vaingloury - Tumblr blog

[vaingloury]

dunmeshi is funny bc chilchuck is exactly the same as every other 'looks like a child but is an adult' anime character, people just don't recognize that because of his gender + the story tone. eventually someone somewhere will be called out for making porn of him though

[vaingloury]

I'm hardly the first person to notice this, but good god webcomics are the least time-efficient possible way of telling a story, aren't they?

I've been trying to figure out a better method of telling a story so that I could finish it before I die of old age (or, perhaps more relevantly, before everyone loses interest). It seems like no one really wants to read prose on the internet, but also people don't really like a comic that takes a year to go anywhere.

The main bottleneck is dialogue. You can only get 2-3 lines in a standard comic panel, so even a short conversation of character texture can take several pages. It makes me wonder if the Single Panel With Text Beneath It style (like ForEach) isn't just the Objectively Correct™ way to tell a comic on the internet. It's very efficient on the art, you can include narration if that's your jam, and it's very easy to make it work on mobile. (Also the art being separate is a boon if you want to make marketing materials). But everyone will correctly call you a Homestuck rip off.

Though the other thing Homestuck did was make these sprites of the characters that could be used to crank out a bunch of panels for scenes where nothing visually interesting was happening. You don't really see that copied as much

Not openly, anyway. There's a stigma. I've thought about rebooting Legend of the Hare as a visual novel, where that kind of thing is arbitrarily more accepted, but it does start raising the question of why you're bothering with the visuals at all. I don't think the kind of person who makes webcomics is usually looking for an excuse to get out of drawing, even if it lets them increase their page output dramatically. Making sprites that don't look like absolute ass is also really hard. Homestuck sprites have a really specific janky charm to them that I've never really seen any other comic pull off.

And, yeah, you could always just use a simpler art style, like Order of the Stick does, but it's super hard to get anyone to read a webcomic with great art, let alone simple art designed to maintain a high page output. And, again, why are you making a comic if you don't want to draw, unless you just naturally happen to draw that way and be really fucking good at it like Rich Burlew is?

It seems like the only really good way to tell a story in a reasonable amount of time as a webcomic artist is to make enough money off it that you can work full time, and, um, that's not really feasible either.

I don't have an answer I like. I guess just kill yourself in the content mines working webcomics as a second job that doesn't pay you anything.

I don't have a conclusion, capitalism is a nightmare.

[vaingloury]

Disparate Thoughts on Dungeon Meshi

I'm an anime-only watcher, so no spoilers beyond what's currently aired (eps 1-3) + mild map spoilers for a random 3.5e D&D module (Sunless Citadel).

- I'm not the first nor will I be the last to harp on the English localised title but Delicious in Dungeon sucks. I do, however, think going with the "DnD" naming scheme was a nugget of a good idea (let's face it, "Dungeon Food" sucks too). Maybe "Diners in Dungeon"/"Dungeons & Diners" instead (as in those who dine, not a place where one dines). Or "Dungeon Dine" (like "dungeon dive"). Regardless, I'll just be calling it Dungeon Meshi going forward.

- I don't know if this is coloured by me going into this series with the knowledge that Ryoko Kui loves Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 or a wider ripple effect of eastern dungeon-fantasy conventions being shaped by there not being an official Japanese translation of D&D between Basic and 5e, but the world-building's vibe is old-school D&D as hell. It feels like it was written by someone who maybe never got the chance to play the tabletop game much but spent hours poring over the 1e Monster Manual in hopes of getting a campaign off the ground (and ended up penning a manga instead, game scheduling be damned). There's the disarming of traps, feeling for secret doors, and even the iconic red dragon as seen on the covers of the Basic Dungeon Master's Handbook and 1e Monster Manual being the dungeon boss. Design-wise, the dungeon's layout it reminds me a bit of the map from Ruins of Castle Greyhawk or The Sunless Citadel (pictured below, right).

- The main cast is very tropey at the moment. Quite literally all the Basic classes are covered; the generic white man Fighter (Lv 1, no multi-attack yet :P) as the party face, the halfling/thief, the elf/wizard, the missing cleric, the dwarf... This works for this point in the narrative but doesn't make me particularly attached to any of them. They need another overarching obstacle.

