Khrux

Also the toxicity that is implied to exist by this post is pretty rare really. Even back when I was using Reddit, toxicity generally sank to the bottom of comment sections, and even more so here. When I got into D&D close to the beginning of 5e, some online voices on YouTube for example carried this toxicity but nowadays, most voices are far newer and friendly.

In general, most people are more interested in what happens at their table instead of all tables, and the rules are just guidelines to aid that.

I'm a 50/50 toss up between two reasonably different genres.

The first is coming of age films, particularly queer ones. My go to film to call my favourite is Call me By Your Name, I also love Stand By Me, Aftersun and have a huge soft spot for Kiki's delivery service.

The other 'genre' is dramas / thrillers that get pretty fixated on madness, particularly from the protagonist. There will be Blood is my go to second film to say, and I love Apocalypse Now, Perfect Blue, The Witch and The lighthouse.

I'm not as much fan of when the genres overlap however, although that may be because of how small the sample size is. There are quite a few films that have a young protagonist who is finding themselves, who may end up idolising another to the point that the film falls into being a thriller. We had Saltburn last year, which people often compare to The Talented Mr Ripley, and I do enjoy these films but I never get that milestone feeling that I've just experienced a piece of media that has profoundly impacted me. The only thing that exists in this shared space is one of my favourite novels; The Picture of Dorian Gray.

I'm born in 98' so I'm right down the middle but generally classed as the last of the millennials.

I feel a lot closer to zoomers, but where I'm from, I think the people who have fast-tracked adulthood with kids and mortgages are textbook millennials where as layabouts like myself share a lot more spaces with young adult zoomers.

I'm already needing to remind myself that some of the deepest internet brainrot like skibidi toilet is not a new phrase but a meme of the hour started by generation alpha and then carried by confused millennials.

Yeah I don't like Microsoft but like Office, I just run offline pirated version of their main programs. It's like how I avoid Google for 70% of options but absolutely love Google Maps and Google Translate.

No.

This isn't my standard instance but I do take a look at it sometimes. I'm definitely very far left leaning, I don't have a label that clearly fits me but I'm probably close enough to anarcho-communism or syndicalism. I live in the UK so it's pretty common for my views to fall further left of the USA.

I'm not particularly good at actually adhering to my own views, infact I don't think I've ever done e anything substantial to bringing my ideals into reality. My dream would be for small federated housing / workers co-ops and unions to get a good handle in my area, and then have the stability to grow.

The crucial reason I'm not a tankie is that I actively oppose top down leadership structures, and I'm actually more against authoritarianism than I am against the right, but I feel that in my country, conservatism and authoritarianism are deeply linked, and a bottom up power structure would do more to actively oppose facism and power consolidation than a far left authoritarian regime.

In short, No. My principles may make me a commie, but I'm an anarchist first.

I just always give too much context to my stories, and quickly realise that I'm giving context for context for context and cant remember my point.

My closest friend is very similar here though, and we can have great long conversations that are 20 layers deep of tangents and forgetting our original points. We also sometimes yell 'pin' at eachother as a shorthand for 'lets put a pin in this' which basically means that at some point we're trying to remember what we wanted to say at that point because it was fun.

I read that as "different because..." implied the author was in the closet.

Also, I live in a UK city that may be in the top three for left wing, LGBT, etc support and my best friend has had basically all of this said to her because of her sexuality and worse, including threats of rape yelled at her and threats of murder at her partner. I literally never hear these kinds of comments but they are absolutely things people in the queer community hear all the time.

Being a lame ally is better than being hostile though, and it's a shame this comic blends bigotry with well meaning but lame support.

This is my favourite, it's a little cheesy and fun, but it doesn't have my biggest issue with the Reddit one which is for some reason acting like it's a birthday party.

Surely that would be more of a

Show

This is super cool. It makes me think of the current popular clone of the video game Lethal Company which is called Content Warning, about vloggers trying to get footage of monsters.

In 1958, Disney made a documentary called White Wilderness where they 'documented' Lemmings following eachother off cliffs, becoming a widespread fact. This was proved to be untrue decades later; The documentary crew herded them off the cliffs to their deaths for footage. In 2003, Timothy Treadwell and his partner were killed and ate by a brown bear after living with them for years. The 2005 documentary Grizzly Man by Werner Herzog uses a lot of his own amateur footage documenting his delusion, partial success and ultimate failure that he could live among grizzly bears. These are fantastic sources to derive characters from for this game.

