Northernlion would be an alchemist in the same vein as Van Hohenheim had he lived in Medieval Europe

Too bad God hates him from conception put him here with the rest of us

[reading pigeon message from chat] "silver is washed? Yeah me when the, uhh, the chrysopoeia fails for the third time because I tried to induce fermentation in the white doves before fully dissolving the black crows. Whaddaya talkin about silver is washed? Listen, buddy I know its the the moon to the sun of gold but you gotta have some perspective here. No Abu Bakr al-Razi reading ass." [reading another carrier pigeon message] "I'm not crashing out I'm just saying the only thing im washing my damn silver in is more of the waters of life if you know what im sayin." [Alembic explodes because he was reading chat] "DUDE!!!!"

"Are you stupid? My forever stew is hot! It's soup. How is going to imbalance my humors?"

Then a week later I'll be like

"Sorry guys can't toil today, I have diarrhea. Or as we call it in the medieval era, normal poops."

You heard her

TRANS YOUR GENDER

What and have to compete with Hoshimachi mother fucking Suisei? NO THANK YOU. You'll be seeing my ass in the kiddie pools without the sharks.

thinking about how I hate deckbuilding rpgs, but not because of anything inherent to the genre. I could love it and I see the path to loving it. I hate a single card that nearly every single one of them has

the "this should have just been an attack button" low damage clutter card. bane of my existence. nail in my shoe.

This kind of misses the point of deckbuilding, though? The entire idea is that you have to fine-tune your deck and adjust the curve and balance to improve performance. The point of basic filler cards is to be filler. You're supposed to replace them over time.

They're there so you don't just have access to your best cards all the time. Otherwise, your deck could consist of one hand's worth of really powerful cards, and it would be "this might as well just be a regular RPG". Having filler cards makes a powerful, consistent deck something that you have to work towards.

while I understand the mechanical utility of them, it doesn't do anything to make it more fun. with all things being as they are, what I find to be an intrinsic flaw in a genre is going to be someone else's point of appeal

that being said, I just don't think it's good design.

it's always seemed like a weird collision of the worst tendencies of older jrpg design (default attack spamming when specific spells aren't needed) and the worst tendencies of older ccg design (keeping baseline agency low so that the latter half of the game is more exciting by comparison), but rarely makes adequate use of solutions to those problems from either side

I think this is an artifact of deckbuilding RPGs being (spiritual?) descendants of dominion, where you start out with a deck with 10 shitty cards and over the next 15 minutes you build up to a really good deck. 

In that context it makes sense:

1. Since it’s a multiplayer game, with turn order, in general you want to decrease first turn advantage, and first turn advantage tends to compound when you start off with baseline better decks. The entire nature of deckbuilding RPGs is that you, the player is asymmetric so this makes less sense. 2. It becomes easier to teach and pick up, because the base deck will be filled with pretty easy to understand cards and interactions. This is great where you have a game night where someone might be playing this for the first time, but not so much for an RPG you are going to spend many multiple hours on.

3. The games are often built around removing cards from the deck as a vector of deck improvement, and removing that vector would mean that cards either need to be more complicated or the game itself would be too flat. Obviously when implementing a video game card complexity can go up since it’s a program, not a person executing it. 

4. Having deck removal be a thing means that you can potentially have games where deck removal is NOT a thing, so you can have both games where the player builds up very quickly to very powerful decks, or games where the pacing slows down and you have to consider optimizing your deck in other ways. On the other hand, single player deck builders, the game experience that feels most directly awesome is of course when your deck is awesome.

I don’t know which specific RPG you’re talking about, but I have a lot of Slay the Spire playtime so I’ll just talk about that. And there, I think the bad starter deck is exactly what leads to very varied play experiences.

High ascension play with everyone but the watcher involves lots of thinking on how to trade off short term gain vs longer term success since they start out “behind” the power curve, which means you end up playing completely different decks on different runs. For watcher, the strength of the starter deck means you can hold out until you get exactly the deck you want and the game ends up just being the waiting room for “make a rushdown infinite”. Even if that turns out NOT to be optimal play, the period of time where you play just the starter deck can be significantly longer as you don’t need to pick up any card NOW in order to survive the next three fights, which means 20 different runs of act 1 can start to blend together more. 

I think the need to survive while ALSO building the deck is where most of the interesting strategic decisions are and what separates deckbuilding games from preconstructed CCGs.

Y I K E S didn’t read the sibling post BORN TO DEAD HAND, strikes are a FUCK, 遊戯王combo them all, I am ironclad man. 410,757,864,530  failed runs.

thinking about how I hate deckbuilding rpgs, but not because of anything inherent to the genre. I could love it and I see the path to loving it. I hate a single card that nearly every single one of them has

the "this should have just been an attack button" low damage clutter card. bane of my existence. nail in my shoe.