- I generally don't like Studio Trigger's output (not the Imaishi-involved stuff anyway; Gridman fucks) but I respect how bouncy their animation usually is. So, I was excited to watch something animated by Trigger but not (originally) written by them. Dungeon Meshi, however, looks static and resorts too often to Dutch angles to maintain visual interest. There's a bit of an art shift in episode 3 where this improves; more fun "off-model" moments, the movements get a little bouncier, more color harmony. Hopefully, this stays and isn't just a guest director fluke. Form the snippets I've seen on the manga, Kui suffers a bit from "draw background killed my grandma", thus her ability to make her simple character designs emote well has to carry the page. The anime does the opposite; super detailed backgrounds but flat shading/lack of texture on the characters creates a need for them to over-emote with a "screen-shake" effect in order to stand out from their surroundings, which I could see getting old fast. The main event, the food, looks better in the anime than in the manga due to colour and animation bringing it to life.

- I don't usually laugh at Japanese comedies because they're either too slapstick for my tastes or too pun heavy for my JP comprehension level. Dungeon Meshi gets a point for making me "lol" more than once.

- Finally, a good panty shot:

- I watched episode 3 dubbed. EN Marcille > JP Marcille (I say this as a stickler for subs). The rest of the dub cast is fine but I'm probably sticking with JP because JP Laios' ability to scream > EN Laios (EN is a great generic white man, though). I'm not familiar with most of the JP voice cast. I think Chilchuck is my fave in JP.

Both languages have little breathing room between lines of dialog and I was hoping the EN dub would play around with the fact that the character speaking isn't necessarily the one on screen (thus less lip-flap matching, especially for Senshi, who has few indicators that he's actually speaking even when he's onscreen) but alas. I'll do another one of these if I have more to say later in the season 🥂

[vaingloury]

The unofficial translation of Gensou Narratograph is now available to download!

I know no one ever actually looks at tumblr blogs, but I've made a basic page to hopefully collect information and links in the future.

An unofficial tabletop RPG published by Kadokawa. While the game as a whole is by no means "canon", it includes a full transcript of a game session with ZUN as one of the players, plus new character quotes and location descriptions written by ZUN, so it's worth checking out just for that alone.

Narratograph is largely boardgame-based, played with a selection of 30 characters gathering clues on a map of Gensokyo to progress through objectives and resolve the incident/kerfuffle of the week. However, it is still an RPG, with every scene being roleplayed and the incident also having a proper story to it. Narratively the game leans towards the light and feel-good end of Touhou fanworks, though I suppose it's up to you what you do with it. The book includes two prewritten adventures as examples, one of which I've run for a group to test it out.

It has pretty digestible mechanics, and a very unique danmaku combat system. To help with the number of sheets, figurines, tokens etc. needed, I've made public the Tabletop Simulator mod that I use to run the game myself, together with character figurines. You can use the assets included with the game to try and make it work in some other virtual tabletop of your choice. Or of course, you can also just print everything and play it live, if you can get a group together.

The rules have some quirks, and I'll try to figure out the best way to post my own notes and suggested houserules. As things stand, though, despite having nothing to do with the game officially, after putting a lot of work into it, I'm also curious to hear anyone's thoughts or experiences running it!

[vaingloury]

what is it with tiktok tradwives and the worst cooking known to mankind? like where in the bible does it say that it's a cardinal sin to season your food?

[vaingloury]

Standard fantasy RPG pantheon, except:

each god is also the patron of one of the setting's local city-states, and each city-state espouses their own version of the pantheon's org chart that positions their patron as King or Queen of the Gods. The gods themselves decline to weigh in on who's correct.

the god of war died in a bizarre trebuchet accident several decades previously; a coalition of other gods have been playing Weekend at Bernie's with their priesthood ever since, doing their best to answer their prayers with variable plausibility and success.

there are two separate gods of knowledge with two separate, non-overlapping cults. Each god's cult is apparently unaware of the other's existence. There's nothing obviously supernatural about this separation; they just never seem to bump into each other.

the supreme god of the Nice Pantheon of Goodness and Light and the supreme god of the Icky Pantheon of Evil and Darkness are clearly the same guy wearing two different hats. Most NPCs react to having this pointed out as though it's obviously absurd.

the obligatory Squiddy Alien Gods From Beyond The Stars are treated as just another branch of the pantheon alongside the usual faux-Greek deities. Nobody thinks it's at all odd that the god of thunder's sworn blood-sibling is a shapeless cloud of blazing eyes.

