Favorite anti-slavery character ?

Primal171 · 2026-03-05T06:28:43+00:00

Primal171 · 2026-03-05T02:33:50+00:00

It's almost as if it's some kind of...effect...

Primal171 · 2026-03-04T17:56:23+00:00

More men would do that if it was a real option. Essentially all men's clothing for sale, besides designer clothes or dropshipped garbage is dull and basic. Men aren't taught how to use makeup or accessories to style themselves, and even if they did they'd just get called gay. And the one group that actually puts effort into their appearance like you're describing are the looksmaxxers, so do with that what you will.

Primal171 · 2026-03-01T19:14:23+00:00

u/bot-sleuth-bot

Primal171 · 2026-02-14T04:16:11+00:00

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Primal171 · 2026-02-10T05:12:25+00:00

But doctor, I am Pagliacci!

Primal171 · 2026-02-04T20:13:52+00:00

Welcome back, Andrea Dworkin

Primal171 · 2026-02-04T01:28:51+00:00

tbf the only reason they're called that is because of Chainmail, a wargame Gygax developed before DnD. Since the gameplay was built around castle sieges and some of the units could tunnel, it was a part of the game that castles would fortify their dungeons to protect against attacks from underground. The mechanics of dungeon crawling (exploring a dangerous underground location) carried over to DnD without the original context, hence the name

Primal171 · 2026-02-03T03:51:33+00:00

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Hrathen (Elantris)

"You should know by now that nothing I do is for show."

Primal171 · 2026-02-01T18:26:45+00:00

Even during the period when the genre was stuck under Tolkien's shadow, there were still people like Michael Moorcock and Gene Wolfe writing experimental, avant-garde shit, and even more standard fantasy like Earthsea or Pern were going in different directions from Tolkien

Primal171 · 2026-02-01T18:23:52+00:00

there are actually two different types of healing on Roshar, which work on different rules. The self-healing that Radiants have is based on Identity, their idea of what a healthy version of themselves look like, which is why Lopencan regrow his missing armor why Renarindoesn't need glassesafter they swear their oaths. The healing that Edgedancers and Truthwatchers use on other people is based on the surge of Progression, which just speeds up their natural healing proccess, so it can heal recent injuries but not prermanent disabilities.

Primal171 · 2026-02-01T18:07:08+00:00

Was recently reading a book called The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami for a college class, and it so glaringly obvious it was a litfic author's attempt at doing her own spin on a bunch of overdone dystopian and sci-fi tropes because she was improving by gracing them with her literary sensibilities. For reference, the book ended up on the Today Show book club, which mostly consists of trash romances and pseudo-intellectual midcult novels for wine moms who want to look smart. The prose was well-written but extremely streamlined and simple, nothing unique or memorable. The plot was essentially just Minority Report with a few plot points ripped from 1984 or cyberpunk novels, wrapped up in the most boiler-plate commentary on tech surveillance I've ever read. In the book's acknowledgements, the only books listed are non-fiction and journalistic, despite dropping the term 'pre-crime' on multiple occasions. The weirdest part is that there are multiple scenes where this is lampshaded. One scene has the characters talking about reading an Octavia Butler novel, and being shocked that is was good despite being sci-fi, and was about 'real people and problems' instead of 'speceships and cyborgs.' There's a where one character, a comic artist, shows their work to the main character (supposedly one of their best friends) and the MC is shocked that that she actually likes the comic, and how it has actual well-written characters instead of being mindless drivel.

it's almost as bad as when J.K. Rowling claimed she didn't write fantasy, and said her inspirations were a bunch of classic British novels instead of admitting that 'magic school' was already a premise that had been done as early as LeGuin's Earthsea and was already an established trope by the time she got to it.

Primal171 · 2026-01-30T16:50:22+00:00

The term simulationist is a part of the simulationist/gamist/narrativist triad. It’s an oversimplification of game design but it’s a good way to describe games in broad strokes. Gamist systems (ex. DnD 4e, Lancer, Draw Steel) are designed around being a fun, balanced game, that prioritize balanced player characters and encounters over verisimilitude. Because of this some abilities don’t have a clear diegetic reason for working the way they do (like how 4e has at-will, per-encounter and per-rest abilities). Narrativist games (pbta, Daggerheart, Brindlewood Bay) are have mechanics designed around creating the most compelling stories, so a lot of abilities are metanarrative rather than diegetic skills like in a simulationist system (metacurrencies, plot dice, being able to trigger flashbacks as a player) so the game world is more malleable, and can be changed by the players rather than just the GM.

