*pinches bridge of nose* I promised myself I wouldn’t blog about this
Really, what I want is a heroic fantasy/sword & sorcery adventure RPG where characters have strong ties to a locale and can take positions of leadership and responsibility. They have to figure out how to protect and foster their community in a dangerous world, and going on dungeon expeditions is part of it but there’s more besides. I think that would be a really cool game.
My dream RPG experience, which I’ve imagined for years but fear I may never realize, is one where there’s a 4X/grand strategy-type domain management game going on in the background. My options at the moment are:
1) play a certain game I choose not to name at the moment, but which offers this experience in complete form, using the classic BX D&D as its chassis. Pros: it’s all there. Cons: it’s pretty complex, but more importantly—the main designer is kind of infamously a dink and I feel self-conscious about asking anyone to play a game written by a dink.
2) figure out something from scratch? maybe using Fate? Pros: the author, being me, would still be a dink, but everyone knows what they get with me, so I feel less self-conscious about asking people to play a game I made. Cons: I’d have to make the whole goddamn game.
Also, general problem that I don’t know if this kind of set-up would actually interest anyone who might play with me, so it might all just be moot.
#it would be a shit ton of work to set up and run either way so that’s not a distinguishing Con for either one#dnd#rpg theory#there actually is a game that bills itself as 4X Fate#i don’t love everything about it#but it would at least give me some ideas to try#and i mean like#Gary Gygax was also a dink#there’s no escaping them
Unsolicited hot take sure to cost me followers:
Roleplaying game books meant for table use should not have glossy pages with graphic backgrounds and big splashy art. They should be like utilitarian reference books, not coffee table books. I should be able to read them easily, and mark in them for my own and my players’ convenience.
When having a bath, I started calling it “having a baff,” and then that segued into “awarding myself a BAFTA.”
tranxio reblogged
tbh i think elision between your ideological enemies is always embarrassing. liberals saying communism and fascism are the same are stupid. communists saying liberalism and fascism are the same are stupid. idk what else to tell you
I made two work mistakes today, one of which was barely inconvenient to another person but immediately forgiven and the other, no one involved knows about yet but as far as I can tell it will have no consequences for anyone at all, and yet……… ANXIETY
tranxio reblogged
Okay! The pain is now entirely gone. Time to get my own thoughts back. Here’s what I want to fill my head with:
- First principles of practical philosophy. I keep finding myself pulled in different directions here, because I’m trying to synthesize a bunch of influences—or, as it more feels like, pilot my way safely through a bunch of shoals. At the base are the Socratic Plato and Kant, and I’m trying to get at them with a perspective grounded in pre-philosophical common sense; I’m also (morbidly?) fascinated with Heidegger and I can’t shake the feeling there’s something there I can excise and appropriate for my own purposes. The goal is to get a full-blooded normative system up and running for myself.
- Dialectical foundations of “political economy” (if I must call it that). Eventually I’m going to want an antipositivist, antimaterialist framework for talking about liberal social theory, and I’m going to want to ground it in those practical foundations. I think the outcome of this would be a weird synthesis of Hegel, Weber, Husserl–Schutz, the classical Austrian economists, and the German Ordoliberal economists that would appeal to no one but myself. Further to that, boning up on my economics would not be a bad idea. If, along the way, I’m thinking about Austrian themes (subjectivity, specificity, process), so much the better.
Help me draw out my thinking on my weirdo idealism and weirdo liberalism!
“My Blue Heaven” as meowed by cats
tranxio reblogged
What if the world were long, silent pauses gathering the detritus of ordinary experience, weaving garlands of the old fishing lines and waiting for those punctuating moments in which all is presented in a kaleidoscopic image which fractures in a thousand places and burns with color? What then?
tranxio reblogged
Reblog if you're hoping 2011 will be a fresh start.
tranxio reblogged
My ethos as a reader is to give an author as much effort and as much charity as I might hope someone reading something I wrote would expend in their effort to understand me. I think to give anything less would be hypocritical.
And like, if you think Hegel or Heidegger are “meaningless,” I definitely think you’re lazy
tranxio reblogged
i want to say there's something like playful as opposed to instrumental reading that you get from longer primary texts
I wonder how much of it comes from having never had to actually write something scholarly. Readers who think “How hard can it be to make a point clearly and coherently?”—if you’ve never had to do it, you have no idea.
tranxio reblogged
i genuinely think it is not possible to be unimpressed with Kant if you've read a serious amount of his work with due diligence
I came to Kant reluctantly. I’d gotten the textbook account and read excerpts from the Groundwork in an Ethics class, and I was convinced there was nothing there to shake my Spinozism. I didn’t give Kant a serious shake until the summer after completing my MA—I figured, heading into a PhD programme, I’d been exposed to enough post-Kantian philosophy to figure there was something there I needed to have a handle on. Reading the whole Groundwork, and reading the first Critique in conjunction with the Groundwork and the second Critique, produced what I can only describe as a conversion experience.
tranxio reblogged
i think lying is always pro tanto wrong at least