[vaingloury]

Disparate thoughts on “How Do You Live?”

Saw it over this past weekend. Not a review, just trying to work through my thoughts. 

Spoilers:

- What’s up with the english localised title?

- The movie looks like it was painted on cels in 2003 at the latest in some scenes, then, in other places, it has visually clashing modern digital techniques. Tracking shots are excellent as always except the early one with the heron fleeing the one-sided sword-fight.

- I need to listen again but this is not my favourite Ghibli score. The music was overbearing, repetitive and much more compositionally basic than I’ve come to expect from Quincy Joe. However, the IMAX soundscape does a good job with directional audio. I felt the wind rustling through the trees through the screen.

- Script was more than a bit unsubtle at times as well (the MC commenting aloud to no one in particular “...my mom left this for me!” one second after the audience is shown an open book with a message written by his mother on the inner cover. Voice direction was weird, imo (JP dub for reference). Several instances of lines being read too close together in a way that felt like a run on sentence/didn’t give the VA a chance to breathe. Heron and MC were the only memorable performances, although I’m not sure if I enjoyed MC’s performance because of or in spite of it (he’s stilted in a way that I think is supposed to be awkward but also I can’t tell). The entire cast doesn’t seem to have much if any prior VA experience upon a cursory investigation.

- Unless I missed something the MC’s stepmom is his aunt. Not a nitpick, it just gave me a “what in the Alabama” pause.

- Hayao: “I have to find a successor to keep the universe alive!” Gorou: “No, I’m too impure!!” (I’ve read elsewhere that there are 13 blocks in the tower holding up the universe and Hayao’s directed 13 projects [I’m too lazy to check]).

- Me doing the pointing soyjack meme at Studio Ponoc, Ufotable, Kenshi Yonezu, and Miyazaki Gorou in the credits:

Planning to re-watch dubbed because Ghibli dubs are usually nice.

[vaingloury]

Hacking the Game

While there is absolutely nothing wrong with running a game entirely according to the rules as presented in the book, most Game Masters I have encountered in life tend to have their own House Rules. After all, running a game comes with a certain amount of game design inherently built into the experience. I know some might disagree with this assertion, but I believe this to be true, starting when you craft encounters while agonizing over whether or not you believe your party of player characters can rise to the challenge and then eventually expanding as you begin to craft unique magic items or monsters specific to your campaign.

Why then shouldn't a Game Master eventually start tinkering around with the very rules that underpin the entire system in order to meet their specific needs? With the agreement of your Players, of course.

Success at a Cost

Not so much a house rule of my own design in this case, but rather an optional rule presented within the text of Fabula Ultima itself, well... I let the text box speak for itself:

I like this rule a lot because it gives the players the opportunity to turn those agonizing near misses, when you just miss the check difficulty by one or two, into successes... assuming they're willing to take on a complication. A Devil's Bargain, if you will, to borrow a bit of terminology from Blades in the Dark. Of course, to tinker with it a little bit more, I think I probably would not allow Success at a Cost on rolls that miss the mark by a wide margin in most cases, reserving it for say... within 5 of the Difficulty at most, but I suppose I would willing to hear my players out if the cost they proposed was suitably troublesome. After all, the more they're willing to get themselves into trouble, the easier my job becomes, right?

Starting Bond

Bonds in Fabula Ultima are a source of narrative power for the heroes, in some ways like the grease that keeps the wheels turning. They can be used to help improve Checks or Aid allies during Group Checks, and even some Class Skills or Equipment can benefit from a character's bonds.

So I thought it was pretty weird that Player Characters do not begin play with even a single Bond written down on their character sheet.