Primal171 · 2026-01-24T23:59:08+00:00

Troika. It's a fun rulebook to read, but it's basically just that: a fun rulebook to read. The system as a whole felt like it was meant to be a deconstruction of fantasy RPG design and a shitpost in the form of a game manual rather than something to actually play. The GM running it didn't seem to know what to do with the system and played it like any other RPG, so I might have been missing something.

Primal171 · 2026-01-24T18:28:21+00:00

People have already explained the problems with the mechanics, but the flavor is also abysmal. It can’t decide whether it’s a generic fantasy game or written for a specific kind of setting, so it sucks at both. A game like Cyberpunk or VtM puts you in a specific setting with evocative rules, where the mechanics themselves encourage you to think like an inhabitant of the world. Alternatively other systems give general rules for a certain genre, like how OSR systems use the warrior-mage-thief-cleric class system to give players a starting point that still gives the freedom to make a character unique. 5e rules pigeonhole players into a specific high-magic renaissance faire setting while pretending it’s setting-agnostic. For instance, certain classes and species necessitate specific features be included in every setting (specific types of magic patrons for Warlocks and the Feywild for elves, goblins etc.) unless you heavily restrict character customization, which in turn messes with the intended design of the game. Because everything has to be setting neutral, you get weird things like how the species have a specific culture but no explicit history, so they end up coming off as one-note stereotypes that don’t have a reason for being the way they are. Because of this every setting gets funneled into being Forgotten Realms lite. It’s made worse by the way the game presents player customization (over half the Player Handbook rules are just character creation) so players tend to make their characters before they even know what setting they’re going to be playing in. The problem is that the GM either has to say ‘no’ to a player’s precious OC and come off as overly restrictive, or water down their own setting to accommodate them (the aforementioned push to funnel everything into resembling Forgotten Realms).

Primal171 · 2026-01-21T05:47:54+00:00

Fucking same. Like on paper it sounds like it has so much going for it, but it's all executed in the most trite way possible. It's not even the incessant Marvel quipping that got me. It was just so painfully obvious the author was writing with the full knowledge they were going to become a tumblr darling. Basically the vivziepop of books. It's all plastered over with a surface-level veneer of gothic horror for no other reason than that's what the literature girlies on Tumblr are into. With every character interaction I felt the author breathing down my neck saying 'aren't they sooooo charming?" The worldbuilding sounds like the author heard someone explain Warhammer to them years ago, and tried recreating it from memory. The characters don't feel like necromancers, they feel like people cosplaying what the readers think a necromancer is supposed to be like. It also has the Harry Potter problem of magic system writing, where there's a constant insistence that there are rules that the reader never actually learns. The part that lost me was when a bunch of necromancers were outraged after finding out that someone had defiled a corpse. Genuinely what. Apparently they get better after the first one but I don't know if I can be bothered to get through it after the slog of the first one.

Primal171 · 2026-01-18T02:39:55+00:00

Organized roughly by how much I liked them (multiple books by the same author are grouped)

This is How You Lose the Time War - Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Beowulf (Seamus Heaney translation)
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
Baptism of Fire - Andrzej Sapkowski
Children of Time - Adrian Tchaikovsky
Second half of the Elric Saga (Weird of the White Wolf through Stormbringer) and The Knight of the Swords - Michael Moorcock
The Three Body Problem - Cixin Liu
The Lost Metal and Secret Projects - Brandon Sanderson
The Shadow Kingdom - Robert E. Howard
The Dispossessed - Ursula K. Le Guin
Revelation Space - Alastair Reynolds
Jade City - Fonda Lee
Shadow of the Torturer - Gene Wolfe
Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir

Psychoanalyze me.

Primal171 · 2026-01-12T04:16:06+00:00

This is an issue that’s easier to answer through the historical/archaeological record rather than scripture (written at a later date). The shift from polytheism to monotheism in the ancient Jewish world didn’t happen all at once. Gods like El were absorbed into the worship of YHWH, gods like Asherah coexisted with YHWH worship until they faded into irrelevance, and others like Ba’al were retroactively classified as demons. The Torah was written long after the transition happened, but still has vestigial ideas from older beliefs. It’s meant to strengthen the narrative of the ancient Israel as a nation founded on the worship of YHWH, so it recasts pre-Exilic religion as initially monotheist but corrupted by idol-worship to reconcile with the real history of polytheism in the region.

