#this system is so much more useful

[egophiliac]

So.... what are your thoughts on Ace's UM, if you haven't been asked this already?

sneaky magic for the sneakiest boy

no but really, I think it fits him really well! I had thought his UM would probably involve something kinda sleight-of-handy or pickpockety! and I looooved that it made such a nice loop-around back to episode 1. ❤️ I was. kind of half-expecting him to just run out and punch Riddle in the nose again. but instead this time 'twas he who offed the queen's head! it was great! and he did it while stone-cold terrified out of his mind! because Ace is the only remotely normal or well-adjusted person at NRC and therefore the only one who is like "we're going to literally die, this is super effed up". but he did it anyway!!!! I AM SO PROUD

[hyakunana]

🍰 Caking! Amazing! 🍰

My contribution for the @ridersystemzine! Thank you for the whole team and the talented artists and writers for this project!!

[bacchuschucklefuck]

space sweepers but they're delivery people and are at no point on screen through the entire movie

[freelyjoyfultrash]

This reminds me of what I've seen of Owlcat's Rogue Trader VRPG, and you've found a really interesting way to make wealth actually useable.

Anyways, speaking of working on games, how about some Stampede Wasteland updates;

Working on a carousing table;

Also a little table to inspire GMs when they need to whip up a last second mission;

And the highlight of this post, rules for tracking Resources and rules for tracking money. Resources first.

The goal was to come up with an abstracted way of keeping track of the more mundane supplies and stuff that PCs are going to need without having to worry about actually keeping track of things. So, behold, either you have it or you don't.

Resources Each player has an abstract, binary pool of Resources. This covers rations, water, fuel, bullets. All the bare necessities. If it is ever in question whether you have Resources or not, roll+Hits marked. On a success, you’re out of what you need. You either have Resources or you don’t. There’s no in between. 

And now for wealth. Originally, I had a pretty standard "this sort of things costs this much" and "this job might reward this much". But here's the thing, coming up with actual monetary values sucks and I hate doing it! Also, given that supplies are abstract, why shouldn't money be abstract? Internal consistency is nice.

So, two birds one stone, I ripped out the original "wealth system" and replaced it with the following;

Cash Each player has an abstract pool of cash on hand at any given moment. The exact amount doesn’t matter. You can have No Money, A Little Money, A Lot of Money, or More Money Than You Could Ever Imagine (you cannot actually ever have this much money, bummer).  Each time you gain A Little Money, mark one slot on the track (10 slots). Once the track is filled up, you have A Lot of Money.  If you have A Little Money, you can always afford things that cost A Little Money. Same for A Lot of Money. If a situation ever arises where you might lose money, roll+money slots marked vs 20. On a success, you’re good. On a miss, step down one wealth level.  Money is tracked individually, but you can give a slot of Money to someone else if you really want. Cash rewards go to whoever is the agreed upon treasurer. Hope you trust them. If a character ever dies with wealth on them, half the number of marked money slots can be recovered from their remains, rounded down to a minimum of zero.  Nobody starts the game with any money.

Ultimately, how much money you have wasn't going to matter in the game beyond bookkeeping, just whether or not you had enough. And this subsystem represents that better. I ended up going with "roll+money slots marked" as the "modifier" to the roll because it makes some sense that the more cash you have, the harder it is to lose it all.

Still plugging away at the GM facing material, but honestly, almost all the player-facing stuff is done (and I'm going to be doing some small playtesting, before maybe opening it up some. We'll see.), and it is nice to get closer and closer to text-complete.

[orange-sora]

The thing is from SVSSS' perspective, the way the characters are and how it's all written, MXTX's choice to not have any revelation makes sense. However, I think, truth matters a lot. (In life too, atl to me).

In a story about liars, it's foolish to want truth. I recognise that. To scratch that itch, I have read many fics about Shen Yuan's identity reveal. MANY MANY FICS. I just really wanted Binghe to know.

Grief is such a heavy all-consuming emotion that it make everything else seem petty in comparison. Squabbles are normal in any relationship. Then, something big happens and it feels stupid. Your own hurt and anger feels small and immature in comparison. Nothing matters as much as death. It's too...final. Definitive.

Being thrown into the Abyss and betrayed by the one who promised time and time again to protect and care for you wasn't a tiff, though. It wasn't trivial, in any sense. Even system insisted again and again, the Abyss arc was significant. Unskippable. Indispensable.

