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cavegirl

cavegirl

@cavegirl.bsky.social

1.3K followers 250 following 320 posts

Emily F Allen. Indie RPGs. Horror & Whimsy. Owner of one Ennie Award. She/Her. Sapphic trans girl, Quaker, hard left, spider-lover.

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cavegirl @cavegirl.bsky.social · 23h

that's your core conflict. Believing in some hopeful future (be it the individual esoteric paths of the trads of the techno-utopianism of the technos) vs this blind, empty hateful cancer that sees no future and are, effectively, trolling reality because nobody can stop them.

cavegirl @cavegirl.bsky.social · 23h

against this threat of insane distructive breakdown of consensus, force the traditions and the technocrats to reckon with the greater threat. The trads and technos might have very different goals and paradigms, but both at least believe in reason and progress; both want to build, not tear down.

cavegirl @cavegirl.bsky.social · 23h

pull the nihilistic corruption of the nephandi and the thrashing madness of the marauders into alignment, as two forces that simply move fast, break things and laugh at those who would practice silly things like ethics or reason or restraint. Have them take aim at the structure of shared reality.

cavegirl @cavegirl.bsky.social · 23h

cast the technocracy as trying to reign in a system that's spun out of their control and is hurtling towards entropy and ruin.

cavegirl @cavegirl.bsky.social · 23h

have the ascension war spiral out of control as the structures the technocracy set up are usurped by nephandi that superficially mimic technocratic paradigms, inserting themselves into positions of power in governments and tech organisations to pervert the Union's agenda towards nephandic ends

cavegirl @cavegirl.bsky.social · 23h

gonna be honest, I think the only viable way to make a Mage The Ascension 5th edition set in the present moment is to pull the technocracy out of power.
Have a world where the technocrats have lost their control, having been usurped by technocrat-adjascent nephandic mages.

Reposted by cavegirl

Angry People in Local Newspapers only spooky @apiln.bsky.social · 2d

The Phantom Poo Spotter

Letter: Has anyone else been accosted by Newtown's phantom dog mess spotter?

This reader wants to know if anyone else has been accosted by Newtown's phantom dog mess spotter.

www.countytimes.co.uk

cavegirl @cavegirl.bsky.social · 2d

ngl my go-to roman game is a pulpy combat soap-opera about gladiators

cavegirl @cavegirl.bsky.social · 2d

cavegirl @cavegirl.bsky.social · 2d

its generally accepted, however, that 'coasting' is a pretty sweet position to be in, which implies flat ground.

cavegirl @cavegirl.bsky.social · 2d

if you think d&d's mechanics have no impact on the type of stories its designed to tell, it looks like somebody doesn't have

spongebob holding a rainbow with "media literacy" written on it

cavegirl @cavegirl.bsky.social · 2d

I also think that the term 'gatekeeping' has been so thoroughly abused by people who deploy it against criticism of D&D that it needs to be taken away and put on a high shelf until people can show that they can make arguments that don't rely on misused buzzwords.

cavegirl @cavegirl.bsky.social · 2d

i don't think that's true or fair
i think its fair to criticise hasbro for the wide, wide gulf between what they present the game as in its marketing, & the game that actually exists in its mechanics
Yes, D&D is a storytelling medium, but the stories its intended to tell are shaped by its mechanics

cavegirl @cavegirl.bsky.social · 2d

Hope that clears up my position. I'm not making an argument for what D&D 'should' be, I'm making an argument about what it factually *is* if you look at its mechanics.

cavegirl @cavegirl.bsky.social · 2d

(also, to be a pedant, the literature D&D took the most influence wasn't tolkein, but other pulp fantasy authors; vance, leiber, howard, morecock, etc. There's a *lot* more of Conan the Barbarian in D&D's DNA than Lord Of The Rings, which gygax and arneson reportedly quite disliked)

cavegirl @cavegirl.bsky.social · 2d

(you may be interested to know that my own design work is pretty evenly divided between oldschool pulpy adventure D&D, and more emotionally-focussed games, generally about queer romance. My rpg tastes are pretty broad.)

cavegirl @cavegirl.bsky.social · 2d

If the art depicted (say) a big gay paladin triumphantly embracing his hunky boyfriend over the body of a slain dragon that tried to kidnap said boyfriend, I'd have no complaints, because that depicts the sort of thing - danger! excitement! fights! - that D&D is designed to support.

cavegirl @cavegirl.bsky.social · 2d

This is what I'm complaining about; WotC is marketing D&D in a way that misrepresents it, evoking a play-style that it's simply not built to support. IMHO this is actively dishonest marketing, like advertising Harvest Moon as if it were a hack-and-slash dungeon crawler.

cavegirl @cavegirl.bsky.social · 2d

Now, there are problems with the default assumptions D&D has often encouraged, particularly its attitudes towards race and racialised violence, and I think the game's recent push to move away from these ideas is a good thing, albeit one that still has a way to go.

cavegirl @cavegirl.bsky.social · 2d

If you want a game about, say, romance, those exist! There are a lot on the market. My go to reccomendation would be Pasión de las Pasiones by Brandon Leon-Gambetta, which produces some wonderfully torrid melodramas.

cavegirl @cavegirl.bsky.social · 2d

My opinion is that D&D's intended playstyle of peril and adventure is pretty well supported by its mechanics, and if you play it that way, you'll have a really good time swashbuckling around.

cavegirl @cavegirl.bsky.social · 2d

There are other games, with other mechanics, that put their focus elsewhere. Call of Cthulhu, say, is a game whose mechanics focus on using a diverse pool of skills to gather clues, and the degredation of a characters mental health. If you try to play it like D&D, the system actively fights you.

cavegirl @cavegirl.bsky.social · 2d

This isn't an endorsement or a criticism of this playstyle, this is simply an observation of what exists in the books: there are extensive detailed mechanics for going to somewhere dangerous and getting into fights, and more or less none for romance or other social/emotional interactions.

cavegirl @cavegirl.bsky.social · 2d

It's fair to say, then, that this is what D&D is *about*.
Yes, you can do other things in D&D, but when you do the actual system is very little help to you, and you find yourself falling back on the creativity of the players and DM without much of any input from the game mechanics.

cavegirl @cavegirl.bsky.social · 2d

This, then, tells us the sort of activities D&D as a game is interested in: danger, exploration and combat. These are the spaces where your mechanical choices - both in character creation and in the moment of play - have the most depth and the most impact.