| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Hey, the Shire-loving halflings are great, too! Halflings are great in most incarnations. They're absolutely wonderful for providing a uniquely chill, easy-going energy to an otherwise hyperintense adventuring party. Halflings are the only race that's just generally pleasant.
That said, Eberron's "dinosaur riders/tiny Mafia" halflings are fantastic.
Eberron has some of my favorite takes in an official D&D setting in general. Orcs, goblinoids, elves, halflings, warforged (who are, honestly, D&D's best race in general)—basically everybody but kobolds, gnomes and dwarves got something cool and unique to the setting. The idea of imposing a "duality", where every race has at least two "shticks" to choose from, is a really clever way of emphasizing variety. Halflings aren't just dinosaur-taming nomads, they're also the Mafia. Elves aren't just Dia de los Muertos, they're also the Mongols.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
The town I had everyone start in was a gnome town called Whalebone in the middle of a forest that had grown up around the petrified bones of a great whale that had fallen from the sky in prehistoric times.
No one figured out it was a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference.
I love halflings, my one character that lived was a halfling.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Hey, the Shire-loving halflings are great, too! Halflings are great in most incarnations. They're absolutely wonderful for providing a uniquely chill, easy-going energy to an otherwise hyperintense adventuring party. Halflings are the only race that's just generally pleasant.
Not in Dark Sun...
DARK SUN FOREVER
SPELLJAMMER RULES THEM ALL.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Being told "Hey did you know halflings are cannibals in Dark Sun?" is one of the three certainties of D&D, along with bad rolls and struggling to schedule sessions. :P
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Tammy doesn't need a desert to eat people.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
In practice, what law there is in elven society is usually more based around good reputation and persuading others to your side. Which is to say, propaganda and gossip. The elves carry themselves like they're Athens or Camelot, but a pretty heiress who throws some good bacchanals and befriends half the other nobles will have an easy keeping the system under her thumb. It's definitely not perfect, but because the nobles don't really have a lot of control over Kyonin anyways, it's more just a source of amusement for the "common" elves.
Luckily, elven society has always bent towards decency, so the "just ignore the rules and do what feels right" approach is generally okay—if unbelievably frustrating for many rules-minded visitors.
| 7 people marked this as a favorite. |
... I just don't like the Mark of Cain vibes, nor the weird obsession with making drow sexy evil matriarchy bondage elves.
If drow were a true matriarchy, they wouldn't be dressed in tight bondage latex & leather all the time. They'd be wearing comfy sweatpants, oversized sweater-shirts, and flats. Maybe slippers. Probably fiendish lululemon (luludemon?) yoga pants for in-public casual events.
Be brave, put your Drow in cargo shorts, Crocs and sweater vests (tank tops).
... I just don't like the Mark of Cain vibes, nor the weird obsession with making drow sexy evil matriarchy bondage elves.If drow were a true matriarchy, they wouldn't be dressed in tight bondage latex & leather all the time. They'd be wearing comfy sweatpants, oversized sweater-shirts, and flats. Maybe slippers. Probably fiendish lululemon (luludemon?) yoga pants for in-public casual events.
STOP BEING RIGHT
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'm really liking this season of Yamishibai.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I removed the Eberron-specific details from this one. This is less a "hot take" and just how I tend to depict hobgoblins in my games, in keeping with their Lawful Evil alignments and general "sneaky, canny soldiers" flavor.
A hobgoblin never misses a chance to snatch defeat from the bitter jaws of victory, as the saying goes. It is said that a hobgoblin always plays chess like he's down to a king and a pawn; he might play very well or very poorly, but there's not a long you can accomplish with a king and a pawn. It is said that a hobgoblin never forgets a slight, no matter how minuscule, and will destroy themself in the effort of punishing it. The best way to understand a hobgoblin is to know what she has lost.
It's hard to blame them. Hobgoblins are intensely proud, but at the same time, trauma grips them like thorny briar branches, runs through their veins like sickness. Hobgoblins take any loss hard. They are accustomed to having their victories tarnished. This is, perhaps, why so many hobgoblins are Lawful Evil. Hobgoblins are used to having to scrape to keep both their lives and their dignity, and so a hobgoblin often behaves like the general of a losing side, honorable in defeat but ruthless in their bitter determination to hold on to the last breath.
