How far can joy travel?

Not me ignoring sleep schedule to finish this.

Illustration from Princess Maker (PC-98 and MSX).  Art by Takami Akai. 

@gendernewtral holy shit what??

an update to my insulin pump (a model which is highly recommended by doctors because it has software you can update, unlike other models) would allow my doctor to see more of my medical data because of the way my pump would now function.

i technically had the choice not to update it, but if i didn’t, my insurance company would not cover the cost of fixing or replacing it if something happened to it. they could say that the damage came from not updating the system, even if the damage was completely external.

some of the software updates have been beneficial, and have made my life easier. however, the choice to use these new system has always been made for me. i can’t afford to replace this $3000 device that allows me to live without injecting insulin upwards of five times a day.

disabled people already live in a world that is hypermanaged by people who have absolute control over our health and safety. anyone with a prosthetic, hearing aid, or pacemaker can face the same problem i did if the manufacturer decides they need to exert their presence in our lives more than they already do. the “cyberpunk dystopia” is already here, and if you want to change the ever-growing vice grip of “smart technology,” help disabled activists. we’ve been here all along.

(if you want a short primer on what it’s like to be disabled and rely on technology, read Jillian Weise’s personal essay in Alice Wong’s Disability Visibility).

QUEEN - cranialgrind

kendal yeaaaaaa!!

cleaning up an aaaaaancient sketch (ancient as in 2 years old haha. ha)

anyway @comicaurora

In the last few days, I've now had two run-ins with people on this site regarding the idea of a TTRPG's mechanics and rules impacting the roleplay aspect of said game. And from what I can tell, these people - and people like them - have the whole concept backwards.

I think people who only ever played D&D and games like it, people who never played a Powered by the Apocalypse or Forged in the Dark system, or any other system with narratively-minded mechanics, are under one false impression:

Mechanics exist to restrict.

Seeing how these people argue, what exactly they say, how they reason why "mechanics shouldn't get in the way of roleplaying," that seems to be their core idea: Rules and mechanics are necessary evils that exist solely to "balance" the game by restricting the things both players and GMs can do. The only reasons why someone would want to use mechanics in their RPG is to keep it from devolving into

"I shot you, you're dead!" "No, I'm wearing bulletproof armor!" "I didn't shoot bullets, I shot a laser!" "Well, the armor's also laserproof!" "Nuh-uh, my lasers are so hot that they melt any armor!" "My armor's a material that can't melt!" And so on. Because we have rules, the players can't just say "we beat this challenge", and neither can the GM say "you haven't beaten this challenge." Because the rules are clear, the rules are obvious, the rules tell you what you can and can't do, and that's it.

So obviously, when the idea of mechanics directly interacting with the roleplay - generally seen as the most free and creative part of a TTRPG - seems at best counterintuitive, at worst absolutely wrong. Hearing this idea, people might be inclined to think of a player saying "I'm gonna do X", just for the evil, restrictive mechanics to come in and say "no, you can't just do X! you first have to roll a Do X check! But you also did Y earlier, so you have to roll the Did Y Penalty Die, and if that one comes up higher than your Do X die, you have to look at this table and roll for your Doing X If You Previously Did Y Penalty! But, if you roll double on that roll..."

But like... that's not how it works. Roleplay-oriented mechanics don't exist to restrict people from roleplaying, they're there to encourage people to roleplay!

Let's go with a really good example for this: The flashback mechanic from Blades in the Dark (and games based on Blades in the Dark).

In BitD, you can declare a flashback to an earlier point in time. Could be five minutes ago, could be fifty years ago, doesn't matter. You declare a flashback, you describe the scene, you take some stress (the equivalent of damage) and now you have some kind of edge in the present, justified by what happened in the flashback. For example, in the Steeplechase campaign of the Adventure Zone podcast, there was a scene where the PCs confronted a character who ended up making a scandalous confession. One of the players declared a flashback, establishing that, just before they walked in, his character had pressed the record button on a portable recording device hidden in his inner coat pocket. Boom, now they have a recording of the confession.

How many times have you done something like this in a D&D game? How many times did your DM let you do this? I think for most players, that number is pretty low. And for two reasons:

The first, admittedly, has to do with restrictions. If you could just declare that your character actually stole the key to the door you're in front of in an off-screen moment earlier, that would be pretty bonkers. Insanely powerful. But, because BitD has specific mechanics built around flashbacks, there are restrictions to it, so it's a viable option without being overpowered.

But secondly, I think the far more prevalent reason as to why players in games without bespoke flashback mechanics don't utilize flashbacks is because they simply don't even think of them as an option. And that's another thing mechanics can do: Tell players what they (or their characters) can do!

