shoutout to boring queer people who don’t do shit. just go to work or school and then come home to watch shows. while gay
Do people know this is the husband of the prime minister of New Zealand
And who is the guy burying him in the sand
I’ve seen this on my dash so many times and I honestly can’t tell if this is a real animal or just a super realistic puppet
Its a Pallas cat, it’s a real animal, and they really do look like that..I’m convinced they are the inspiration for Fuzzy’s
This cat just told a bad pun.
I just realized there’s an entire nibble ring around that hole
Pallas’ Cats (Otocolobus manul) also known as Manul are an absolute treasure.
Native Habitat:
everyone always sayin to me "not to be weird" you have to be weird. you have to be weird for your health
"Friends dont look at friends that way" COWARD. I look at my friends with awe in my eyes, my chest is filled with love, im glowing because i get to be near my friends. I look at my friends and i would give them my everything. SO SKILL ISSUE, look at your friends with all the love that you have
(Don't) Incentivise Ethical Behaviour
In the ongoing project of rescuing useful thoughts off Xwitter, here's another hot take of mine, reheated:
The quote comes from Luke Gearing and his excellent post "Against Incentive", to which I had been reacting.
My thread was mainly intended as a fulsome nodding along to one of Luke's points. It was posted in 2021, and extended in 2023 after Sidney Icarus posed a question to it. So it is two threads.
Here they are, long as fuck, and properly paragraphed, hopefully more cleanly expressed:
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(Don't) Incentivise Ethical Behaviour
This is my main problem with mechanically rewarding pro-social play: a character's ethical choice is rendered mercenary.
As Luke Gearing puts it:
Bear in mind that I'm not saying that pro-social play can't have rewarding outcomes for players. Any decision should have consequences in the fiction. It serves the ideal of portraying a living, breathing world to have these consequences rendered diegetic:
The townsfolk are thankful; the goblins remember your mercy; pamphlets appear, quoting from your revolutionary speech.
What I am saying is that rewarding abstract mechanical benefits (XP tickets, metacurrency points, etc) for ethical decisions stinks.
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This is a subtle but absolutely essential distinction, when it comes to portraying and exploring ethics / morality, in roleplaying games.
Say you reward bonus XP for sparing goblins.
Are your players making a decisions based on how much they value life / the personhood of goblins? Or are they making a decision based on how much they want XP?
Say you declare: "If you help the villagers, the party receives a +1 attitude modifier in this village."
Are your players assisting the community because it is the right thing to do, or are they playing optimally, for a +1 effect?
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XP As Currency
XP is the ur-example of incentive in TTRPGs. It began with D&D's gold-for-XP, and has never strayed far from that logic.
XP is still currency. Do things the GM / game designer wants you to do? Get paid.
Players use XP to buy better mechanical tools (levels, skills, abilities)---which they can then in turn use to better perform the actions that will net them XP.
Like using gold you stole from goblins to buy a sword, so you can now rob orcs.
I genuinely feel that such systems are valuable. They are keen and illuminating models for the drives that fuel amoral / unethical behaviour.
Material gain is the drive of land-grabbing and colonialism. Logger-barons and empires do get wealthier and more privileged, as a reward for their terrible actions.
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If you want to present an ethical choice in play, congruent to our real-life dilemmas, there is value in asking:
"Hey, if you kill the goblins you can grab their treasure, and you will get richer. There's no reward for sparing their lives, except that they are thankful."
Which is another way of asking:
"Does your commitment to the ideal of preserving life outweigh the guaranteed material incentives for taking life?"
The ethical choice is the difficult choice, precisely because it involves---as it often does, in real life---sacrificing personal growth and gain. Doling out an XP bounty for doing the right thing makes the ethical choice moot.
"I as the player am making a mechanically optimal choice, but my character is making an ethical choice!"
A cop-out. Owning your cake and eating it too. The fictional fig-leaf of empathy over a calculated a decision to make profit.
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Sidney Icarus asks a question which I will quote here:
"... those who hold to their beliefs of good behaviour don't feel rewarded, and therefore feel punished. And that's not a good feeling. It's an unpleasant experience to play a game where the righteous players are in rags, and the mercenary fucks have crowns and sceptres. So, what's the design opportunity? How do we make doing the right thing feel pleasant without making it mercenary? Or, like reality, do we acknowledge that ethical acts are valuable only intrinsically and philosophically? I have no idea how to reconcile this."
I would suggest that the above dichotomy---"righteous players in rags, mercs in crowns"---is true if property is recognised as the only true incentive.
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Friends As Property
Modern games try to solve the righteous-players-in-rags "problem" in various ways. Virtue might not net you treasure or XP, but may give you:
- Contact or ally slots, which you can fill in;
- Relationship meters you can watch tick up;
- Favour points you can cash in later;
- etc.
How different are these mechanical incentives from treasure or XP, really?