Honestly the idea of using this to run a black comedy sci-fi horror documentary to basically do Blair witch in space is so appealing to me. The only thing I'd alter is that I'd make it a livestream with viewers, donators and sponsors who respond well to the gruesome and macarbe moments. Not just do I think that's fun but also by being a livestream, the players would likely take a much better hand at pacing and seeking the fun than in typical games, where the GM must herd them to these moments, as the players believe they win by getting a lot of donators.

Thank you, I've realised that my approach seems a little different from other here, where I try to pick an RPG for an idea that's forming in my head, based on the genre and tone, settling on an RPG that's 80% there but people love the ruleset, then I chop and change it to get close enough to 100%.

This is probably detrimental in a few ways too, as some games like Lancer are unchangable until I'm familiar enough to peel apart the interwoven mechanics and lore, and I'm not going to touch it because I almost never run official settings and adventures, particularly in longform games.

I will shout out both Alice is Missing and For the Queen, which both get worse when they get altered, because their strength comes from their simplicity and then probably ridiculous amount of playtesting.

Any gumshoe game, probably something shorter than Nights Black Agents: The Dracula Dossier. If I set it in my own setting, I'd like to use Bubblegumshoe to do my own telling of "Tomorrow When the War Began" basically what happens if on the summer camping trip after your last school year, your country is invaded. I can't quite tell how good Gumshoe is for homebrew settings however.

My other want is to run a worldbuilding game such as the quiet year, for the queen or microscope, hacked to set up a concise and thematic noir mystery inspired by fiction like Disco Elysium, The City and the City or The Nice Guys, with a rich and vibrant world that the players are invested in as they built it. I'm tempted to hack the bladerunner RPG by Freeleague for the actual police procedural afterwards.

This isn't a perfect example but Cormac McCarthy has been my favourite author for years now, and his first major work Suttree was from '79.

My all time favourites novel is Blood Meridian from 1985. If you're familiar with metamodernism, which is basically very modern works that have their cake and eat it when it comes to modernist ideals and postmodern critique, you'd clock that practically every western is either a modernist white hat western or a metamodern "the west is grim and hard, but also fucking cool" western. The only straight postmodern takes on the west that I know of are either Blood Meridian or pieces of work that take direct notes from it, such as the films Dead Man from '95 (except maybe the Oregon Trail video game from. 85'). Blood Meridian otherwise is a fantastic novel which meditates on madness and cruelty, religion and fate, race, war and conquest and so many other themes. It also has one of the best antagonists ever written in Judge Holden, a character who I would have called a direct insert of Satan if not for the fact that his deeds and the novel as a whole are closely inspired by true events. I feel the novel takes inspiration from Apocalypse Now, specifically the '79 film and not Conrad's 1899 novel Heart of Darkness. If you enjoy that film, you're likely to enjoy this book. The opening and closing chapters are fantastic, but I often find myself re-reading chapter 14. It has some of the best prose and monologues of the entire novel, and encompasses in my opinion the main turning point of the novel.

His other legendary work is The Road, a 2006 post-apocalyptic novel. I'll talk on this one less but as our climate crisis grows and our cultural zeitgeist swings more towards this being the critical issue of our time, the novel fantastically paints itself as both a fantastic warning to our 21st century apocalypse and the unresolved 20th century shadow of nuclear winter. Despite this, it hones in on a meditation of parenthood and could be considered solely about that, with other themes of death, trauma, survival and mortality being explored through parenthood. Of course the unsalvageable deatg of the world that make the setting also makes this theme extra tragic. There is an adaptation into a film from 2008 but it isn't anywhere near as potent as the novel and I'd suggest should only be seen in tandem with reading the novel. The prize of this novel has really evolved to fit the novel too. McCarthy is renowned for his punctuation lacking prose, but where Blood Meridian is practically biblical in its dramatic and beautiful prose which juxtaposes the plain and brutal violence, The Road sacrifices no beauty in it's language but is so somber and meanders from mostly terse to so florid, while also always perfectly feels like how the protagonists are seeing their world.

I'm quite excited for the d12 and how it's used. Twelve is generally my favourite number just because I like hope satisfyingly divisible it is and I would love to see an RPG that somehow elegantly incorporates this.

I haven't played suited but it's worth asking if you've played it or GM'd it already and if you have, did you feel lacking? Or are you wanting to be as prepared as possible for your game before the first session?