Thankfully, we can turn to an optional rule in the book yet again:

In short, the way bonds work, you may have a strong emotional attachment to characters, nations, kingdoms, organizations, and even religions. These bonds are composed of emotional pairs, consisting of Admiration or Inferiority; Loyalty or Mistrust; and Affection or Hatred. A bond's strength is a number equal to the number of emotions you have attached to it, up to a maximum of +3 if you've selected an emotion from each pair, and your bond can be invoked in different scenarios to grant you this numerical bonus to a roll.

With this optional rule in play, as it says above, we have a chance to hit the ground running with at least one bond predefined for each character, telling us a little bit more about who they are and allowing them to engage with this mechanic from the start.

Quirks

Another optional rule, this time from the play test material, Quirks are something that exist as a mechanical narrative reinforcement of a character's unique nature. You could almost think of them in a manner similar to picking a race in Dungeon's & Dragons, like elf or dwarf, but in this case it's more like giving yourself a bit of niche protection by adopting a Heroic Trope common in anime and video games.

Take these, for example:

I like this optional rule because it gives players a bit more room to define who their characters are and what they're about.

Earning Experience

This is probably the biggest one, and the one where I've done the most work on my own. Normally, the game simply awards players 5 experience points for showing up, plus an additional amount of experience defined by how many Fabula Points (think hero points from other games) the players spend during a session and how many Ultima Points (Hero points for villains) that the bad guys spend. Once you've earned 10 xp, you level up, and reduce your current xp ten, keeping any points that are left over.

In a broad sense, this is fine, but I've always been the sort of Game Master that prefers to reward players by giving out experience points for engaging in behaviors that I specifically want to encourage. So, I changed the model to look more like this:

Players will still gain XP from Fabula and Ultima Points being spent during the game as normal, as well as 1 point for participating in the session, and an additional point for playing to their character's Identity, Theme, Origin, and Quirk (your standard good Roleplay award). Next we go to a checklist of Experience questions to determine the additional amount of Experience Points that the Party gains. The questions are as follows:

Did we learn something new and important about the world?

Did we overcome a difficult or noteworthy obstacle?

Did we make significant progress towards our goal?

These questions help encourage the behaviors I want to see in the type of game we're playing: curiosity about the world, demonstrating fighting spirit or intellectual ability to overcome challenges set in their path, and setting goals as a group and staying on task.

Then, after we answer those questions, there is the experience vote. A chance to really let each player shine by sharing the spotlight. There are three awards, given out at the end of each session, and each award grants the player who receives it an additional 2 XP and if two or more players are tied, they will each gain this bonus experience!

A few rules apply, however: You cannot be awarded this bonus XP twice in a row, you may only win one award per session, and you cannot vote for yourself or for the Game Master.

The Awards are as follows:

Embodiment: Embodiment is for the player who perfectly captures the mood at the table or drives the story onward. Stopping the table dead in its tracks with humor while in character, or making great speeches, desperate decisions, or achieving gruesome revenge fall into this category. This goes beyond simply playing to a character’s background and motivation and speaks to a scene or action that the group finds particularly memorable.

Team Worker: The Team Worker is the player who worked the hardest to keep the group together and in good shape or to keep the story moving forward. This award goes to the ones who help despite the risks, the ones who the group leans on to get shit done without any thanks in return, and the ones who sacrifice their goals for their companions.

MVP: The MVP award goes to the player who makes the biggest splash. This could mean being in the right place at the right time, playing to your Identity/Theme/Origin in a way that hauls the group across the finish line, taking the big hit so the rest of the party can succeed, or simply making that crucial roll that enables party to face down the big problem besetting it in the session.

And that's really all there is to it. I like the voted XP awards for a game like this because it encourages players to stay engaged. They have to be involved in handing out the XP to one another, so the theory goes that should be paying attention to what's going on, as well as putting their best foot forward to try to earn these accolades. And the small insurance policy built in that you can't continually win the same award session after session should (hopefully) keep any one player in particular from steam rolling ahead of the others in this now, slightly more asymmetrical level system.