So Binghe was justifiably angry. He wanted answers. The truth. And then Shen Qingqiu self detonated to "pay his debts". And from Binghe's pov, every wrong done against him lost its power over him. This particular ocean is too deep and dark. He'll surely drown. Anything but this. He'll accept it all as long as it doesn't end like this.

Then years of failing to bring Shizun back. There's no energy left to be angry. Anger almost always leads to weariness. It seeps into your soul. Throughout the rest of the novel, it becomes clear to him that yes, Shizun does care for Binghe. Yes, there is love. However, Shizun won't choose Binghe in the way he wants to be chosen. Shizun loves him but Shizun also hurts him. And he hurts Shizun too.

If Shizun doesn't explain himself, then Binghe can just come up with his own answers. Or he can disregard it all. It's not important. It's not.

But it is. System said so. Shen Qingqiu mourned him. A part of Binghe died. They all knew. Maigu Ridge happened because Abyss happened. Because there were no answers. Binghe's insecurity, even in post canon extras, made complete sense.

I truly admire Binghe. I know he's... well everything that he is. But he was able to do something that I personally don't have the power to do. And that's letting go without an explanation.

Does knowledge of love make the pain go away?

I have had people in my life who I know loved me. But, one too many tiny hurts, one too many thought less words, drip resentment that fills over time. It doesn't stay as lovely as it could have been. Maybe all relationships are complicated because love through actions, no matter how regularly conveyed doesn't erase the rest.

An apology, in itself, isn't enough. Words aren't enough. Actions, also aren't enough. Doesn't he deserve both? A closure to why it happened and a commitment to why it won't ever again? Don't we all?

There's a reason why people ask authors for explanation. Truth has the maximum power when it comes from the source. Considering how sensitive Binghe is, it'll stay with him. Binghe can come up with a thousand different theories or ignore it all, but nothing will soothe him quite as well as Shen Qingqiu's truth.

Unfortunately, he's doomed to never get it.

EDIT- Part 2

[tiredbitchposts]

I often feel like people forget that both Shen Yuan and Shen Jiu got fucked over in the transmitgation with Shen Yuan dying and being forced to live as someone to fix that person's mistakes and Shen Jiu being forced out of his body so someone could live his life better than he did. Both of them got the shit end of the deal, that's the whole point of it, Shen Yuan may have gotten his happy ending but he'll never be his own person and he's at the mercy of the system for the rest of his life and Shen Jiu never got a happy ending but now he'll never get tortured in the most cruel ways possible and live knowing he indirectly caused the death of the person he loved the most

[astral-catastrophe]

Anyway people of tumblr I got a cat and her name is maple and she is awful and I love her

She loves to sleep outside my bedroom door, then wake up to my alarm , then sit and meow until I let her in, and she likes to just generally lurk in my doorway when I have the door open. She also tries to get me any time I’m in the bathroom. She hides under my roommates beds. She likes to take up a whole entire cushion of our couch. She eats most but not all of her wet food and gets annoyed with me because of it. I love her

[albireon]

When it fired, I felt it die... like I was dying. I was scared.

[stygiansauce]

I graduate college so I don't have to write essays or do research anymore.

And then I instantly get sucked into research so I can write a historical au.

[seaglassdinosaur]

Hoping wishing praying begging that Kenny doesn’t get put in a relationship with a cop.

[thatfaerieprincess]

WATCHED C3e99 DOWNFALL PART 1 AND UHHH I HAVENT DRAWN FAN ART IN YEARS BUT THE MUSE REALLY SPOKE TO ME THIS TIME

Step 2 figure out how the Emissary actually looks

[solariex]

someone save me from the idiots ive been stuck with for 5+ years...

[cb-writes-stuff]

“You can’t enjoy being neurodivergent/disabled/having X disorder if it makes you suffer so much! How dare you be making jokes about it!!!” Well you see, your bad days only suck a little bit so you don’t appreciate the good days very much. My bad days suck so much worse, so I only appreciate the good days that much more to compensate.

[uncanny-tranny]

I know for a fact I've talked about the golden records, but I don't care because here is a sample of some of my favourite greetings on those discs

There is something so vulnerable, precious, and human about sending up pieces of our hearts into space. Even when we know that there may not be anybody out there to hear us, we are still whispering to whomever might listen how much we love them, how much we want to connect. No matter how small the chance is, we're taking it to say that love is real, that we are real.

