It's a Tumblr put a good title here good job

can I get a job as an editor but the only thing I do is correct when someone uses the word "prone" when they mean "supine"

thank you wikipedia for this really good image

a helpful mnemonic for everyone

too good for tags

I think an important part of the "D&D is easy to learn" argument is that a lot of those people don't actually know how to play D&D. They know they need to roll a d20 and add some numbers and sometimes they need to roll another type of die for damage. A part of it is the culture of basically fucking around and letting the GM sort it out. Players don't actually feel the need to learn the rules.

Now I don't think the above actually counts as knowing the rules. D&D is a relatively crunchy game that actually rewards system mastery and actually learning how to play D&D well, as in to make mechanically informed tactical decisions and utilizing the mechanics to your advantage, is actually a skill that needs to be learned and cultivated. None of that is to say that you need to be a perfectly tuned CharOp machine to know how to play D&D. But to actually start to make the sorts of decisions D&D as a game rewards you kind of need to know the rules.

And like, a lot of people don't seem to know the rules. They know how to play D&D in the most abstract sense of knowing that they need to say things and sometimes the person scowling at them from behind the screen will ask them to roll a die. But that's hardly engaging with the mechanics of the game, like the actual game part.

And to paraphrase @prokopetz this also contributes to the impression that other games are hard to learn: because a lot of other games don't have the same culture of play of D&D so like instead of letting new players coast by with a shallow understanding of the rules and letting the GM do all the work, they ask players to start making mechanically informed decisions right away. Sure, it can suck for onboarding, but learning from your mistakes can often be a great way to learn.

I think this also hurts group dynamics as well.

When you have people that have actually done some reading on the rules vs. people that just coast and foist the majority of the game onto the GM, it makes it appear like the more knowledgeable players are sweaty power-gamers or rules-laywers.

Best example I've got with asking players to make informed decisions was when I ran the Wilderfeast Quick Start. The GM has the info about what ingredients can be gathered in any of the regions, but the party then has to cook it. They know what the ingredient does and just have to make the decision on how they want to combine their ingredients as a party.

#i just wanna play a silly game#i feel like. gatekept. while reading this#i don’t have the drive to read a several hundred pg game manual i just wanna play a game w my friends#like. it’s a game. play it how u want#jeeze

My point is not to say that people who don't want to learn the rules shouldn't play, only that people who don't actually know the rules aren't necessarily engaging with the game to its fullest, especially in the case of a relatively rules-heavy game like D&D, and that as the previous poster mentioned it can actually result in a bad rules dynamic where the DM needs to do more work due to player unwillingness to learn the rules as well as casting players who actually know the rules and can engage with them in unfavorable light. All of these are negative elements of the culture of play surrounding.

Like, there isn't anything meaningfully gatekeepy about saying "players who don't know the rules of the game aren't as good at playing the game as the people who know the rules of the game." Because playing games is a skill that can be cultivated and knowledge of the rules is an important part of that skill.

And respectfully, if the idea of learning the rules of D&D seems like an insurmountable task, you don't have to learn them, but you might actually gain something out of actually making an effort because it can make engaging with the game more rewarding for you. Or if the idea of learning the rules of a game that has hundreds of pages is an insurmountable obstacle, there are lots of games with much more modest page counts! D&D is actually relatively heavy as far as RPGs go but it's not the only RPG, and you can get rewarding mechanical engagement combined with cool stories for a much smaller time investment.

Pointing out that, if you're playing a game with a several-hundred-page rulebook and haven't even made the effort to read the parts of it relevant to your character, then you're pushing a lot of cognitive load onto your friends, isn't gatekeeping. Nobody's kicking you out of your group for it.

i also think that the OP is kind of more about the people who bite back against people going "hey, maybe try something other than D&D" with "but those games are too crunchy/hard to learn" when they don't even really know the actual rules of D&D. i mean, i've had people like this push back against learning PbtA games.

i really hope this was just an unusual case, but i've even had that exist response from one of the local DMs where i live, when i invited him to be a player in a game of Masks i was starting up.

Oh yeah, that was definitely the original context. And it's really funny to hear "learning another game is hard" as a reason for not engaging in game beyond D&D when clearly people are not learning D&D either if they consider the act of reading the rules beyond the pale.

The folks this post is about are the reason you get dudes on Reddit posting about prepping to DM games for 60+ hours a week and still feeling inadequate.

At this point, it’s a fun game for *almost* everyone at the table. And nobody wants to take on the role that has you showing up to game night with a wagon full of paper, an external hard drive, and a heart condition due to anxiety.