This isn't all bad. A hobgoblin is at her best when she's up against a wall, given few resources, and forced to make do. When cornered, a hobgoblin is a ferocious fighter, a brilliant tactician, and a loyal comrade. But when she is given the upper hand... ah, the lengths she will seemingly go to to spoil her own victory.
Hobgoblins don't make a lot of friends. Surprisingly, a lot of hobgoblins have severe abandonment issues, and are, at the same time, very afraid of commitment. A hobgoblin will with one hand grip his loved ones close, to the point of near-dependence... and with the other hand push them away, before they can plot to betray him.
Hobgoblins don't see stealth, lying and cheating, or even fleeing a losing battle as dishonorable. They see every altercation through the eyes of a general—there are rules they'll follow, but surprise attacks, trickery and retreat are all tools of an honorable tactician. On the other hand, accepting help from enemies, debasing oneself by begging for mercy, resorting to "elf magic", relying on the kindness of strangers... these are far worse offenses.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
So, they are basically Browns fans.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Every now and then, I get really caught up thinking about how to adapt D&D adventures into movies, shows and miniseries. I don't know why. Adaptation is just a neat process.
- Diamond Lake and Alhaster are merged.
- Blackwall Keep, Spire of Long Shadows and Isle of Last Resort are merged.
- Diamond Lake and Alhaster are merged. Mahuudril is in Diamond Lake, manipulating the scheming manager Balabar Smenk into erecting a great pyramid, destroying the cairns in the area. Smenk is obeying her out of a mix of greed for more wealth and power, fear, and blackmail, but he's not totally blind to the danger.
- The Whispering Cairn is one of many cairns in the area linked to the Order of the Storm's ancient battle with Kyuss and Kyuss's rise to power. It contains a shard of Balakarde's soul, which is what helps the heroes. Filge has also set up shop there, trying to work out what Mahuudril is looking for in all these cairns.
- Dragotha is basically a non-actor in things, while Mahuudril, Lashonna, and to a lesser extent the Harbinger are the real players. Lashonna just wants all three out of the way because she wants to be chosen as Kyuss's vessel.
Main Characters:
- 2-3 "best friends" who grew up in Diamond Lake, kind of the core of the story. The protagonist is one of them. They form the plan to loot the cairn, everyone else tags along.
- A "professional adventurer", really rough type, just in it for the money
- 1-2 lovable side characters, Gimli/Legolas style
- If you want, an edgy character, like a heavily modified Filge or just a general "former villain", to play up some themes of redemption. Or a love interest. Look, I'm a sellout, I know how things work.
Main Themes/Character Arcs
- The frog in the slow-boiling pot will allow itself to be cooked alive. This may not be scientifically accurate, but it's a good metaphor to the world situation. Everything's rotting and decaying and a lot of people aren't doing anything about it. Many of the "heroes" are tempted to do the same.
- Disillusionment
- Nostalgia and getting lost in the past vs. trying to fix the present
- The main hero worries they aren't cut out for this, and is depressed by the cynicism and misery clouding the world and their companions. Obviously, by the end they come to terms with this and fight to make things better.
- Lashonna is written as sort of a tragic villain—a vampire who is celebrated as a hero for what her living counterpart did, tormented by the ways she doesn't measure up to her living self. She hates mirrors because she can always see the Living Lashonna within, pleading with her to stop from continuing down her self-destructive path. Lashonna hates Dragotha, the Order of the Storm, and the world, and her bitterness, envy and hatred will only end one way for her.
Story Beats
Act One (The Whispering Cairn/Three Faces of Evil)
The characters meet up to explore the Whispering Cairn, figuring there must be special in all these tombs if Smenk and his new friend are so obsessed with them. Maybe something they can get rich off of. The exploration goes well, with one or two iconic fights and puzzles, but between encountering Filge and the spirit of Bucknard, they begin to suspect something's up. The team takes its final form. This is a very packed Act One, so a lot has to be condensed.
