vixensdungeon

[vixensdungeon]

D&D is very much Its Own Thing, because it was just anything the creators and players thought was cool and interesting. It resembles nothing so much as itself, which is why attempts to make it be some other specific Thing can fall flat. But if you go in with an open mind and just let the mess surround and penetrate you, I think you'll be richly rewarded with a perhaps sometimes problematic but always definitely weird experience.

I'd contest that most of these fantasy games aren't medieval fantasy, many of them are wild west/colonial frontier fantasy w a renfair aesthetic and like 0 medieval themes

True yeah

[vixensdungeon]

My new least favourite youtube shorts are just clips from movies and TV with the characters labelled as D&D classes.

[vixensdungeon]

Would you believe I got lazy again and only did the part that I'll focus on later? So yeah, there's a taer tribal federation in the northern part of the mountains, then several mountain dwarf kingdoms south of that. And then in the central desert we have several human kingdoms. Why don't the eastern ones claim territory on the other inland sea? Because I forgot about that one for some reason. Oh, and then there's one little bonus city-state belonging to one of the minor races of the region that encompasses those two isolated mountain hexes. It's our friends the tinker gnomes! I thought I should place them, considering how advanced this world is technologically (something I won't blame you for having forgotten by now).

Next time: Culture, we're drilling down to the kingdom level now in the central desert

Still taking suggestions for a name for the planet, and now for the continent too!

Hot World Summer Part 8: "Human" Geography

Alright, let's populate our triangle. We start by rolling for dominant (25+%), major (5-20%), and minor races (4% or less). We get a round zero for dominant races, three major ones, and eleven minor ones.

The major races are taers, dwarves, and, unsurprisingly, humans. Each has 1d3 significant cultures or sub-races. There's only one for the taer, which is fine since their potential habitat on the map is the smallest one. The dwarves have 3, which I decide are hill dwarves, mountain dwarves, and sundered dwarves. The humans have 3, one dwelling around the inland sea, another being a seafaring one on the coast of the southern moorlands, while the third are steppe nomads.

For minor races we have mongrelmen (2 cultures), spriggans (2 cultures), bullywugs (2 cultures), tinker gnomes, thri-kreen, gargoyles, grell, goblins, sylvan elves, gnomes (of the rock variety), and centaurs (2 cultures). I've already decided that one of the centaur cultures lives in the southernmost of the two forests, while the other lives on the nearby prairie.

The map shenanigans get pretty rough at this point as I apportion the available hexes to the various realms each culture has, but hopefully I'll have a map of at least the major ones soon.

[vixensdungeon]

Hang on, let me dig through my notes… wow this must be the first AD&D errata in 25 years! They added a similar rule regarding BG and BG2. And one for 3rd Edition and Neverwinter Nights.

New D&D errata just dropped: if a player argues that "BG3 let me do it that way," the DM is allowed to kill them.

[vixensdungeon]

Age of Rebellion (Fantasy Flight Games, 2014)

We're sticking to the "some time ABY" timeframe here, and once again I'll be skipping the first part of char-gen for a bit and leaving the last part to the readers. This time instead of an obligation hounding us, we have a duty that's actually beneficial and tracks our advancement in the Rebel Alliance.

Anyway, you know what the best Star Wars video games are? I suppose these days most people would name the various Jedi adventures like the recent Jedi series or the earlier Knights of the Old Republic and Jedi Knight. But in the 90s? Back then, the flight simulator was king. So let's indulge my nostalgia for a while!

Noonti Dagnoom

Duty: Personnel Species: Duros Career: Ace Specialization: Pilot Characteristics: Brawn 1, Agility 3, Intellect 3, Cunning 3, Willpower 2, Presence 2 Skills: Astrogation 2, Cool 2, Gunnery 1, Piloting (Planetary) 2, PIloting (Space) 2, Ranged (Light) 1 Talents: Full Throttle, Skilled Jockey Wound Threshold: 12 Stress Threshold: 12 Ranged Defense: 0 Melee Defense: 0 Soak Value: 2 Motivation: Belief (The Republic) Gear: Light blaster pistol, heavy clothing, utility belt, 135 credits

Noonti was a core worlder so she has perhaps a slightly rose-coloured image of the Old Republic, but that's what she's fighting for.

Now for the group resource. Rebels don't always get a starship like the scoundrels of EotE, so, you know… choose wisely if don't want to bully me.

[vixensdungeon]

Not so much rain because it's still an arid region, but yeah there's probably some magic going on that I hope will be clarified when I create the world's history. It might even be linked to the reason the world is so cold in the first place. I specifically left that area undefined in case I got a really interesting roll that wouldn't normally fit the climate.

Hot World Summer Part 8: "Human" Geography

Alright, let's populate our triangle. We start by rolling for dominant (25+%), major (5-20%), and minor races (4% or less). We get a round zero for dominant races, three major ones, and eleven minor ones.