Like, it's generally accepted that the players only control what their characters do, and the GM has power over everything else. That's a base assumption, so most players would never think of establishing facts about the larger world, the NPCs, etc. But there are games that have explicit mechanics for that!

Let's take Fabula Ultima as another example: In that game, you can get "Fabula Points" through certain means. They can then spend those points to do a variety of things. What's literally the first thing on the list of things Fabula Points let you do? "Alter the Story - Alter an existing element or add a new element." I've heard people use this to decide that one of the enemies their group was just about to fight was actually their character's relative, which allowed them to resolve the situation peacefully. I again ask: In your average D&D session, how likely is it that a player would just say "that guy is my cousin"? And if they did, how likely is it that the GM accepts that? But thanks to the Fabula Point mechanic making this an explicit option, thanks to rules explicitly saying "players are allowed to do this", it opens up so many possibilities for story developments that simply would not happen if the GM was the only one allowed to do these things.

And it's only possible because the mechanics say it is. Just how your wizard casting fireball is only possible because the mechanics say it is.

Some people think mechanics are restricting because those people either are not used to sharing control of the story or don't want to.

OP is very correct in their assessment and I want to add, as part of my experience researching ttrpgs and creativity for my phd, that mechanics (and limitations and drawbacks in general) can help A LOT.

In the collaborative space of ttrpg (and other "yes, and" forms of storytelling), rules establish expectations. It becomes part of play to look at the rules and go "what can I do with it and how". And playing around the rules can also be part of the fun. "How can this thing I wanna do be possible within the rules?" is a valid question established by any kind of rule.

Also, for some people, constraints help limit the scope of what is possible and they are less likely to get stuck in decision paralysis. When you can do literally everything, it can be hard to decide on what to do.

I love ttrpgs in all their shapes and sizes and I wanna see more and more what people do with what they are given, so pleas, don't let a distaste for rules stop you from playing.

hey did you guys know you can animate in Procreate

You know, even apart from the intricate worldbuilding about the talking rodents and what their deal is, the part of The Secret of NIMH that's like "working single mom trying to obtain medical treatment for her sick child discovers that her late husband was basically a high-level Dungeons & Dragons character and never told her about any of it, and she keeps tripping over elements of his unreasonably complicated backstory whose context and significance are never fully explained to the audience because the particulars aren't relevant to her journey" is a really fun premise all on its own.

I think the part that best illustrates this point is the confrontation with the Owl. Our heroine goes to see a creature from whose lair no-one returns, a creature which is for all intents and purposes a god of death, and the moment she drops her dead husband's name, the Owl is like "oh shit, really?" and agrees to hear her out – but when she asks the Owl what the story is there, the Owl just says "that's not important", and the film literally never brings her late husband's history with the Owl up again, because the story ain't about him.

To expand on this a little bit: Ryoko Kui takes the tools of character design seriously, and uses them with forethought and consideration to set her characters apart, give them personality and specificity, and thinks very carefully about what each piece of design communicates and how it interacts with all the other design in her story.

Body shape, face shape, noses, eyes, brows, hair, proportion, fashion, ears, posture, roundness and angularity, broadness and slenderness, posture... Kui clearly thinks about ALL of it, and incorporates all of it.

And this is part of what gives her story such a profound sense of taking place within a world, a whole world inhabited by thousands of people each of whom are as full and unique and distinct as every other one. You look at a group of her characters and none of them feel like Copy Pasted NPC Placeholder #3457, they each feel as though there is a life there, an individuality, even if they are never actually deeply explored in the story.

Compare and contrast with something like Genshin Impact's style of character design:

Now, I don't bring this up just to sh** on Genshin - its character design style is adapted very effectively to the kind of story and world it is trying to build, which is to say a gacha story where every part of a character is formulated towards the singular goal of appeal. It's a world inhabited by nothing but main characters, essentially, and it is a laser-focused power fantasy structured around constantly pursuing the high of maximum damage numbers pumped out by maximally cool and badass battle moves executed with maximal grace by physically perfect avatars who provide the player with maximal aesthetic pleasure.

But because of that, its character design style is under severe pressure to regress to the mean - i.e. skinny bodies, young bodies, beauty ideals, and a minimal amount of physical difference. This style of character design tends to focus all of its effort in colorful, detailed and attention-grabbing fashion and hair styles, and generally avoids "alienating" design features like, well, literally anything that could be conceptualized by anyone as "ugly." Big strong noses, for example, or larger ears, or wrinkles, scarring, skin folds and so on. Fatness functionally does not exist in Genshin Impact's character roster for this reason, and it's part of the reason why the franchise struggles so notably to design characters of color - the concept of "beauty" is deeply bound up in systemic biases of class, race, gender and nationalism, and since Genshin's character design ethos is "make every character as broadly beautiful as possible" it has to keep hitting the same limited set of beats over and over and over again, and it reinforces the biases it inherits with its inability to step outside of them.