Act Two (Spire of Long Shadows/Blackwall Keep/Last Resort/Wormcrawl Fissure)
Having met Lashonna, the party goes to the Mistmarshes, where they encounter local lizardfolk tribes who help them get to the keep. The lizardfolk give plenty of warnings, references to rotting eggs and incoming wars with humans; the lizardfolk tribes are the last members of the Order of the Storm. All they know now is that the Obsidian Ring must be secured at all costs. The fights in the Spire are rough. Visions tell the PCs of the important details, and the Harbinger is destroyed, but they lose a member while escaping the swamps.
The party is devastated, but Lashonna comforts those of them losing hope, perhaps sitting with one and foreshadowing her own secret past while encouraging them onward. Overall, this is their "Gandalf is dead" moment—a dark moment, but not the true End of Act Two yet.
This is quite a busy Act Two, so the lizardfolk are mainly setpieces, and much of the Spire is safely in ruins.
The party goes to battle Dragotha, traveling through a landscape torn apart by war between the dragons and giants. Yet another problem in the world. In the Tabernacle, they learn here the foul truth: Dragotha really has almost no idea what's going on, aside from what the visiting Mahuudril has told him. He's a bitter old man slowly withering away and turning into a demilich, and is quite incapable of even leaving the Fissure after his last war. Even the great villains are rotting away, it seems. He and Mahuudril know Lashonna is betraying them one-by-one.
The heroes kill Mahuudril, but Dragotha proves a greater challenge. He kills one and/or hits one with his breath attack, causing a slow withering that will eventually kill them. The reveal from him that Lashonna has betrayed them, that she is an agent of Kyuss, and that she has killed their wizard friends they introduced her to is the End of Act Two darkest hour moment.
The party separates, and only a few go to fight Lashonna in a doomed effort to stop the rise of Kyuss and save Diamond Lake.
Act Three
Obviously, the other heroes show up to help. Lashonna becomes the vessel of Kyuss, but her identity is consumed in the conclusion to her tragic arc of self-destruction, and the heroes destroy her and Kyuss and save the world.
Optional Tweaks/Bonus Points
- Lashonna's living soul could replace Bucknarde, trying to contact the PCs but helpless to warn them.
- Bucknarde could be an old friend of a PC.
- I have a note here, I'm not sure when I wrote it — Smenk gets punched in the face at the end. What could this mean?
- The Ebon Triad could be present to some extent, but likely you'd disregard the "Overgod" stuff or minimize it.
- You could cut the Harbinger put Dragotha in Kuluth-Mar for a massively simplified experience—especially if the PCs get rebuffed the first time and have to flee before Lashonna talks them back into things.
You could easily split it into 2-3 movies and it would pace better, but this is assuming a stingy studio.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
| 7 people marked this as a favorite. |
That photo's completely out of context. I stubbed my toe.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
"Gosh, [wizard PC], you sure are powerful. Why do you even need me?"
"Gosh, this monster sure is taking a while to attack."
"Gosh, the evil necromancer sure has a stupid plan."
"Gosh, my friends, the enemies always seem to know what we're going to do next. They must be scrying us, since there's no way otherwise for that to happen beyond, say, some weird plot contrivance."
I don't know why people bother with PbP, arguably the least stressful medium for openly stating your discomfort from the safety of behind your screen, if they're just going to be passive-aggressive children about it.
Yeah, it's really eating at me. None of my players read this thread—and besides, I've always been open with them about asking them not to do that. Because I like handling things directly! Because I'm marginally an adult and life is too short for D&D games where we're all sniping at each other like a high school gaming club.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'm in three games. One I recently started, and it's lovely, with the players getting along very well and handling problems well. One I've been running for nearly a decade, and it's a mixed bag (speaking of "act your age", I started running it when I was, like, 18), but I enjoy the characters and storyline, and the players are really committed.
