alyssa @alyssa@cat.family
🧚♀️
Joined May 2022
very rude of this word game to incorrectly tell me that seax is not a word
@Satsuma i might call it a general store because i think the one that used to exist in my home town had that in the name. i feel like convenience stores in the US do not usually carry grocery items. i am not familiar with either bodegas or corner stores. i think basically i have never actually referred to this type of thing generically. just, like, calling the local one(s) (which other than the one in my home town i feel like i've only encountered in the US on college campuses) by its name/a nickname
A novel #DecRecs for today:
Fable of the Swan, by Jenna Katerin Moran (whom you may know from her RPGs Nobilis, Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, Glitch, among others), is a novel told by a girl who has lost herself and seen the True Thing. It is the story of her loss and her glimpses and her few moments redeemed in the radiance of the swan. It is an explanation of why and how she must unfold herself into a leviathan of burnished brass and gleaming chrome, why she must swim out into the void and fight with he Death—the lord of Death's Dominion, the first of the Riders, the Headmaster of the Bleak Academy is he named. It is perhaps my very favorite work of fiction.
I must offer the content warning that reading it reliably induces minor dissociative episodes in me and leaves me temporarily unable to believe in the reality of the world. I have intentionally reread it more than once knowing this.
how do i reveal to my players that the military riverboat they commandeered is in fact the supposed pirates that they had expressed interest in investigating before... the captain had a stereotypical pirate cap on board and the surviving crew burst into laughter when the PCs mentioned their plans to hunt the pirates. idk what to do unless i just actually tell them straight up
I don’t normally recommend things but I’ll give #DecRecs a try. to start: I’ll recommend the tabletop role-playing game Strike!
It’s a very charming setting-neutral (but action-focused) game that was perhaps the first of the games that decided to combine a D&D-4e-inspired but streamlined tactical combat mini game and combine it with a rules-light core system for situations where that doesn’t apply (or isn’t warranted). Its core rules are centered around simple d6 rolls and learning new skills by trying unskilled rolls. Its combat system has some very delightful class designs, such as the class that’s about playing two different characters and a very cool take on three variations of the classic “Vancian” magician. Its bipartite class/role system also means you can satisfy almost any sort of role in the team with any class.
It is available at https://www.strikerpg.com/ or https://jimbozig.itch.io/strike
it's like just an infinite supply of single-day accesses that still have to go thru the usual like post-subscription flow
library access to the NYT is still rather inconvenient
@pan there's a game called rolemaster that's big on a different kind of very extreme table rolling
like, for every attack, you roll a d100* plus modifiers and you look up the result on the attack table for your weapon, looking in the column corresponding to the armor type you're attacking. and then it tells you how much damage you do and whether you get a critical hit and if so which critical table to roll on and what modifier to apply. (then the critical tables are simpler tables but with lots of very specific (sometimes gory) entries)
it's a lot but kinna neat imo. some related games made it so that there are fewer armor types and not as many attack tables to simplify it a bit.
- there are some extra details where you have a 5% chance of having to roll again and add it and similarly for subtracting so that notionally you can roll any positive or negative number but probably won't go suuuuuper far
thanks glitch-soc for the doodling feature. i forget who did that but thank you.
@pan nodnod
i'm always pretty like minimal with my prep (the obsessive phase tends to mostly go to reading setting stuff, writing rules summaries, and things like that) usually but often when that phase passes i'm like, similarly bewitched by something else and end up having a hard time fitting in even the little bit of prep i think i need to do (in practice it is fine except that sometimes i get sufficiently anxious about it to cancel a session to delay to prep more hehe)
@pan nice. i often have the problem that i have like a phase of being super obsessive about a campaign and spend lotttts of time thinking about it, but that phase ends before the campaign actually gets going hehe. glad yr not having that problem ^
«If it’s ever too much. If you’re ever doing something and it’s just too much. Even if you’ve already started doing it. Even if it doesn’t seem there’s anything you can do but to do it. If it’s ever too much, you can stop.»
—The Night-Bird's Feather, by Jenna Katerin Moran
that said, my beloved @sigmaleph did point out that the argument misquoted the usual claim about the quality of the film and that the correctly-phrased property ("greatest mafia movie ever made") invalidates the argument
peeps on tumblr are out there making reverse ontological arguments about screenplays for fictional films
@Lady i don't think mastodon would really be a particularly good way to follow a tumblr anyway
@aescling @wallhackio there is a ZWSP on the end after the eye. maybe that's breaking the check?
upside of trying out soulbeast in gw2: a furry
downside: i don't throw shiny pink floating swords at people with my mind anymore
also in a practical sense i do more damage more easily
@Lady huh, neat that you can do that
🧚♀️
Joined May 2022