The major races are taers, dwarves, and, unsurprisingly, humans. Each has 1d3 significant cultures or sub-races. There's only one for the taer, which is fine since their potential habitat on the map is the smallest one. The dwarves have 3, which I decide are hill dwarves, mountain dwarves, and sundered dwarves. The humans have 3, one dwelling around the inland sea, another being a seafaring one on the coast of the southern moorlands, while the third are steppe nomads.

For minor races we have mongrelmen (2 cultures), spriggans (2 cultures), bullywugs (2 cultures), tinker gnomes, thri-kreen, gargoyles, grell, goblins, sylvan elves, gnomes (of the rock variety), and centaurs (2 cultures). I've already decided that one of the centaur cultures lives in the southernmost of the two forests, while the other lives on the nearby prairie.

The map shenanigans get pretty rough at this point as I apportion the available hexes to the various realms each culture has, but hopefully I'll have a map of at least the major ones soon.

[vixensdungeon]

No map yet (working on it), but I have revised my list of races a bit. I decided to reroll most of the ones that don't have a matching habitat in this region, so bullywugs, sylvan elves, and centaurs have been replaced by janni, broken ones, and halflings (stouts and tallfellows). The one exception to this replacement are the thri-kreen, who live on the big plateau in the southern part of the map that I've decided inexplicably has a tropical climate.

Hot World Summer Part 8: "Human" Geography

Alright, let's populate our triangle. We start by rolling for dominant (25+%), major (5-20%), and minor races (4% or less). We get a round zero for dominant races, three major ones, and eleven minor ones.

The major races are taers, dwarves, and, unsurprisingly, humans. Each has 1d3 significant cultures or sub-races. There's only one for the taer, which is fine since their potential habitat on the map is the smallest one. The dwarves have 3, which I decide are hill dwarves, mountain dwarves, and sundered dwarves. The humans have 3, one dwelling around the inland sea, another being a seafaring one on the coast of the southern moorlands, while the third are steppe nomads.

For minor races we have mongrelmen (2 cultures), spriggans (2 cultures), bullywugs (2 cultures), tinker gnomes, thri-kreen, gargoyles, grell, goblins, sylvan elves, gnomes (of the rock variety), and centaurs (2 cultures). I've already decided that one of the centaur cultures lives in the southernmost of the two forests, while the other lives on the nearby prairie.

The map shenanigans get pretty rough at this point as I apportion the available hexes to the various realms each culture has, but hopefully I'll have a map of at least the major ones soon.

[vixensdungeon]

Hot World Summer Part 8: "Human" Geography

Alright, let's populate our triangle. We start by rolling for dominant (25+%), major (5-20%), and minor races (4% or less). We get a round zero for dominant races, three major ones, and eleven minor ones.

The major races are taers, dwarves, and, unsurprisingly, humans. Each has 1d3 significant cultures or sub-races. There's only one for the taer, which is fine since their potential habitat on the map is the smallest one. The dwarves have 3, which I decide are hill dwarves, mountain dwarves, and sundered dwarves. The humans have 3, one dwelling around the inland sea, another being a seafaring one on the coast of the southern moorlands, while the third are steppe nomads.

For minor races we have mongrelmen (2 cultures), spriggans (2 cultures), bullywugs (2 cultures), tinker gnomes, thri-kreen, gargoyles, grell, goblins, sylvan elves, gnomes (of the rock variety), and centaurs (2 cultures). I've already decided that one of the centaur cultures lives in the southernmost of the two forests, while the other lives on the nearby prairie.

The map shenanigans get pretty rough at this point as I apportion the available hexes to the various realms each culture has, but hopefully I'll have a map of at least the major ones soon.

[vixensdungeon]

But were they elected on that as their platform? Is that something a majority of their voters cared about? I don't think we can make assumptions on what their voter base thinks of secular fiction leading you to damnation from this.

How do you think Gygax conceptualized the fact that in D&D you are playing as wizards and worshippers of pagan gods, considering he was extremely Christian?

Did he deadass thought that you are playing as sinners who will go to hell, did he have some personal theology (wizard's magic is fine because it doesn't come from demons and also all gods are aspects of the trinity?), or was he just not as religious as many people think?

This is very silly. I don't hold any particular religious beliefs and don't believe in anything supernatural, yet through the power of fantasy I can conceptualize a world where magic is real and gods exist. Religious people are also capable of this. Gary Gygax may have been a Jehovah's Witness but he was still capable of conceptualizing a world that was not based on his worldview.

[vixensdungeon]

Oh yeah, I figured out some more details about this character’s backstory. She’s not a follower of Cham Syndulla. If there’s an early rebel leader she followed, it was Anto Kreegyr. She’s too young to have done anything during the Clone War, but her heart beats to the Separatist rhythm.