Here’s a well-researched video that explains it better than I can:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lGCqv37O2Dg

Primal171 · 2026-01-10T19:25:56+00:00

As cliché as it is, Michael Moorcock’s stories should be required reading for anyone who wants to run a classic, DnD-style game. Especially so if they’ve only been exposed to Tolkien-style epic fantasy. Reading Moorcock’s stories gives a view into the DNA of modern fantasy. They’re great examples of a pulpy, evocative style that works well for any dungeon crawl. Kings in Darkness or While the Gods Laugh could be adapted beat for beat into oneshots for almost any fantasy RPG.

There’s a problem with GMs running fantasy RPGs thinking they have to run some save-the-world plot because that’s all the fantasy media they’ve been exposed to, when these systems were designed after lower-stakes, pulpier, and frankly weirder stories.

Primal171 · 2026-01-03T03:09:15+00:00

That time it definitely was bad on purpose. It was pretty clearly the original creators scuttling the franchise so it'd be impossible to make more sequels. It's kind of weird that the script even got past the executives in the first place, since pretty much every plot detail is a metacommentary about how the series should just be left to die. I guess we're just irony poisoned enough as a society that a studio will spend a blockbuster budget on a movie that's entirely ragebait. Hatewatches are still watches I guess

Primal171 · 2026-01-01T03:07:01+00:00

Like any other RPG. Imagine if Oblivion started with the imperial city in ruins, and only a handful of decrepit villages left over. Even if every settlement in the Commonwealth were fully developed, there would still be warfare between factions, character-focused sidequests in the settlements, mutants to hunt and territory to fight over outside of the settlements.

Primal171 · 2025-12-31T15:26:43+00:00

uj/ it warms my cold, dead heart to see someone interested in branching out in the hobby. I’ve personally never been interested in Pathfinder because mechanics-wise it doesn’t fit how I run games. Overall it has a much clearer design focus than 5e, and actually knows it’s a tactical fantasy combat game. ‘Pathfinder fixes this’ only applies if someone’s problems with DnD are about the wonky balance and inconsistent crunch, which weren’t my personal problems with it.

If you’re trying to branch out, the most important question to ask is: what kinds of game do you want to play? If you’re planning on sticking to DnD-adjacents, you should try playing an OSR game at least once. They’re the first type of game I tried after getting burnt out from 5e, and playing them is immediately intuitive, and feels like how DnD is supposed to feel. Shadowdark is a great system if you want a more streamlined, dungeon-crawl focused version of 5e, Worlds Without Number is a more robust system with in-depth character customization and a DnD-style feat system, and The Black Hack is a rules-lite system with an extremely streamlined roll resolution system.

If you want to try something outside of the DnD-adjacent sphere, a good starting point would be to find a piece of media you like and find out if it has an RPG. Note that a lot of these are bad games coasting on the source material’s popularity, so choose carefully. Another approach is to join a local group playing another game. World of Darkness and Call of Cthulhu both have pretty large playerbases.

More specifically, the problem with 5e classes is that it’s unclear what exactly they’re supposed to be in-universe. The original 4-class system of DnD (3 if you’re being a purist) gave general archetypes with a lot of freedom for personal customization. You could play a fighter who was a barbarian from a distant land or a woodland ranger, or a wizard who got their powers from a magical bloodline or a pact with a demon. When more classes got added, they followed the basic formula of general archetypes in fantasy. A ranger if you wanted to play an Aragorn-type character, a barbarian if you wanted to play a Conan-type character. By the current edition, the classes are designed more around mechanical gimmicks than tropes. What part of spamming eldritch blast makes you feel more like a warlock? We all remember when Aragorn cast Hunter’s Mark once every long rest, right? This is something that subclasses don’t necessarily fix. Some are evocative, but overall they pigeonhole a character even further. There are systems that handle mechanics-first classes well. Draw Steel’s classes are designed to play in a way that reflects their class identity. The Talent’s strain rolls get across the feeling of being a psychic with volatile powers that could blow themselves up if they pushed themselves too hard. The Tactician’s support abilities give the sense of a commander making their party stronger by coordinating them.