It's really hard to regulate and know how much I'm annoying people, but I think my best measure for it is that people are being pretty honest and fair about how they don't want to have to deal with it. They're here to have fun, which is a normal way to feel about a PbP. It's not their job to accommodate one player who chemically can't help but take every side comment as a sign that she's unwanted.
I think I'll be happier not playing it than playing it. But I'm also making myself sleep on it, because I know how my brain works and I'm sure I'll have a more nuanced understanding of things by then.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
It's been a pretty interesting week. This is the last day of the first half of my "forced" exile from writing—the second half I'll actually start trying to form a routine again, but slowly. I'm looking forward to it. Lots of ideas come from taking a step back.
On an unrelated note, a funny thing I've been sort of examining lately is the impact of one's main community growing up being a bunch of old gamers (and fashionably aged gamers, of course). It's sort of like how you're always a kid when you're talking to certain people—teachers, parental figures—except it's for this whole forum. It's not necessarily a good or bad thing; the Paizo forums are home. But as I've been sort of trying to get back into them, I am more conscious of how I've felt a need to assert my "maturity" here that I sure don't feel in other communities.
The D&D/RPG community has changed so much in the last fifteen years. Lots of new blood from the podcasts and new editions, a lot of growing up in general as we all started reckoning with old bad tropes, the Edition Wars (and subsequent burnout as ninety percent of us realized we really didn't want to fight anymore about such stupid things*), all the new indie RPGs and niche playstyles.
I think RPGs finally went "nerd mainstream" again, after a long spell of being seen as the "nerdy even for nerds" hobby. It's neat seeing people trying to negotiate that from all sides of it—grognards trying to decide whether to be resistant or embrace the changes, new players trying to work out whether to join the old communities or build new ones. I know a lot of zoomers who play D&D, but they come at it from a very different place than I do.
Pathfinder 1e and D&D 5e both have a special place in my heart, but I know that 5e is probably a huge part of what drove the revival. People needed a fresh entrance point that emphasized RPGs' most immediately engaging elements, and PF's focus on statblock-building, while fun as all heck, just isn't it.
*... when we could be fighting over whether mages are stronger than martials, or whether an alchemist flask only deals its 1 splash damage against a swarm. You know. Important fights.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
It's been a pretty interesting week. This is the last day of the first half of my "forced" exile from writing—the second half I'll actually start trying to form a routine again, but slowly. I'm looking forward to it. Lots of ideas come from taking a step back.
On an unrelated note, a funny thing I've been sort of examining lately is the impact of one's main community growing up being a bunch of old gamers (and fashionably aged gamers, of course). It's sort of like how you're always a kid when you're talking to certain people—teachers, parental figures—except it's for this whole forum. It's not necessarily a good or bad thing; the Paizo forums are home. But as I've been sort of trying to get back into them, I am more conscious of how I've felt a need to assert my "maturity" here that I sure don't feel in other communities.
The D&D/RPG community has changed so much in the last fifteen years. Lots of new blood from the podcasts and new editions, a lot of growing up in general as we all started reckoning with old bad tropes, the Edition Wars (and subsequent burnout as ninety percent of us realized we really didn't want to fight anymore about such stupid things*), all the new indie RPGs and niche playstyles.
I think RPGs finally went "nerd mainstream" again, after a long spell of being seen as the "nerdy even for nerds" hobby. It's neat seeing people trying to negotiate that from all sides of it—grognards trying to decide whether to be resistant or embrace the changes, new players trying to work out whether to join the old communities or build new ones. I know a lot of zoomers who play D&D, but they come at it from a very different place than I do.
Pathfinder 1e and D&D 5e both have a special place in my heart, but I know that 5e is probably a huge part of what drove the revival. People needed a fresh entrance point that emphasized RPGs' most immediately engaging elements, and PF's focus on statblock-building, while fun as all heck, just isn't it.
*... when we could be fighting over whether...
the last 15 years have been interesting, yes.
I still do not care for 5e. I do wonder what would have happened if Paizo took umbrage with 5e using a mechanic they invented as such a large part of their game, and what would have happened if Paizo used it more(say to replace Bless and Bane).