Edge of the Empire (Fantasy Flight Games, 2013)

As far as I'm concerned, we're in Canon territory now. The year: like, 1 ABY or something.

With a new publisher once again comes a completely new system, though some DNA remains from the two previous ones. First things first, we determine character concept and background, so I have some ideas percolating in my head. Next we're supposed to determine our starting obligation, but I'm using the expansions that have specific ones for different careers, so I'll have to come back to this later. So we move on to species, which will determine our base stats, followed by picking the career. Then after finally picking our obligation, which is the thing that keeps us on edge because it occasionally causes problems, we pick a specialization within our career, and then it's stuff like investing starting experience points and picking a motivation and gear and such. There is one last step that I'm going to leave until the very end of this post. So let's see what kind of star warrior we cook up this time!

Yotta Geadun

Obligation: Bounty Species: Twi'lek Career: Colonist Specialization: Politico Characteristics: Brawn 1, Agility 2, Intellect 3, Cunning 2, Willpower 2, Presence 3 Skills: Charm 2, Knowledge (Core Worlds) 1, Knowledge (Education) 1, Leadership 2, Negotiation 1, Ranged (Light) 1, Streetwise 1 Talents: Inspiring Rhetoric, Kill with Kindness 2 Wound Threshold: 11 Strain Threshold: 13 Ranged Defense: 0 Melee Defense: 0 Soak Value: 2 Motivation: Cause (Capitalism), Creation (Family) Gear: Holdout blaster, heavy clothing, long range comlink, 72 credits

Okay so I set out to make her a political radical from Ryloth, a follower of Cham Syndulla, but, umm. I guess she's some sort of ancap tradwife demagogue. So, you know. Enjoy being in the same crew with her if you decide to play toys with me. As for appearence, just imagine a sexy green Twi'lek tradwife, I guess.

Now there is one final step in character creation that is usually done with the rest of the group, but since I have no idea if people are going to play toys with me on this one and even if they do it would be tricky to decide such a thing over tumblr, I'll leave it up to you, my dear woodland critters!

[vixensdungeon]

I don’t have anything useful to add and this is certainly not helpful to anyone, but can we make “ruleplaying” the third distinct corner of a cursed trinity?

the false dichotomy of "roleplaying and rollplaying"

so i've been thinking about this disconnect that exists among certain people in the broader TTRPG community. the one about what counts as "roleplaying" when you're playing a tabletop roleplaying game, particularly with how there's the implication that when the rules come in and the dice come out, you are, somehow, no longer roleplaying, or that perhaps it's some kind of "lesser form" of roleplaying.

specifically, i was thinking about this through the lens of video games. appropriately enough, even more specifically through the lens of RPG video games.

you see, there's a wide array of RPGs, and they can approach the concept of "roleplaying" in strikingly different ways. for the sake of this discussion, we're going to look at JRPGs, particularly those of the classic Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy sort, and compare them to what's never really gotten a convenient grouping term and so i'm just going to have to go with "western RPGs". it's dreadfully inexact, but it's been used before to refer to this category and at least isn't as inexact as "computer RPGs" (or cRPGs) which is perhaps the other most common term for them. illustrative examples of this sort include Bethesda and BioWare games.

anyone familiar with these two categories will be able to immediately pick out some pretty major differences between the trends found in each one. in a JRPG, you play as a specific, predefined character. while you're often able to pick a name for them yourself, they typically have an official one that any casual player will likely be made aware of. they always have a defined appearance, and outside of a handful of very specific and broadly insignificant moments (usually things like confirming whether or not something was understood), their script is fully defined and set in stone from the start of the game. "builds" are rarely a meaningful thing in these games, and even character class is more often immutable than not.

meanwhile, in a typical western RPG, your character rarely has an official name, even in outside material. they are the Lone Wanderer, the Warden, the Fledgling. they don't tend to have a set appearance (especially as hardware technology made greater customization more feasible) up to and including their gender. you'll typically have a wide variety of options to build your character including classes, skill points, and even what kind of weapons to use. and this is not even to mention the script. not only do you generally have a plethora of dialogue options, but you usually even have some influence over how the story goes - sometimes as simple as whether you're going to be a "good guy" or a "bad guy", sometimes over what order events happen in or whether some of them even happen at all.

now here's the question: which of these approaches is roleplaying? is one "more" or "truer" roleplaying than another? in a JRPG, you're like an actor in Hamlet while in a western RPG, you're like an actor at an improv show, but both actors are still playing a role, and when put in that light hopefully it disrupts any initial belief in the relative "trueness" of one type of roleplaying over the other.

in a similar way, i hope this can help to show how mechanics and rules in TTRPGs aren't an impediment to roleplaying but how we engage with roleplaying in the medium. the rules and dice rolls are like the scripted JRPG (even if the script isn't being written ahead of time), asking us to inhabit the role they are writing for us. like the western RPG, the builds and mechanics are how we express our desires to shape our character into the role we want to play. these are not things to be fought against or wished away, but engaged with and utilized. just as JRPGs and western RPGs have their respective ways to roleplaying, this is how we roleplay in TTRPGs.