I'm glad they're coming later. The cat is totally out the bag that the reason the 2014 DMG is so hard to actually use is because there was no time to work on it, and we're yet to even see any playtest content for the 2024 DMG.

This is it for me, I basically don't use those keys daily and can access them via a function key when I rarely need them, so I'm gonna prioritise the aesthetics and compactness.

• I feel to underestimated as a player but don't want to hog the limelight.

In Dracula, which is probably as good as we get for established vampire cannon, two quite different vampire coffin based shenanigans happen that stand out to me:

1. Lucy Westenra is preyed upon by Dracula to the point of death, where she is entombed in a coffin within a crypt. As the curse takes effect, she rises at night to hunt local children but returns to the coffin each night. This is where her undeath comes to an end as the hero's defeat her here.

2. Our titular character and general vampire icon, Dracula, has a scheme to set up home in London. He does so by moving 50 boxes of dirt (I believe Transylvanian earth) to different locations around London as he needs them to sleep in. I can't remember if these are canonically coffins or just dirt boxes he sleeps in. Regardless, it's definitely not where his grave lies. He was however buried in the tomb within the chapel of his castle, where he later rose in undeath.

So I'd say in all of Bram Stoker's accounts, vampirism restores a being to undeath some time after they perish, and this place is essential to their rest, meaning they must rest there in a deathlike state, or take their burial place with them, such as the dirt of their grave (which sounds like a legal loophole God should have spotted). They aren't always returning to their grave every night, but the rules say they must, so they make do with moving what God sees as their burial place via moving their earth that entombed them.

My (opinionated) ke. Will AI be the future of dungeons and dragons? Short answer, No.

Long answer, In the designing and development of games, yes, but probably in ways that don't hurt. If WotC has an internal PowerPoint in a revenue meeting and that PowerPoint was made with the assistance of Microsoft Copilot, then AI is already altering our industry, but we're not worried about that.

The thing that seperated the larger TTRPG companies from the smaller ones (particularly WotC but also Chaosium, Freeleague, Darrington Press' etc) is the production of large, high quality products with good art. From my observations, exciting and innovative game design cames from all corners and all budgets of the industry, potentially because it doesn't actually require money in any way, just time to put towards thinking about it.

This means that the rise of generative content to support TTRPGs creation is probably more likely to close the gap between smaller and larger publishers, as it's currently in the creation of art filled, high quality books with elegant layouts and descriptions that independent and small publishers can't compete with, and that's all made easier by AI. The best thing these larger companies can do is pride themselves on everything being handmade and genuine, because they're the only people in the industry who can afford to at this output cost, so I don't see them throwing that away any time soon, infact I genuinely believe WotC actually want to avoid AI generated content and have been victims in their two scandals, from designers ignoring this. If I'm proven wrong here though and AI generated content becomes allowed and common, I wouldn't be surprised either.

However at the table, I am not worried. Plenty of GMs are already using ChatGPT for prompts and to bounce ideas against, or image generation to share the vibe locations and characters with players. I hope we see generative tools and machine learning continue to support GMs in ensuring everyone is having the most fun. Do I ever think we'll have AI GMs? No, never. At least none that will ever be commonplace or better than regular GMs, I'm sure some startup will give it a go at some point and it'll be bland.

Let me tell a quick anecdote. In the pandemic I DMd a 1-17 campaign of D&D 5e over 45 sessions averaging 7-10 hours each. That's because we were all home and bored and could put that much time into a game. Since then, I have played in a campaign with a similar number of sessions at probably 4-5 hours each, and it's taken us 3 years, with a few pauses to play different systems and let others run one-shots. As a player, I really miss DMing weekly and was building up to DMing alongside this game in a style where even if some players can't make it, we play anyway, with ways to get strangers involved to ensure seats are always filled, and that the story would be guaranteed to get told as long as I, the DM, could be there. Months into planning this, I had a realisation. I love TTRPGs and 5e because my friends and I told a wonderful story, and I loved doing that with them and their characters. If I made a game that was effectively indifferent to them and their characters in favour of the story progressing, then I'm cutting out the reason I love the game, it wasn't the story, it was sharing that with my friends.

An AI GM cuts out one of the core things that's amazing about this game; friends. We want to tell compelling stories and have great characters in a well realised world, but most importantly we want to do that with eachother. Tools that supplement and support this will always be welcome, regardless of if they're generative 'AI' tools or anything else, but they'll never successfully usurp the soul of the game which is collaborative storytelling with friends.