How is that not something to be in awe over?

[scificrows]

Okay, my brain refuses to think about anything other than Murderbot, so I looked at every use of the word "friend[s]" in TMBD and... created some pie charts. Normal human activities.

Some Thoughts™ I had while putting this together (under the cut):

In All Systems Red, Murderbot notes that the PresAux crew are all close friends (twice! and goes on to explain their internal relationships which I think is very cute). This is pretty much the only use of 'friends' in ASR, except for when Murderbot says that SecUnits can't be friends with each other.

It seems that this may be one of the first times Murderbot has ever really been around a group of friends before? Murderbot notes that this is not the norm for its contracts and admits that the fact that they are all friends and the way they interact with each other make it actually enjoy that contract (before!!!! the hostile attack, so it already enjoys this contract before they start seeing it as a person etc ghghhhh). [Inference: Friendship seems enjoyable.]

The first character that calls Murderbot its friend is ART in Artificial Condition. Murderbot immediately refutes this (and then goes on to call ART its friend to its clients for the rest of the book). [Inference: Maybe ART is Murderbot's friend. And maybe that is... agreeable]

Rogue Protocol has more than twice as many instances of the word 'friend' as any of the other novellas. Why? Miki. Friendship and its implications for non-humans are a central theme because Miki is friends with everyone. Murderbot initially scoffs at the notion that Miki and Miki's humans are friends. At the end of the book, after witnessing how desperately Don Abene tried to stop Miki from trying to save them, and her grief after its death, Murderbot has to admit that she had in fact been Miki's friend. [Inference: Humans can be friends with bots and can sincerely care about them]

In Exit Strategy, Murderbot tentatively uses the word "friends" for its humans for the first time (several times actually). It questions whether it can actually call them its friends or not and later realizes that it had been afraid what admitting that the humans are its friends would do to it. At the end of the book, Mensah tells Murderbot the PresAux crew are its friends, which is the first time a human has directly said that to it (at least on-page). [Inference: Humans can and want to be Murderbot's friends]

In Network Effect, Murderbot seems to be more habituated to the word 'friend', confidently calling ART and Ratthi its friends, like it is no longer just trying the concept on unsure if it fits. There are many instances in which other characters refer to MB as ART's friend or the other way around and Murderbot's humans refer to Murderbot as their friend several times. Generally, there seems to be less hesitancy, because yes, all of them are Murderbot's friends, why wouldn't they be. [Inference: SecUnits can have friends. This SecUnit has friends. They care about it a lot.]

Conclusion: The Murderbot Diaries tell the story of a construct that does not seem to consider the possibility of friendship for itself and is fine with that - until it accidentally starts caring a little too much and suddenly more and more people annex it as a friend (ew) to the point where it can no longer deny that this is happening and has to begrudgingly admit that yes, it has friends now and maybe that is actually not a bad thing.

[swordscleric]

I can't stop thinking about the post from a few days ago about how Critical Role has been great at doing personal faith but didn't put the necessary work in to discuss the religious/god angle of c3 in-depth. Like the fact that Cardinal Respa was linked to both the Dawnfather and the Chained Oblivion is, on a personal level, very interesting (fallen/corrupted priest goes hard) but like does that mean that there's a Papacy somewhere in Exandria dedicated to the Dawnfather? If so, are there more cardinals who ordain the bishops of the Dawnfather? Are there Conclave-level intrigues going on in the Dawnfather's Sistine Chapel? Why is the Dawnfather so Christianity-coded in vibes alone if there's no actual outline of his religious organisations? With Downfall the Dawnchild/Dawnfather thing makes the allusions to Christ as Son of God co-existing with the Father textual - was there a Dawnfather Schism around whether the Dawnchild was a separate mortal? Was there a Reformation about how the Dawnfather's Pope kept selling indulgences? Is that why the priest of the Dawnfather Grog & Pike offer a drink to doesn't partake because of a cultural shift between Protestant-Temperance-League-coded and Catholic-coded Dawnfather congregations? Why do I have so many questions about the religious organisation of one of the most important Prime Deities in Exandria and to Critical Role's 3 campaigns? How on earth were the cast (and us as the viewers!) meant to care about the gods if all they had were "really tall kings" instead of interrogating how religious organisations provide both a place of healing and community to a wide range of people and also a place of horrific harm and abuse for a wide range of people?