Your relationships with supposedly living, breathing beings are transformed into abilities for your character: skills you can train; powers you can reliably proc. Pump your relationship score with the orc tribe until calling on them for reinforcements becomes a once-per-month ability.
Relationships become contracts. Regard becomes debt. Put your friend in an ally slot, so they become a tool.
If this is what you want play to be---totally fine! As stated previously, games say powerful things when they portray the engines of profit and property.
But I personally don't think game designers should design employer-employee relationships and disguise these as instances of mutual aid.
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Friends As Friends
In the OSR campaigns I'm part of, I keep forgetting to record money. Which is usually a big deal in such games, seeing as they are in the grand tradition of gold-for-XP?
In both games, my characters are still 1st-Level pukes, though it's been months.
I'm having a blast, anyway.
My GMs, by virtue of running organic, reactive worlds, have made play rewarding for me. NPCs / communities / geographies remember the party's previous actions, and respond accordingly.
- I've been given gills from a river god, after constant prayer;
- I've befriended a village of monsters, where we now live;
- I've parleyed with the witch of a whole forest, where we may now tread;
- I've a boon from the touch of wood wose, after answering his summons.
I cannot count on the wood wose showing up. I might try calling him; he might answer. He is a character in the world, not a power I control. Calling on the wood wose might become a whole adventure.
Little of this stuff is codified my stats or abilities list or equipment list. They are mostly all under "misc notes".
Diegetic growth. Narrative change that spirals into more play.
This is the design opportunity, to me:
How do we design and shape TTRPG play culture in such a way that the "misc notes" gaps in our games are as fun as the systemised bits? What kinds of orientation tools must we provide? What should we say, in our advice sections?
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A Note About Trust
The reason why it is so hard to imagine play beyond conventional incentive structures has a lot to do with trust.
Sidney again:
One of the core issues is the "low trust table". I'm not designing just for myself but for my audience. For a product. How much can I ask purchasers and their friends to codesign this part with me?
Us nerds love numbers and things we can write down in inventories or slots because they are sureties. We have learned to fear fiat or player discretion, traumatised as we are by Problem GMs or That Guys.
The reason why the poverty in Sidney's hypothetical ("righteous players are in rags") sounds so bad is because in truth it represents risk at the game table. If you don't participate in the mechanics legible to your ruleset, you risk gradually being excluded from play.
You have no real assurance your GM and fellow players will know how hold space for you; be considerate; work together to portray a living world where NPCs react in meaningful ways---in ways that will be fun and rewarding for everybody playing.
You are giving up the guarantee of mechanical relevance for the possibility of fun interactions and creative social play.
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I honestly believe that the "low trust table" is learned behaviour--the cruft of gamer culture and trauma.
When I game with folks new to TTRPGs, they tend to be decent and considerate. I think there's enough anecdotal evidence from folks playing with school kids / newcomers / etc to suggest my experience is not unique.
And if the "low trust table" is indeed learned behaviour, it can be unlearned.
Which rules conventions, now part of the hobby mainstream, were the result of designers designing defensively---shadowboxing against terrible players and the spectre of "unfairness"?
How can we "undesign" such conventions?
Lack of trust is a problem that we have to address in the play culture, not the ruleset. You cannot cook a dish so good it forces diners to have good table manners.
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This is too long already. I'll end with an observation:
Elfgames are not praxis, but doesn't this specific dilemma in the microcosm of our silly elfgames ultimately mirror real-world ethics?
To be moral is to trust in a better world; to be amoral / immoral is to hedge against the guarantee of a worse one.
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Further Reading
Here are writings from around the TTRPG community about incentive and advancement in games, which I find illuminating:
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However, the reason there is a big debate about this is that behavioural incentives in games clearly do work, either entirely or at various levels. This applies outside gaming, as well. Why do advertising companies and retail business use "rewards" structures to convince people to buy more of their products? Why do people chase after "Likes" on social media?
A comment by Paul_T to "A Hypothesis on Behavioral Incentives" from a discussion on Story-Games.com
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the structure and symbolism of the D&D game align with certain structures and values of patriarchy. The game is designed to last infinitely by shifting goalposts of character experience in terms of increasing amounts of gold pieces acquired; this resembles the modus operandi of phallic desire which seeks out object after object (most typically, women) in order to quench a lack which always reasserts itself.
D&D's Obsession With Phallic Desire from Traverse Fantasy
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In short, my feeling is that rewarding players with character improvement in return for achieving goals in a specific way impedes some of the key strengths of TTRPGs for little or no benefit in return.
Incentives from Bastionland
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When good deeds arise naturally out of the players choices, especially when players rejected other options that were more beneficial to them, it is immensely satisfying. Far more than if players are just assumed to be heroic by default. It gives agency and meaning to player choice.