This kind of misses the point of deckbuilding, though? The entire idea is that you have to fine-tune your deck and adjust the curve and balance to improve performance. The point of basic filler cards is to be filler. You're supposed to replace them over time.

They're there so you don't just have access to your best cards all the time. Otherwise, your deck could consist of one hand's worth of really powerful cards, and it would be "this might as well just be a regular RPG". Having filler cards makes a powerful, consistent deck something that you have to work towards.

while I understand the mechanical utility of them, it doesn't do anything to make it more fun. with all things being as they are, what I find to be an intrinsic flaw in a genre is going to be someone else's point of appeal

that being said, I just don't think it's good design.

it's always seemed like a weird collision of the worst tendencies of older jrpg design (default attack spamming when specific spells aren't needed) and the worst tendencies of older ccg design (keeping baseline agency low so that the latter half of the game is more exciting by comparison), but rarely makes adequate use of solutions to those problems from either side

I think this is an artifact of deckbuilding RPGs being (spiritual?) descendants of dominion, where you start out with a deck with 10 shitty cards and over the next 15 minutes you build up to a really good deck. 

In that context it makes sense:

1. Since it’s a multiplayer game, with turn order, in general you want to decrease first turn advantage, and first turn advantage tends to compound when you start off with baseline better decks. The entire nature of deckbuilding RPGs is that you, the player is asymmetric so this makes less sense. 2. It becomes easier to teach and pick up, because the base deck will be filled with pretty easy to understand cards and interactions. This is great where you have a game night where someone might be playing this for the first time, but not so much for an RPG you are going to spend many multiple hours on.

3. The games are often built around removing cards from the deck as a vector of deck improvement, and removing that vector would mean that cards either need to be more complicated or the game itself would be too flat. Obviously when implementing a video game card complexity can go up since it’s a program, not a person executing it. 

4. Having deck removal be a thing means that you can potentially have games where deck removal is NOT a thing, so you can have both games where the player builds up very quickly to very powerful decks, or games where the pacing slows down and you have to consider optimizing your deck in other ways. On the other hand, single player deck builders, the game experience that feels most directly awesome is of course when your deck is awesome.

I don’t know which specific RPG you’re talking about, but I have a lot of Slay the Spire playtime so I’ll just talk about that. And there, I think the bad starter deck is exactly what leads to very varied play experiences.

High ascension play with everyone but the watcher involves lots of thinking on how to trade off short term gain vs longer term success since they start out “behind” the power curve, which means you end up playing completely different decks on different runs. For watcher, the strength of the starter deck means you can hold out until you get exactly the deck you want and the game ends up just being the waiting room for “make a rushdown infinite”. Even if that turns out NOT to be optimal play, the period of time where you play just the starter deck can be significantly longer as you don’t need to pick up any card NOW in order to survive the next three fights, which means 20 different runs of act 1 can start to blend together more. 

I think the need to survive while ALSO building the deck is where most of the interesting strategic decisions are and what separates deckbuilding games from preconstructed CCGs.

I heard that Inugami Korone has an 8-pack. That Inugami Korone is shredded

International Dog of Violence Collection

One of my favorite Korone moments is still her picking up the Super Shotgun in Doom 2016 and whispering its name in reverent tone, right after she was humming “It’s a Small World” while happily tearing apart zombies with her bare hands.

https://twitter.com/HiFightTH/status/1337930637597057025

I love tumblr. I love that tumblr is the best social media site of 2021.

Every other site has spent the last decade perfecting the art of targeted ads. I am a wallet of flesh and blood which must be stripped bare and profiled and picked apart for the maximally efficient way to squeeze profit from my presence. Every other site will fold and morph itself to a shape of my liking - like a fairy tale trickster stealing memories and taking their mold - to lull me into compliance and loosen my coin purse.

Facebook sees me searching fitness equipment and injects my timeline with athletic wear ads. Reddit profiles the subreddits I follow and eagerly promotes a new coding bootcamp or cloud service at every turn. Google overhears me lamenting over my moving to-do list on voice call and fills in my “how much to tip movers” query before I’ve gotten the third word typed out.

Tumblr never even tried.

They could have. The information is there. The basic infrastructure, presumably, exists. Tumblr can recommend me tags based on tags I follow, blogs based on blogs I follow, even posts that for one reason or another may strike my fancy. Tumblr could be - SHOULD be - funneling this framework into advertising, as the only means that free-to-use social media platforms can turn a profit in our capitalistic hellscape.

They just don’t.