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Advantage is an idea so good it basically sold me on 5e on its own. Like, Pathfinder 1e's biggest flaw is arguably that they thought to add a bunch of "reroll" mechanics too late, leaving us largely stuck with Third Edition's overwhelming bonus creep. Advantage eases one of the d20-based RPG's biggest flaws, which is how easily a good idea and good character moment can turn into boring failures or humiliating slapstick with an unlucky roll of the die.
My unpopular opinion is that the d20 simply isn't a good die for the kind of hobby D&D and Pathfinder have become, but, well, what can you do? I like to have players roll 2d10 whenever possible (which also allows me to make 5e's Advantage system a bit more modular), but that's such a drastic change I hesitate to even suggest it a lot of the time.
I also really like "failure as a complication, not a stop sign" systems. Unfortunately, "failure as a stop sign" is a premise both PF and 5e are pretty hard to extricate from.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I homebrew failure as a complication into a lot of situations in my PF1 game. My players, weirdly, dislike homebrew rules, even this one. They like PF1 specifically b/c so much is pass fail and math. If they jam enough bonuses in, the role of luck is reduced when they have fixed DCs like 10 plus a monster's CR or what have you.
Personally I miss the old Marvel Slugfest tables and such. You might miss with an attack altogether, getting a white result, but then with Green you hit, did some damage; a generic comic book panel. On a Yellow result you hit AND there was some devastating effect like you slam the villain away from you, or your shot caused a nearby wall to crack or something. On a red there was the possibility of knocking out a foe cold or, if you were using a truly deadly weapon like adamantium claws you might kill your foe. Of course there's a comics code so killing is a no-no so the Judge might allow you to pull your punch or even make up some other, truly fight-ending effect.
I miss having degrees of success in your actions.
FASERIP FOREVER
Also fighting and types of damage could be INCREDIBLY(40) problematic/complicated.
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
Woke up to the news that my therapy actually isn't covered by my insurance, like we thought it was. So that's, uh, $675 I owe out of pocket. I can cover it, but boy, that's a fun new alarm clock for me. Combine that with the pharmacy being out of "generic" estrogen and charging me close to $200 for an identical brand product and gosh I am longing to get political this morning.
The therapist literally offered to just eat the cost because she felt so bad about it. That's how you know it's a great health care system, when two middle-class queer kids are arguing over who gets to pay because they blame themselves for the crimes of a system literally nobody understands except the executives.
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
Okay, we agreed to split it. That's a bit better. What a silly system. They didn't even know the insurance wasn't working until after the fifth session.
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
In the immortal words of Click, or maybe Clack: Hah! We're back! Those were a chaotic couple of months. I ended up taking a month's impromptu break from my PbPs, but today I went and wrote up the return posts at long last. Combined with my writing, I've written very close to 6,000 words today.
I also made a stroganoff today, but some ill-advised experimentation with portabella mushrooms means it's pretty mediocre. Edible, at least. I did a double-decker beetcake* the other day, and I still get to be proud of that - even if my ex is not a fan of it and my girlfriend is pretty lukewarm towards it, so it turns out I'll be the only one eating this thing. :P
Oh, yeah, other updates:
- One of my girlfriends and I broke up last month, but we're all still living together.
- Our second dosages will be fully activated this Friday, meaning we'll be fully vaccinated at long last.
- I've been averaging about 9,000 words a week in my writing, so I think I'm finally rounding the corner on that long, long burnout spell. I won't feel fully secure until I've kept it up for at least a month, though. By that measure, 11 days to go!
- Wildfire season's gonna be starting early this year. Hope our air purifier can make this hell month better than 2020's hell month.
*Before anyone heckles me about it: I'm not the one putting potatoes in a plastic bag, I just keep forgetting to correct it.
I haven't written much of anything, but I have finished the sunrise patio, a yellow brick road style (except light grey in a sea of dark grey pavers) patio/walkway that winds it's way from a swimming pool to the fire circle to the outdoor kitchen before finishing at the outdoor fireplace, rebuilt a winding stone staircase and built patios all the way around an Olympic size swimming pool.