[vixensdungeon]

New D&D errata just dropped: if a player argues that "BG3 let me do it that way," the DM is allowed to kill them.

[vixensdungeon]

Congratulations to the Wayfarer for a well-earned victory. Just check out this chunky friend:

Like someone in the tags said, so much room for activities! And the best part? That orange module can be swapped out so you can have several setups ready to go. If you're feeling saucy you could even rig a starfighter hangar in there.

Edge of the Empire (Fantasy Flight Games, 2013)

As far as I'm concerned, we're in Canon territory now. The year: like, 1 ABY or something.

With a new publisher once again comes a completely new system, though some DNA remains from the two previous ones. First things first, we determine character concept and background, so I have some ideas percolating in my head. Next we're supposed to determine our starting obligation, but I'm using the expansions that have specific ones for different careers, so I'll have to come back to this later. So we move on to species, which will determine our base stats, followed by picking the career. Then after finally picking our obligation, which is the thing that keeps us on edge because it occasionally causes problems, we pick a specialization within our career, and then it's stuff like investing starting experience points and picking a motivation and gear and such. There is one last step that I'm going to leave until the very end of this post. So let's see what kind of star warrior we cook up this time!

Yotta Geadun

Obligation: Bounty Species: Twi'lek Career: Colonist Specialization: Politico Characteristics: Brawn 1, Agility 2, Intellect 3, Cunning 2, Willpower 2, Presence 3 Skills: Charm 2, Knowledge (Core Worlds) 1, Knowledge (Education) 1, Leadership 2, Negotiation 1, Ranged (Light) 1, Streetwise 1 Talents: Inspiring Rhetoric, Kill with Kindness 2 Wound Threshold: 11 Strain Threshold: 13 Ranged Defense: 0 Melee Defense: 0 Soak Value: 2 Motivation: Cause (Capitalism), Creation (Family) Gear: Holdout blaster, heavy clothing, long range comlink, 72 credits

Okay so I set out to make her a political radical from Ryloth, a follower of Cham Syndulla, but, umm. I guess she's some sort of ancap tradwife demagogue. So, you know. Enjoy being in the same crew with her if you decide to play toys with me. As for appearence, just imagine a sexy green Twi'lek tradwife, I guess.

Now there is one final step in character creation that is usually done with the rest of the group, but since I have no idea if people are going to play toys with me on this one and even if they do it would be tricky to decide such a thing over tumblr, I'll leave it up to you, my dear woodland critters!

[vixensdungeon]

You fumble your collar-and-elbow tie-up, accidentally breaking your opponent’s arm and decapitating yourself.

Pitch: Rolemaster-based wrestling RPG called "We Want Tables!"

[vixensdungeon]

Hot World Summer Part 7: Rivers, Lakes, and Seas

You will note a lack or rivers. They're there, ya girl just lazy.

This was a quick part, as I just rolled for how many seas and lakes the region has. I knew there had to be at least some inland seas, as this had been determined during a previous phase, so I was prepared to reroll until I got some, but didn't have to. As for lakes, I dropped their number because of the arid climate in the region. So here we have it. There are two inland seas in the central area of the map, as well as two lakes in the moors down south by the coast, plus another lake in the mountains (which is probably really hard to make out on the map but it's there). I'll be adding the rivers later, along with some glaciers that feed them.

Next time: "Human" Geography, where things finally get interesting

[vixensdungeon]

just how many Star Wars ttrpgs are there?? I’m all here for it but I thought there were only 3.

This is bit of a complex question but the simple answer is yes and no.

Broadly speaking there are three games from three different publishers (West End Games, Wizards of the Coast, and Fantasy Flight Games). The first two have each had multiple editions. The last one was released as three separate games focusing on different aspects of the franchise. So it depends on how you count them.

I'll just go ahead and list them all.

West End Games

Star Wars the Roleplaying Game Revised Edition Revised and Expanded Edition

Wizards of the Coast

Star Wars Roleplaying Game Revised Edition Saga Edition

Fantasy Flight Games

Edge of the Empire Age of Rebellion Force and Destiny

[vixensdungeon]

I see ye olde discourse about roleplaying vs ruleplaying (coining a new term here) is going around again, so let me throw in my two cents, using D&D as an example.

"Describe your character's actions to the DM" is one of the rules of D&D. Making your character do stuff by telling the other players about it is a game mechanic. So guess what, all the stuff the theatre kids are calling "real roleplaying" is also just playing by the rules, mwahahahahahaa!