Today I saw an ad for treating Hyperhidrosis - a condition, I think, in which a person sweats too much - and I saw it twice, four posts apart, and it is so incredibly benignly impersonally ineptly untargeted toward me compared to all other pinpoint-aimed advertising that I’m endeared to it. Tumblr knows NOTHING about me. 8 years, 51,000 likes, and tumblr has not learned a THING about me.

Advertisements for a mattress? Shitty mobile game ads that don’t make even the slightest pretense at being anything other than a candy crush rip-off? Choose-your-own adventure games either about Royal Espionage or Choosing The Wrong Dress For Your Date with ZERO in-between.

And then this. This here. The culmination, the crown-jewel of tumblr’s nihilistic non-compliance with the state of social media advertising. Any pretense of capitalistic exchange is abandoned at the gas station by the side of the road. This is not a company. This is not a product. This is not anything that fulfills the contract of consumer and seller. 

THIS. THIS IS WHAT TUMBLR HAS TO OFFER INSTEAD.

“Pour vinegar on your bread, fuck you.”

“Put it in the garbage, fuck you.”

“Your wife says you’re a fucking dumbass, fuck you.”

That’s it. That’s the advertisement. You vinegar-breadless cuck. You virgin extraordinaire bereft of bread and garbage can. I am fucking your wife right now in our vinegar-soaked motel bed. She puffs a cigarette which I pulled from the trashcan and we both laugh heartily at her recounts of your immasculine ineptitude. I don’t want your money. I don’t want anything from you. Fuck you. 

Amazing. Amazing. What a state of things to ring in 2021. What a great platform we all collectively choose to be on.

I started screenshotting my favorite ads

Just fucking take a bite out of your soap you piece of shit. Sleep with it and eat it

I don’t even know what this is trying to sell me. Tumblr doesn’t either. The ad doesn’t know either. Did I click on the link? Fucking absolutely. I think it was broken

Beautiful a+ 10/10

Ok, so before working on Tumblr, even before working for Automattic, I worked for the empire an ad network. We were the middle men that took money for advertisers and bought ad space from apps and sites to place their ads. What you need to understand is this is a totally automated process. Sites like this don’t sell space to every advertiser individually. They use another layer of middlemen called “ad exchanges”. Think about them like eBay for ads, but where the users are just computers.

Long story short, it works like this:

Now, the price for those ad spaces increases exponentially when they include segmentation info. So the bare minimum you get for an ad space is something like “a space of this size, in this app/site, for a system using this language”. From there, a lot of crap about you can be added: with the exception of your name, everything else is fair game: where you are, which sites you have seen, your age, your gender, your friends, the apps you have installed… Facebook options are like a fucked up catalog of human behaviors you can micro-target your ads towards. Of course, if you are advertising something, it’s much more valuable for you an ad spot that can tell you is going to be seen by someone you think is the target of the campaign. So including personal info can make an ad easily 100x or 1000x more expensive.

Everything described happens, literally, in milliseconds, so no human intervention is possible, everything is programmed by folks like me. Folks like me that need to test what they are doing to make sure it actually works in a real life environment.

So we used to have some small real money budget to test things worked as expected. Basically you put a test ad, program it to bid the minimum amount possible (you don’t want to waste your budget and you can get impressions for something as low as 0.001€ if you don’t mind to get the spaces no one wants) and then open an app you know is using the same ad exchange you are using, and start to doomscroll until you get to see your testing ad showing up in the app. Until you get to see it and stop the automatic bidding, another few hundred or thousand totally unrelated folks would have seen it too. And it would have cost your company maybe 0.1€.

Since this is dirt cheap, you launch literally shitposts as an ad. My testing ad to go was a picture of a pony with a button that said “Ride now!” and a link to google.com. if you have seen an ad like that between 2013 to 2015, that’s on me, you are welcome.

Now, of course, the cheaper the ad space, the bigger the chance to get a testing ad from a bored chap that just needs to test the ads their company sells will still be shown after whatever chances they have just done.

So what happens if you have a (hell)site that generates A LOT of traffic, a lot of empty ad spaces, but shares no premium “personal info” segmentation data? The cost of those spaces is going to be the bare bottom, and since there are so many of them, every bid will probably have very few bidders and the price won’t go up. So… Testing shitpost galore!

So every time you see a weird ad on Tumblr, especially when they have broken links or the like… You are seeing a live proof that Tumblr is not selling any info about you (and we are getting almost nothing for every ad we show)

The girl who became a tiger

The girl who became a tiger

For heroes, there are trials

For saints, there are temptations

For me, there is you

FOUND HYETTA IN THE SEWERS LAST NIGHT

sounds like she has the hots for you