[vaingloury]

fresh up out the durag wavy, make you haters sea sick

[vaingloury]

Why does this always happen

[vaingloury]

I'm going to pointlessly whine for a second but I hate sucking at art so much. I didn't practice enough, everyone I know is better than me, and I don't have enough time to draw and keep up with everything else. I need to draw and read books and play games and exercise and watch movies. I have more time than my peers, too, which is the worst part. I have so much time, and it's all going to waste.

art is genuinely kind of agonising. the thing that's hard to internalise is that you literally do just wake up one morning and find something you've drawn acceptable, and then you look back to something you did a year ago and it looks like a baby drew it with their off-hand

progress is often entirely unrecognisable until you realise that you've somehow, in a way you never even noticed, made up for that lost time

it helped me to stop thinking of art as something you'd ever get "smart" about and start thinking of it as an exercise in the exact same way as running or lifting weights. it's really easy to overdevelop your technique and find yourself frustrated at the incapability of your body, or worse, overdevelop your body and hurt yourself because you didn't work on your technique

which is all just kind of a rambling way to say that, although this probably won't do much to help with your particular anxieties, it's important to make peace with the fact that art is the lifelong process of cultivating your skill until it satisfies your aesthetic sensibilities, and then having your aesthetic sensibilities lurch forward and give you something new to chase. it's a race against yourself, not your peers

[vaingloury]

new article by me!

a cultural journalism deep dive into an increasingly weird internet community rabbit hole, created with some research help by @cryptotheism and their editor!

content warnings: slurs, xenophobia, suicide/self harm, grooming, eating disorders, cults, femcel culture, edgelord shit, NFTs

[vaingloury]

every time i see those posts like ‘what food from a show did YOU always wanna try’ i go lol none? but i just remembered im a liar

i always wanted the fucking soup brock made in the pokemon anime

[vaingloury]

The American Dream Mall is having a great deal of trouble paying back their debts. The equity partners will lose their money. If the situation continues to degrade, everyone else will likely get theirs back once the assets are stripped and auctioned off.

It’s massive. Entering it feels like driving into an airport except the airport has a water slide sticking out of its side and a Ferris wheel protruding from the roof. The vast majority of stores were closed. I visited with the business boyfriend and he exhibited increasing panic as we progressed through the mall. Why aren’t they open? This is peak shopping time. Look, no one is carrying bags. Very little of this is revenue generating. It’s a five billion dollar public park.

The sound of the American Dream Mall is a gaggle of children on a rotating coaster car screaming above your head while the sound system plays Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em. We had to repeatedly dodge people driving around on motorized pandas.

The thing I found interesting was the interior design. We both agreed it was fairly well done. Why is it so shroomy? I liked the mirrored bull and the haunting empty hall culminating in an Angry Bird elevated above the shoppers like a god. I saw the longest couch I’ve seen in my life which was cool.

I found it profoundly disorienting. I’d think it’s disorienting on purpose to make you shop except almost all the stores were closed. Why are they closed? The business boyfriend says it’ll be half dark within a year but I’ve learned never to trust any prediction a businessman makes with great confidence.

[vaingloury]

i basically have to restrain myself from being a massive hater about dungeons and dragons fifth edition at all times and it interferes with my functioning as a human being in society. at the grocery store i am constantly seconds away from ranting to nearby grandmothers about meaningful character options. at some point they will develop medication for my condition and whenever i take it i will undergo immediate brain death

[vaingloury]

Even more disparate thoughts on Fabula Ultima

Belated write-up: I finally got the chance to bring this game to the table last month...

...for all of one session. 

That’s one more session than most of the indie ttrpgs I own. Still, I bought a physical copy of the rules and I’m a bit disappointed to see it become yet another art book in my collection.

This post isn’t really a review or a judgement of the game’s quality, just some thoughts on why my group bounced off this game after one session and why it might not work for other tables like mine. This also isn’t in response to it winning the Ennie, I just couldn’t find the energy to write this sooner.