So Genshin Impact characters have a tendency, for me at least, to all kinda blur together into a brightly colored cavalcade of lowest-common-denominator ambulatory clothing racks, characters whose bodies exist for the primary purpose of transporting a highly elaborate costume around.

Kui by contrast very very actively seeks out elements of physical difference, and incorporates them into her design process - she seems to delight in inventing as many nose shapes as possible, as many different kinds of eyes as she can think of, and the result is that she has a character roster which is recognizable even if you change or remove very important parts of their basic design.

Where Genshin Impact (and that style of character design) would severely struggle to make characters recognizable without their costumes, because the characters in large part are their costumes, Kui's design style makes characters extremely recognizable not only in and out of costume, but even if the fundamental nature of their bodies change across species, and it makes her characters of the same race and species eminently recognizable from one another, even while sharing many physical traits and aesthetic features.

anyway tl;dr Ryoko Kui is the best to ever do it.

There should've been a virus causing universal translator malfunction episode on ds9 in which Bashir either knows everyone's languages or only speaks like an obscure dialectic of Arabic and nothing else. Garak and Bashir spend the episode making heart eyes at each other while everyone else tries to stop the space station from exploding

I hear that, and I raise you;

it’s chaos on the station, Bajorans can’t take to starfleet officers, Sisko and O’Brien can only speak to each other. Kira is organizing the bajorans but other than that just has odo. Dax knows some languages, but not enough. The only one who speaks all the languages present in the station…. Is Quark.

He’s used to international travelers, and did business before starfleet and their communicators showed up. Now Sisko and Kira have to talk through him if they want to get anything done. And he charges by the minute.

Little things I don't think non-cane users would know cause Issues™, for reference in writing!

- gusty wind not only throws personal centre of balance off but if you've got a lightweight metal cane it will throw your placement of the cane off

- same goes for being driven past by busses or lorries

- uneven pavements can suck my ass the cane is meant to be parallel to your leg and this is very hard to do when the pavement isn't level

- same goes for cobbled streets, brick paved streets tend to be smoother so I love them <3

- some paving slabs get really slippy when they're wet! This often means that I lean on my cane much heavier bc I can't rely as much on even my good leg to stay stable

- yes cane height should be adjusted to account for heels/ wedged shoes it's a bit of a bastard if you used a fixed length cane

- using a cane for the first few days/weeks hurts! If u only use it irregularly/ on bad days it can hurt every time! Wrists aren't used to taking weight in this way.

Check RBs and my asks tag for more info!

one year ago today i woke up with an idea, 'ha, ha, what if you got isekai'd into D&D? ...as a tabaxi!?' ... and started doodling my first iterations of glimmer.

i started writing, and drawing. the more i wrote, the more it came together. i kept going, and going. and going.

I'm still going.

Everybody talks about how Silver Age Superman is a dick, but a less remarked-upon quirk of the era’s writing is that Silver Age Lois Lane is obsessed with proving that Clark Kent is Superman specifically because she’s convinced if she does, he’ll be obligated to marry her.

Initially it’s implied to be a blackmail thing, but later Silver Age writers seem to have forgotten that and taken “Clark Kent must marry Lois Lane if she discovers his secret identity” as an axiomatic rule, to the point that Kent would often voice worries that he’d be forced to marry other characters who were close to putting the pieces together – regardless of whether they’d expressed any interest in the first place!

Now, do you know which character apart from Lois Lane has the best track record for figuring out that Clark Kent is Superman across all the various reboots, elseworlds, and miscellaneous adaptations?

That’s right: Batman.

So, logically

This particular chain of telephone game characterization fascinates me, because it’s such a clear a to b while still being so bizarre. Which is relatively par for the narrative restrictions put in place by the comics code, but I still wonder if there’s a way to sneak the idea into a modern telling. With the way the last couple decades worth of superhero movies have been ashamed of being superhero movies, probably not.

It really depends on which part of the idea you’re trying to resurrect. The initial “Lois Lane is a crazy stalker who’s trying to prove that Clark Kent is Superman because she plans to use the proof to blackmail him into marrying her” premise would probably fit right into the modern idiom, though it would obviously read very differently than it did in its original, more cartoony Silver Age context. The whole “Clark Kent is for unspecified reasons obligated to marry anyone who uncovers his secret identity” thing that it eventually evolved into would be trickier.

Highlights from the tags.

Commission for a client on Instagram