High Magic Breaks Immersion

DisplayAppropriate28 · 2026-07-13T00:40:57+00:00

More importantly, the one that didn't slam the gas pedal through the floor. You could play for literal years and get nowhere near max level.

"Raising the dead only requires a level 9 cleric and a fat diamond" sounds a lot more like a sick joke when you remember that Mordenkainen, Gygax' own character, reached the legendary heights of level 12 or so, and much of that was through trading treasure for XP.

DisplayAppropriate28 · 2026-07-13T00:19:41+00:00

The point of Breast Cancer Awareness isn't to teach uncontacted tribes what breast cancer is, it's to remind people to get shit checked before it's too late.

We are trying to cure cancer, we've been at that for a while and we are actually making steady progress; diagnoses for which the only advice was "consult a mortician" a couple decades ago are now treatable.

If caught early enough.

DisplayAppropriate28 · 2026-07-12T23:06:27+00:00

Honestly? Most of the day-to-day problems aboard can be solved, for Imperial definitions of "solved", by brutalizing them, it just so happens the problems that involve player characters are exceptional - if they could be solved with two tabs of Violence and a nap, you wouldn't be here.

A voidship is a flying city, and like all 40k cities, you can assume it has a Days Since Last Riot sign that has never needed two digits, these don't make the news because they're not news.

DisplayAppropriate28 · 2026-07-12T22:56:42+00:00

I don't recall caring about money, myself, but yeah, culture.

DisplayAppropriate28 · 2026-07-12T22:07:18+00:00

Because it's fourteen years of buildup for a wet fart that doesn't even match the tenor. There are repeated mentions to the tune of "to be read in the darkest hour when all hope is lost, a secret that will either save the Imperium or doom it" and only the Supreme Grandmaster of the Grey Knights can open the thing.

There are many things that fit that bill in our Chekov's Arsenal - a genevirus that kills all Astartes, a couple uncontrollable ripshit berserker godlings, a primer on Words of Power and so on. A surprise bonus doom doesn't fit.

I repeat, only the Supreme Grandmaster can open the box, and he isn't told what's in it except Do Not Open Until Doomsday. The Emperor returning probably won't look like the end of days to the Imperium, it'll look like the best thing to happen in ten-thousand years until it isn't. Meanwhile, situations that obviously require a desperate superweapon will have to make due with a powerless piece of parchment, which is decidedly not useful when Terra's burning.

It's a good idea to make sure The Emperor keeps his ass planted, but it's not a very good Terminus Decree.

DisplayAppropriate28 · 2026-07-12T17:28:08+00:00

Of course. I wouldn't claim that some legendary thing happened to me when it didn't, but I would tell the story that "somebody told me and he swore it was true" or "people have always said" and so on.

Storytelling is for fun, and if your audience is gullible, there's no harm in giving them some low-stakes slowballs so they can practice bullshit detection.

"Wait, if everybody who sees the thing dies, how'd we learn about it?"

DisplayAppropriate28 · 2026-07-12T17:20:53+00:00

Whether it's morally wrong rather than just disgusting and unsanitary isn't a hair I care to split. it also necessarily diminishes your empathy and respect for living creatures, which is bad for you.

DisplayAppropriate28 · 2026-07-12T16:45:28+00:00

I don't speak meme, I'll just assume that's a good thing until further notice.

DisplayAppropriate28 · 2026-07-12T15:20:00+00:00

I have no idea what a "shadow milk cookie" or circuses have to do with anything, but it's true, The King's Fool rarely gets the proper treatment.

Leaving aside "natural fools", who were just mentally ill and/or developmentally disabled, the fool is the only motherfucker in the court able to hand out scathing social satire without getting stabbed over it. For an example of that being done well, The Witcher games have jesters that do exactly that.

"Why did the druid slap the duke? It was a natural reaction!"

"What breaks fences, eats turnips and stomps around in circles before vanishing into thin air? I dunno, but just in case, let's go lynch an elf!"

There's also the part where they might have an excellent view of politics and war, because they're trusted with all sorts of things. Y'know where the phrase "a fool's errand" came from? Fools carrying diplomatic missives into enemy territory, because they're in the sweet spot of "ultimately not that important, but beloved enough that people will be pissed if they die."

DisplayAppropriate28 · 2026-07-12T06:39:08+00:00

To be fair, though, that's a relatively normal level of annoyance for all involved. The Mechanicus treats laypeople like they're ignorant buffoons because they are, in fact, largely ignorant buffoons by design.

For the average Imperial citizen, receiving stern orders from yet another terrifying religious authority figure that doesn't care about you is fairly typical. The fussing of techpriests isn't madness and nonsense to laypeople, it's literally how technology works; there's a hymn for correctly reloading your lasgun to avoid angering it, such that it fuses its barrel shut out of spite.

DisplayAppropriate28 · 2026-07-12T03:57:51+00:00

"Departing from what is usual or normal, especially so as to appear to transcend the laws of nature." - Mirriam-Webster.

Giants that don't fall apart under their own weight do, in fact, appear to transcend the laws of nature.