Be kind to your GM. Learn bits of the rules and help out :)

Quite so. If you just want to fool around and occasionally roll some shiny math rocks, that's a perfectly cromulent aspiration, and there are plenty of games that will give you exactly that – but if you just want to fool around and occasionally roll some shiny math rocks while simultaneously insisting upon using a rules-heavy system whose rules you refuse to learn, what you're doing in practice is making the GM do all the work of playing your character for you. It isn't gatekeeping to point this out; it's simply a fact. To be sure, there are a few GMs who are receptive to that sort of thing – it's often termed "black box" play in the hobby's jargon, likening the rules to a box the players can't see inside – but most GMs merely tolerate having all the work of making your character happen dumped on them for the sake of avoiding drama. It can be worthwhile to think carefully about whether this is something you're really okay with doing to someone you call a friend.

Like, there's this stereotype of the "play literally any other game" crowd as a bunch of arty snobs who want to force everybody to play semi-freeform Jungian psychodramas about giant telepathic bugs or what-have-you, but in my experience, the greater part of them are folks who've been GMing Dungeons & Dragons for years, and spent that time single-handedly doing all the work of making the game happen, and all they really want is for their group to pick a game whose baked-in expectations regarding mechanical engagement are compatible with the level of engagement they're actually willing to put forth!

These are adults btw

Fake ass fans too. All they did was more accurately translate the original Japanese where she was already trans. Albeit they were certainly weird about it in the original Japanese. I'm curious if they toned down (or hopefully removed) the misgendering that was seemingly a running "gag" if you can call it that in the Japanese version for the rerelease.

i think of this image at least once a month its so funny how this is just what its actually like

Biblically accurate Florida

That awkward moment when you break the shower wall….

I will absolutely reblog for the gif every time

The thing about Microsoft shutting down Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin is that it isn't really a case of finance bros not understanding how game development works. Sure, saying "we need smaller games that will win us awards" while shuttering studios which have a record of producing smaller, award-winning games looks dumb on paper, but you need to know how to parse corporate doublespeak.

In brief, they want the prestige of producing smaller, award-winning games, but not the risk. The way you get the former without the latter is by constantly buying up independent studios which already have successful titles in their portfolios, keeping them around long enough to provide post-launch support, crank out paid DLC for their already-proven properties, and finish development of whatever is currently in the pipeline, then dismantle them and shut them down before they get any funny ideas about risking your money on new, unproven projects.

If you're thinking "hey, that sounds a lot like a predatory business model", well, exactly.

There are so many unintended consequences to well-intentioned actions. It feels like a game you can’t win.

#CHIDI WAS RIGHT

The Good Place really went with making their new Point ‘there is no ethical consumption under capitalism’ and I respect that

And then went on to say “blaming individuals for all of this is absurd and evil, as is locking them up for punishment instead of rehabilitation” and I respect that

Also, “consequentialism is a fundamentally flawed branch of ethics”

The whole "the brain isn't fully mature until age 25" bit is actually a fairly impressive bit of psuedoscience for how incredibly stupid the way it misinterprets the data it's based on is.

Okay, so: there's a part of the human brain called the "prefrontal cortex" which is, among other things, responsible for executive function and impulse control. Like most parts of the brain, it undergoes active "rewiring" over time (i.e., pruning unused neural connections and establishing new ones), and in the case of the prefrontal cortex in particular, this rewiring sharply accelerates during puberty.

Because the pace of rewiring in the prefrontal cortex is linked to specific developmental milestones, it was hypothesised that it would slow down and eventually stop in adulthood. However, the process can't directly be observed; the only way to tell how much neural rewiring is taking place in a particular part of the brain is to compare multiple brain scans of the same individual performed over a period of time.

Thus, something called a "longitudinal study" was commissioned: the same individuals would undergo regular brain scans over a period of mayn years, beginning in early childhood, so that their prefrontal development could accurately be tracked.

The longitudinal study was originally planned to follow its subjects up to age 21. However, when the predicted cessation of prefrontal rewiring was not observed by age 21, additional funding was obtained, and the study period was extended to age 25. The predicted cessation of prefrontal development wasn't observed by age 25, either, at which point the study was terminated.

When the mainstream press got hold of these results, the conclusion that prefrontal rewiring continues at least until age 25 was reported as prefrontal development finishing at age 25. Critically, this is the exact opposite of what the study actually concluded. The study was unable to identify a stopping point for prefrontal development because no such stopping point was observed for any subject during the study period. The only significance of the age 25 is that no subjects were tracked beyond this age because the study ran out of funding!