And I'm currently lowering a patio which I should finish by Thursday.
Also we're considered fully vaccinated this weekend and I got us tickets for Modest Mouse playing downtown (which means I get to drink if I so choose) this summer.
Oh gosh, yeah, looking at exes' social media can be really harmful. Everyone needs a space to vent and come to terms with their anger, and while I obviously can't comment on the specifics of the TikToks, doing it that publicly, where you know your ex will see, is not a healthy or kind or mature way to do it.
Also, that's some fantastic writing! I'm bad about doing comparisons, too - it's so easy to start investing your self-worth in being the "best" at something, or having a "niche". I'm bad at reading the works of my peers in the genres I write because I can't help but feel insecure that they're being so "productive" compared to me. If we let ourselves play that game, we'll always feel like there's someone better.
Wow, really, really rough morning.
My Alphasmart keyboard is on the serious fritz, meaning that every 20-60 seconds it starts glitching and typing random letters or just flat-out not responding unless I notice what's happening and type a very particular sequence. I keep having to explain it for work, and it's extremely stressful every time because it's an incredibly sore point to me (I was just getting very content with and accustomed to the AS, it's a wonderful device and I'd been writing upwards of 9k words a week with it before this started). Worse, people keep trying to give suggestions for how to "fix" it without knowing the situation. Oh, and because the situation is loosely because my girlfriend tried to make a modification and it had unforeseen consequences, now I'm being crabby and sulky at her even though I know I have no good reason to be.
Meanwhile, like a fool, I accepted an invite a week ago to rejoin a PbP I'd left previously due to discomfort and anxiety with a couple other players. Well, that situation just sort of reset and continued to get worse and worse until everything blew up yesterday, with me accusing one player of not respecting boundaries and them accusing me of using out-of-character complaints whenever the in-character wasn't going my way. I backed out of the game, apologizing to the GM, but the poor GM (who's very new to PbPs) is absolutely devastated and seems to be considering shutting the whole game down.
I know everybody's very angry with me over there, and I can't even say it's not my fault because, well, I was the only person who ever felt any discomfort, and I should have known better than to accept the invitation regardless. It's all just going to gnaw at me for the next week. I feel sick to my stomach at the thought that I basically destroyed this GM's first foray into PbP gaming, and I'm horribly upset with the other player who I still feel was in the wrong, and I just can't get my mind off of any of it.
And it's not even noon yet! And my keyboard just keeps malfunctioning even as I type this! It just tried to type, "for the next weeeeeeeeeeeeeee", like I got flung off a swingset mid-sentence.
I'm genuinely so, so f**$ing gutted about the game situation. I wish I could just say I think it's all my fault, and beg the GM to keep running without me, but it's... I just don't think it's my all on me, or that I was the one who made this a problem. I just couldn't get the other player to care that I was uncomfortable, and I absolutely should have left sooner, and quieter, and that's my responsibility as much as theirs. But it's not the GM's fault at all. And I can't even beg them to keep running, because I have no right to center my feelings in it all anymore.
But I tried so hard to get the other player to care, and I just couldn't communicate it right, or they just genuinely didn't give a shit, and I'm... I am here because I can't get this out of my head, and if I vent anywhere else, I have to stop to explain what a PbP is, and I don't have it in me.
They implied I was trying to manipulate them, and just didn't seem to believe me when I did my best to explain. Two of the things that tend to really f&%$ with my head are, "a person I'm trying to be friendly with doesn't care that I'm in pain" and "a person accuses me of acting in bad faith". It's why I overexplain and overshare so much with people. Making myself understood is really hard, and I tend to miscommunicate things, so I try to explain everything about my actions to head that off, to tell people how I'm feeling when I'm not able to show it. Only, when someone thinks I'm a liar, all of that basically falls apart, and I'm stuck in a void where nothing I say actually matters.
I tried so hard to be understood, and I should have left way earlier, and that's the one thing I can absolutely apologize for but it's also the most passive-aggressive thing to apologize for in all this.