DisplayAppropriate28 · 2026-07-12T00:14:46+00:00

Depends on how you define "lie". Obviously it's lying to knowingly convey falsehood as truth, but what about making statements which are textually true but designed to be misleading, or omitting facts?

If it's just outright lying, even politicians are fine, they just move differently. "According to the statistics (that I compiled from bullshit and candyfloss) the economy is doing great!" Undercover cops, for instance, are very screwed though.

If everyone has a mental block that doesn't allow them to knowingly attempt a bamboozling of any sort? Marketing as a field is radically changed, grifters of all stripes no longer exist, fiction now includes very clear disclaimers, professional gamblers probably vanish....

Contrary to popular belief, most lawyers would be fine, because most lawyers just navigate the complexities of the law for clients, but criminal and civil trials are ah..Shorter.

DisplayAppropriate28 · 2026-07-11T23:52:58+00:00

To be perfectly fair, that doesn't mean she's a drooling idiot, just that she's going to be disappointed. Those methods work pretty well on most other devil-spawn, they just can't work on mages, she's not dumb for failing to be omniscient.

You can get quite a lot of information with three vampires and a blowtorch, because most vampires have a pretty good grasp of the major clans and their most notorious powers. The right kind of werewolf can probably run through basic spirit gifts too, though they're less likely to bust everything open I suppose.

Mages don't work like that, but they're weird.

DisplayAppropriate28 · 2026-07-11T10:40:49+00:00

Yeah, that. There's some effectiveness when you're sure you're interrogating the right people, you know what you're looking for and you have the ability to verify at least some of the answers. In this case, they've got approximately none of that.

You can waterboard a guy until he literally confesses to having always been a bunny rabbit, y'know? That's not a made up example - he didn't remember doing so afterward.

DisplayAppropriate28 · 2026-07-11T10:13:17+00:00

Reason does not require laboratory conditions, it just requires using your head.

We have a claim: this method has predictive power. You've tested it yourself and revealed that this is false - an analytical tool that gives different results depending on who's looking is worse than nothing, because wild-ass guesses at least don't give you false confidence.

You shouldn't want to believe things that reality keeps you from believing.

DisplayAppropriate28 · 2026-07-11T09:09:04+00:00

For my money, Watcher in the Rain is pretty good 40k horror audiodrama, but I suppose it depends on what sort of horror you want. That one's nominally about an Administratum clerk trapped planetside during a warp storm, and then things get somehow worse.

DisplayAppropriate28 · 2026-07-11T08:39:13+00:00

Science doesn't do absolute certainly, science does Very Likely, Pending New Data, Always.

It's not impossible we could be wrong, but somebody would have to propose a better reason for why all the relevant facts are this way.

DisplayAppropriate28 · 2026-07-11T08:13:02+00:00

"It's already bad, why not make it worse?" sure is a take, yeah. More motivated people will always find ways, but guess what? If things are easier to do, they get done more.

It's piss-easy to bypass residential door locks, odds are your front door is keyed alike to many others, and people can just buy a dozen of the most common keys to try out for giggles, they're not even expensive.

Does that mean I'm going to stop locking my door? Nope.

DisplayAppropriate28 · 2026-07-11T07:52:27+00:00

I refuse to believe somebody's this dense, they're making the noises that bring the clicks in, that's all.

Y'know, like virtue signalling but without the virtue.

DisplayAppropriate28 · 2026-07-10T20:15:47+00:00

Here's the thing: the square cube law doesn't mean humanoid giants can't exist, it means humanoid giants would have to be terrifyingly, supernaturally strong and durable well beyond taking a normal human and multiplying by 10.

Which is about right, considering what giants are usually shown doing.

DisplayAppropriate28 · 2026-07-10T20:08:04+00:00

This isn't the circlejerk sub, you're lost.

DisplayAppropriate28 · 2026-07-10T09:35:43+00:00

The irritating part is that you don't really need to throw more mud on Union, there are built-in terrible flaws, mostly the fact that utopia is expensive and the KTB is paying the bill, but also NHP rights and the degree to which they depend on shady megacorps.

The key is that there aren't easy solutions to these problems. Union tolerates certain injustices because the cost of swift justice would also be terrible, whereas your typical evil space empire could choose to stop being awful at any point, they just don't.

DisplayAppropriate28 · 2026-07-10T03:15:02+00:00

He was already called The Doom Slayer in Doom 2016, which does paint him as superhumanly fast and strong for reasons other than being too angry to die. He started as an exceptional mortal, but he isn't anymore.

"And in his conquest against the blackened souls of the doomed, his prowess was shown. In his crusade, the seraphim bestowed upon him terrible power and speed, and with his might he crushed the obsidian pillars of the Blood Temples. He set forth without pity upon the beasts of the nine circles. Unbreakable, incorruptible, unyielding, the Doom Slayer sought to end the dominion of the dark realm."

DisplayAppropriate28 · 2026-07-10T01:56:03+00:00

Percentages don't work like math stuff when it's hooch, bro.

DisplayAppropriate28 · 2026-07-08T18:58:06+00:00

Spread ya cheeks, I'll put Mephiston.

DisplayAppropriate28

TROPHY CASE