled dicks that transformed the traditional mystery story into the tough guy (and gal) crime fiction that remains popular to this very day.

Fantasy (Dark Worlds Quarterly): What I do like about Rabkin’s scale is it helps me to identify or codify some types of fiction that don’t fall neatly into genres (which we must remember were invented by publishers as a marketing tool, not academics). For example Doc Savage is a genre-crosser, with some Fantasy, Science Fiction, Horror and Mystery elements, and yet none of the above. But ol’ Doc can be placed on the scale, outside of genre considerations.

Men’s Adventure Magazines (Paperback Warrior): During the 1950s and 1960s, Men’s Adventure Magazines like “Stag” and “For Men Only” told salacious stories – often masquerading as non-fiction journalism – of daring deeds and lusty ladies around the world. The magazines were illustrated with vivid action drawings by many of the same artists who created the cover art for the vintage action and crime paperbacks we adore. Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle have preserved many of the great stories and art from these magazines in a series of anthology books called Men’s Adventure Library published by New Texture.

RPG (Goodman Games): You’ve speculated. You’ve wondered. You’ve waited. Now you get an answer. Coming this September, Goodman Games will release Original Adventures Reincarnated #5: Castle Amber. Intended for levels 3 through 7, Castle Amber was the adventure that launched the Mystara campaign setting, and was the second adventure for the D&D Expert Set. Here’s some text from the back cover:

Music & Comic Books (Far out Magazine): We dive straight back into the Far Out Magazine Vault to find Marc Bolan, the musician, guitarist and poet who is arguably best known for being the lead singer of the glam rock band T. Rex, who was seemingly obsessed with comic books. Now this tale seemingly twists and turns into areas that even we weren’t sure where it would take us next. This story is going to depict how three extremely popular figures of popular culture all interviewed each other, at different times and in different circumstances but all with aiming for the same end result.

History (Peter Grant): The so-called Shangani Patrol was a legendary encounter in 1893 between colonial forces and the Matabele tribe of Lobengula in what is today Zimbabwe.  The entire patrol was annihilated, after having killed more than ten times its own number in an epic fight through the bush.  In colonial Rhodesia, it was regarded in the same light as the fall of the Alamo in Texas, or the doomed fight of the three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae.

Gaming (News Hump): Nation turns to Warhammer players for advice on how to stay at home for two weeks. Pungent men with severe vitamin D deficiency and a large collection of overpriced figurines are suddenly very much in demand as they are deemed the nation’s greatest experts at staying indoors for weeks on end while they paint space goblins.

Comic Books and D&D (Goodman Games): Thus begins the Crypt-Keeper’s Corner, the letters page in the June-July 1950 edition of E.C. Comics Crypt of Terror. You could be forgiven if you mistook that dramatic introduction as the opening salvo from any game master at any table-top role-playing game. In fact, it’s also fairly easy to see how Gary Gygax, the main co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons (and an entire gaming industry) would fess up to being influenced by the art and storytelling found within the comic books of his formative years.

Sensor Sweep: Firefly, Black Mask, Original Adventures Reincarnated published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/