So I just have to accept that maybe I broke something, or helped break something, and there's nobody who can forgive me or vindicate me or give me closure for it except myself. Sometimes things just suck and we make our peace with it and press on.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'm dyslexic with a small speech impediment, so I know how hard communication can be, especially when you seemingly say one thing and someone else thinks you're saying something else.
I feel your pain! If you need anything I'm around.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Thanks, Mark, that's all honestly very kind of you to say. <3
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Well, shit. I'd say I chose the wrong week to come back to the forums, but I honestly only came back because I heard about what's going on, so I guess I just chose the wrong messageboard community and company to become deeply invested in from a young impressionable age. So, um... that's probably worse, right? That sounds worse.
I don't even really know why I'm surprised anymore, and maybe I'm not, but somehow all this--the revelations about the company, the people showing their asses trying to defend it--still hits like a truck.
I don't have any close friends or family who really follow the Paizo drama anymore. Honestly, any attempt to vent about it just turns into me having to re-explain it all, which mostly ends up sounding like "a corporation was bad!" to them anyways. It's hard to even begin to explain what the Paizo messageboards are to someone who didn't really put down roots here. The community eccentricities, the familiar faces, the forum memes and bizarre fads (anyone remember the time the OTD just became a huge free-form roleplay for, like, six months before the mods had to step in?), the ease with which staffers would mingle with forum regulars or recruit forum regulars to join them. How do I explain that?
How do I break down to them in a way that makes sense the idea that this messageboard was my primary social outlet (sometimes my only social outlet) for most of my early adolescence, and get across the ways that my identity is still deeply tied to both messageboard and company in ways that I don't necessarily even want anymore? How can I make that make sense to them? It doesn't even really fully make sense to me.
It's a parasocial relationship with a community that in large part doesn't exist anymore, with an idea of a company that largely never existed, and with a handful of staffers and ex-staffers who helped create this space for us and now are either watching it fall apart or are in some way tasked with helping it fall apart because this company and community hurt them in ways that deserve to be acknowledged.
So, you know. Thank god it's Friday.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
On the other hand, Patrick Curtain liked one of my posts yesterday, and that guy once started a whole thread with the premise that everybody except me was allowed to post there. So, you know, that's a relationship arc, is what it is.
(Yes, I deserved it. He still got locked, though, because... you can't actually do that, even if the other poster is very, very annoying. It's still really funny to me.)
| 6 people marked this as a favorite. |
I don't have any close friends or family who really follow the Paizo drama anymore.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Geographically! I meant geographically close! I'm a verbal venter.
Geographically! I meant geographically close! I'm a verbal venter.
That's rough. My friends and I used to gripe about Pathfinder(or other various game stuff if you got us started) for two hours on Discord if someone joined us who wasn't in the know.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I am slowly undergoing the self-care process of Hiding every "controversy" thread, one by one, through an advanced technique I like to call "arguing on it until I get so mad I post an outburst and then sheepishly Hide the thread to avoid having to confront the consequences".
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I am slowly undergoing the self-care process of Hiding every "controversy" thread, one by one, through an advanced technique I like to call "arguing on it until I get so mad I post an outburst and then sheepishly Hide the thread to avoid having to confront the consequences".
Don't knock it. It's a solid strategy.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
It's very in-line with the pugwampi way, isn't it?
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
In other news, I just realized I'm credited under my deadname on a whole handful of minor products in the Paizo store, so now I need to set aside the time to email Paizo to see if we can get that fixed or what. So that's gonna be a burr in my side until I get around to it.
|
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
I am slowly undergoing the self-care process of Hiding every "controversy" thread, one by one, through an advanced technique I like to call "arguing on it until I get so mad I post an outburst and then sheepishly Hide the thread to avoid having to confront the consequences".
That’s not a bad idea. I might have to follow suit. At this point, I’ve said my piece on it.
I understand the urge to leave the community - and do not blame people who have done so - but I think the community is more than the company, and the will of a strong community might be a force for positive change. So I don’t think I’m going anywhere.
But closing the threads? Yeah, nothing new is going to be said in them at this point.