It gets me when people try to argue against the neuroscience-proves-everybody-under-25-is-a-child talking point by claiming that it's merely an average, or that prefrontal development doesn't tell the whole story. Like, no, it's not an average – it's just bullshit. There's no evidence that the cited phenomenon exists at all. If there is an age where prefrontal rewiring levels off and stops (and it's not clear that there is), we don't know what age that is; we merely know that it must be older than 25.

Found my 53yo very-much-not-online father in the kitchen today meticulously arranging cutlery on the countertop and i was like 'what are you doing' and he looked up at me with the world's most shit-eating grin and said "Your mother told me this is how you rick-roll the Youth" and i looked over and it was fucking. Loss.jpg.

i must stress that he's never seen the original comic. My mother simply showed him the shorthand symbol and he memorized it. As far as he is aware this is just a fucking hieroglyph that deals instant psychic damage to everyone under the age of 30

Ok wait let her speak

Please give evidence beyond “I hate them” or “I like sleeping in” or “I have to get up early”, none of which is actual evidence

Signed

an actual morning person

Night person who needs to see a doctor/get your car worked on/go to the bank/buy groceries, etc? You're gonna have to sacrifice sleep for it. Because for some reason it was decided that most places of business should open in the morning and close in the evening. Fewer and fewer places are 24/7. Wanna go for a nice stroll in the park? Tough shit, they close at sundown. Hell, want to just go for a walk in general? Fair chance of being harassed by the cops because being out and about in the dark is "suspicious" behavior. Want something that's not fast food and don't want to/can't cook for yourself? Best we can do is a diner like Denny's or IHOP. Got a loved one in the hospital you want to visit between work and sleep? Either gotta get up early or stay up late to meet visiting hours.

And let's not forget, no matter how little you actually sleep and how much you actually get done, if you're not awake during certain hours it means you're a lazy good-for-nothing. Express a desire for more places open 24/7? Selfish and entitled. Complain about how noisy your neighbors are during your sleep hours? Well you can't expect the world to tiptoe around you. But also you'd better keep it down at night because other people are sleeping!

But don't worry! There are plenty of guides on how to "fix" your sleep schedule out there! You just have to follow a strict, often disruptive routine that you can never stray from even a little or else you'll fall back to your natural sleep schedule lazy, undisciplined ways.

And at that, good luck finding a job that doesn't expect you to be in by 9 AM at the latest. Which means getting up at 7:30 AM at the latest, earlier if you have a commute. Which means getting to bed at 11:30 PM at the latest.

Which means night owls have a straight choice between self-employment/freelance work, with all its insecurities, or constant self-torture. (Oh yeah, sleep deprivation does count as torture, per the UN.)

I hate to break it to y'all, but people are not inherently morning or night people. Your body will automatically adjust to whatever your sleep schedule is. You might wake up miserable to an alarm for a few weeks while you get used to the routine, but you too can be a morning person (or you know, push yourself to stay awake longer for a few weeks to become a night owl)

Huh, good to know my doctors are wrong and if I just push myself I’ll be okay!!!

"People are not inherently morning or night people"

The amount of sheer confidence this BS is stated with.

Wow, it's almost like people's natural sleep schedules are subject to some amount of natural variation just like damn near everything else! Who'd have seen this coming! Well, aside from the people actually paying attention to science, I guess!

Thank you for coming in with the science punch!!!! I was too exasperated and went with snark.

Not to mention that from an evolutionary biology standpoint, it makes perfect sense that a portion of the population is acclimated to being more awake at night. Go back to when we were communally living in nature. You would want to have someone watching your back while the others slept to protect the group from the various threats, like predators. And you would want that person to be wide awake. So it tracks that this is a trait that would be valued and therefore persist.

Also re: job opportunities - I specifically work as a night nurse and overnight nursing pays better than daytime nursing, even though I am technically doing less. It is still obnoxious that I have to suffer if I want to get anything done vis a vis car repairs, grocery shopping, buying any essential goods or services, doctor’s appointments however.

We also know that the circadian cycle changes with age. Ask anyone with teenagers and they will tell you. There is research that shows that current high school times are genuinely not suited to the people who we are supposed to be educating there. We've known this for decades at the least and nothing has changed. Which just goes to reinforce the original post. Forcing an early morning diurnal schedule is, in fact, oppressive.

I've seen posts going around claiming that petting animals is basically tricking them into thinking they're being groomed, and it's bugging me because, like, there's no trickery afoot. Petting and scritching are grooming activities. They help to dislodge loose fur and foreign objects and more evenly distribute protective oils, among other things. Primates are social groomers, and the human impulse to scritch is the legacy of our primate ancestors. We see an animal we like, even a dangerous one, and the monkey brain says "groom that thing".

Sucking a guy's dick is basically tricking him into thinking he's having sex

derin why

I'm helping

look at my head boy