Make Players Choose To Be Kind from Cosmic Orrery
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Much has been made about 1 GP = 1 XP as the core gameplay loop driver of TSR D+D. But XP for gold retrieved also winds up being something of a de facto capitalistic outlook as well. Success is driven by accumulation of individual wealth -- by an adventuring company, even! So what's a new framework that can be used for underpinning a leftist OSR campaign?
A Spectre (7+3 HD) Is Haunting the Flaeness: Towards a Leftist OSR from Legacy of the Bieth
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Growth should be tied to a specific experience occurring in the fiction. It is more important for a PC to grow more interesting than more skilled or capable. PCs experience growth not necessarily because they’ve gotten more skill and experience, but because they are changed in a significant way.
Cairn FAQ from Cairn RPG / Yochai Gal
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Thank you Ram for the Story-Games.com deep cut!
( Image sources: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/neuron-activation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majesty:_The_Fantasy_Kingdom_Sim https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/special-reports-pdfs/10490978.pdf https://varnam.my/34311/untold-tales-of-indian-labourers-from-rubber-plantations-during-pre-independence-malaya/ https://nobonzo.com/)
Song of the Sea (2014) dir. Tomm Moore
i miss forum signatures
sometimes I put a little happy face on the nuggets to help ease the pain
aw man I posted this one? my bad I'm sorry guys
fanart
thanks
you're welcome
wake the hell up everyone
pentiment + posts
little comic from about a year ago
Death Note AU where hbomberguy makes a five hour long video about youtuber Light Yagami that's initially completely unrelated to the murders (Light would probably plagiarize or have really unhinged right-wing political takes if he was on youtube)
but halfway through he reveals that while researching he stumbled upon evidence that Light might be behind the Kira murders, and then spends like fourty minutes explaining the concept of a shinigami, an hour explaining how he thinks Light used one to commit murders, and then another hour explaining Light's ideology and why the concept of criminals being inherently evil is flawed
He finishes the video by addressing Light directly and telling him that he (Hbomberguy) had his name legally changed before uploading the video, to something that only he knows, making it impossible for Light to kill him
Now Light. I know you're still watching, and I'm sure you've tried writing my name in your book. Or you've at least considered it - after all, if I die, then it points pretty clearly to you as the killer. But then, maybe Kira is just going to try to kill me in order to frame you. We get it, you're very clever.
If watching this whole video hasn't changed your mind - made you *think* about the humanity of the people you are just callously sentencing to death - then I'm at a bit of a loss. But I do know one thing you don't:
My legal name.
That's right. Before I uploaded this video, I changed my legal name, and have encouraged those in my life to do so as well. Frankly, trying to decide what my new name would be probably pushed back this video's release like, a month.
(Aside: Actually it didn't but we can all just pretend it did, it's way more interesting than the minutiae of real issues that cropped up)
So. Is Light Yagami Kira? I can't say for sure. It turns out, accusing a public figure of serial murder comes with a lot of legal ramifications! You would think I'd have learned by now that talking about people has "potential consequences" like "being sued by extremely litigious individuals. "
I spent a long time thinking how to end this video. The only thing I came up with is that there's no way to judge a person by just a list of actions alone. And yes that includes Light, the wanker. Courts spend weeks and weeks trying to litigate criminal cases and they still get it wrong! So even though I think he may be the actual scum of the earth, I hope I'm wrong. I want to believe that, given the opportunity, he wouldn't take the ten seconds to write down my name and take my life with just a flick of his wrist.
*long beat*
But I still changed my name so don't even think about it you little sh-
*bouncy credits music*
(980116) happy birthday seungkwan 🎂
Highlights from the conference room where they nominated contenders for Word of the Year 2023:
• They put Skibidi Toilet on the projector to explain what “skibidi” means.
• Baby Gronk was mentioned.
• We discussed the Rizzler.
• “Cunty” was nominated.
• “Enshittification” was suggested for EVERY category.
• “Blue Check” (like from Twitter) was briefly defined as “Someone who will not Shut The Fuck Up”
• The person writing notes briefly defined babygirl as “referencing [The Speaker]”. He is now being called babygirl in the linguist groupchats.
• MULTIPLE people raised their hand to say “I cannot stress this enough: ‘Babygirl’ refers to a GROWN MAN”
When technical issues occurred while voting on “kenaissance”, everyone had to reassure the speaker, Ben Zimmer, that he was “benough”
In a stunning upset, the last-minute nomination “(derogatory)” DEFEATS “cunty” as the most useful/most likely to succeed word of 2023.
Someone renominates “babygirl” for word of the year, saying that they have spent the past year trying to figure out if people are “little meow meows, blorbos, or babygirls”. This is in front of a room of hundreds of people.
ENSHITTIFICATION WINS WORD OF THE YEAR 2023
While verifying this was true (it is) I discovered that there is a wikipedia article on enshittification