Praise first: The art’s great. I know not every project can afford consistent, original art but Fabula’s illustrations do a lot of the heavy lifting (not to say the written material isn’t also solid) in getting you interested in the game and imagining all kinds of characters you might want to portray. The game avoids stock dungeon fantasy classes with unique classes that don’t feel gimmicky for the sake of avoiding dungeon fantasy classes. Class abilities interact with each other, prompting teamwork. I really like the identity/theme/origin section of the character sheet because I’ve been in one too many games where the players want deep character drama but put the work of planting the seeds for that drama on the GM instead of themselves.

But now the criticisms.

This is not a game for the simulationists. Maybe that was obvious to others from the marketing blurbs, but I saw “J(T)RPG” and got excited thinking about how my character’s pockets were going to be overflowing with Mana Potion x99 in preparation for all the boss lairs we were going to be raiding only to be met with a Schrödinger’s inventory system (if you need an item, you just have it (within reason) except for HP/MP potions, which you can only hold a single digit number of) and a GM section on dungeon crawling that can be summed up as “Yeah, maybe don’t?”

My experience with video jrpgs is pretty synonymous with dungeons, random encounters*, and Mana Potion x99s, so not having those things makes me feel naked here. This is going to be a boon to groups who beg for bags of holding in D&D and find playing anything that’s not “the main story” in ttrpgs to be tedious. I get that Fabula wants a more cinematic experience, with the minutiae of adventuring relegated to happening “off-screen”, but without bean-counting to slow things down between set-pieces (Fabula cut the detailed overland travel rules in its conversion from Ryuutama, if you want travel scenes, just freeform rp it baby) I’m left underwhelmed with the remaining two game modes: combat and cutscene.

(*As a side note, Fabula does have random encounters. However, enemies matched to the party’s level can hit fairly hard, thus more than one encounter a travel day would be brutal in a mismatched tone kind of way. From this, I can assume that encounters are supposed to be few and scripted, keeping in line with the aforementioned cinematic experience. GMs experienced with multiple games will notice this but I’m curious about groups coming directly from video games or D&D. Tangentially, Fabula has an Appendix N, listing several games that are heavy on the dungeon/ multiple random encounter/ resource management trifecta. In hindsight, it finally dawned on me that Fabula doesn’t really simulate jrpgs, rather it simulates media inspired by jrpgs.)

This is also not a game for those of us who don’t run games in the small theatre company sort of way, that is to say your games don’t have a route scripted out in advance like three-night play or a television miniseries, where you gotta hit all the plot beats in sequence. When I said cutscene earlier, I meant it literally. The game wants the GM to interlude the narrative with visions of the campaign’s BBEG getting closer to their goal, enemies do that thing from video games where they can escape a fight you were winning because plot armour (which I find funny rather than frustrating, although that leads me to my actual frustration:). This all assumes that the GM has a grand, linear story to tell. Like the random vs scripted encounter thing, this isn’t addressed explicitly from what I can find in the rules. It’s just assumed you’re running this game because that’s your GM style (it is not my GM style). Lightning round of a few more things my group didn’t like:

Economy: I’m not sure how (much) to distribute money in this game. Because Fabula prefers that you didn’t dungeon crawl, you’re not finding money in chests. Turn in twenty bear asses maybe? Do you even need much money (if you’re not playing a Tinker)? Goods and services are dirt cheap, and most things don’t actually have to be bought. Rare weapons can just be dropped by enemies...

The Starter Scenario Boss: I’m willing to concede that I maybe just ran it wrong but the party didn’t stand a chance despite me nerfing the boss duo’s HP and damage. Also combat ranges aren’t a thing in this game, which I think contributed to the difficulty: the enemy can freely use close range attacks on targets they aren’t standing next to (again, “just freeform it”; they somehow run one football field in a few seconds...).

You Can’t Die: Again, I think this is going to be a boon for a certain type of group but mine felt like the risks weren’t real if you can’t die. I’ve already seen the defence of “just use a different consequence that isn’t death” but our characters found themselves in situations where things wouldn’t make sense if they didn’t die without the help of insane levels of deus ex machina.

I’m usually in the “play another game” camp but rather than trying to tailor Fabula to what I find fun, it’d be easier to just take the theme and bond mechanics from this game and graft them onto Pathfinder 2 or something.