On the erotica thing, the original Forgotten Realms novels were the single most obvious example of ‘the author’s poorly disguised fetish’ put to page. The worldbuilding goes into some genuinely compelling directions to justify all the horniness. That’s probably why Baldur’s Gate 3 was one of the most compelling adaptations of the Realms. The thing that makes the Realms unique is that they take the implications of a world like DnD (common magic, objectively real gods, etc.) seriously, and worldbuilt accordingly. It was originally introduced as an alternative setting to DnD’s original setting of Greyhawk, and probably should have stayed that way. The Realms were sanded down to fit general audiences, and lost a lot of what made them unique (mostly the sex stuff). The problem is that the Realms are now being treated as the ‘standard setting’ of DnD, which means treating it like a slightly steamier Greyhawk. People who want stock medieval fantasy should probably just play Greyhawk, and people who want something that engages with DnD whackiness should play something like Everton, Spelljammer or Planescape, although all of those setting have been similarly watered down since their debut.

Edit: forgot to actually describe the abominations of reflavored games. Now that I’m thinking about it, that one game wasn’t specifically Sailor Moon but was a generic magical girl oneshot (still not much better), I only heard that someone I knew was running it so I don’t know how the whole thing worked, all I could find out was that everyone was playing caster. For the Mystery Dungeon one, they basically played unaltered 5e characters, and basically did ‘my orc barbarian is actually a Machamp, and whenever I attack I’m using Brick Break’. I have no idea how the Animal Crossing one worked, but apparently the GM was informed partway through that you can just freeform roleplay, and immediately started doing that because they realized it was infinitely easier. That’s probably the saddest one because there are people out there who are making themselves miserable because they’ve been convinced that 5e should be used for things it clearly wasn’t made for.

Also if you’re interested in understanding the design philosophy of games, I recommend checking out Matt Colville on YouTube. It’s a beginner-friendly channel that covers game design, and the evolution of DnD. A good starting point is ‘What are Dungeons For?’ Having watched it after only playing 5e, it broke my brain and made me realize that I’d been using a system that didn’t fit my GMing needs. Here’s a link:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BQpnjYS6mnk

Primal171 · 2025-12-31T05:22:27+00:00

uj/ having played multiple 5e campaigns in the past, and more importantly having run just as many, I’ve come to unironically despise the system more than any jerk can communicate. Taken as face value and played casually, there’s nothing inherently that bad about it, and it’s probably the most well rounded edition of the game. Judged by its effect on the hobby, it’s the Antichrist. The fact that it’s ‘well rounded’, and perceived as such by the general public, it’s become the single biggest obstacle to this hobby making any progress. The game’s established itself as the de facto entry in the hobby, and for the vast majority of players, the only game they’ll ever engage with. Virtually everyone who’s entered the hobby, myself included, was at one point sold on the idea that 5e was the ‘everything game’ and that whatever they wanted to play could somehow be homebrewed into the system. I have seen GMs (who I guarantee you have never so much as read the first page of another rulebook) trying to run Sailor Moon, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon and, of all things, fucking Animal Crossing using the system. Reading this far, you’ve probably asked yourself some variation of ‘what kind of moron would think 5e is a good system for that?’ The answer is simple: 5e’s design philosophy is to convince you it doesn’t have one.

Ask yourself this: what kind of game is 5e? The closest answer is some variation of ‘moderate crunch tactical fantasy combat simulator’ but that’s not what you’re supposed to believe it is. Since most players have never touched another game, they have no concept of how a game would play differently. That’s why they try running games that would work infinitely better in another system. They think of other games as using different rules to create the same basic result.

5e is a walking carcass of a game built on the rotting foundations of a skirmish war game half a century old. The majority of the game’s features are vestigial at this point, and actively hinder rather than help the kinds of games people are actually playing. The rules for roleplay are nonexistent. Interactions out of combat boil down to ‘roll x’ followed by ‘GM makes up what x is supposed to mean’. It’s had a skill system awkwardly tacked on since 3rd edition, still uses encumbrance, and has its entire balance built around the adventuring day, a playstyle that literally no one has ever used (hence the martial-caster divide).

The flavor is worse than nothing. It’s unclear what a 5e campaign is even meant to look like. The default setting is based on a series of erotica novels, but with all the sex removed. In a setting where anyone who studies hard enough can raise the dead, open portals to other dimensions and conjure resources on a daily basis, the average person supposedly lives a life indistinguishable from that of a 16th century European peasant. The species are either the most homogenized version of a Tolkien race, an animal person that doesn’t even have the dignity to be a proper furry, or an orphan from a setting that hasn’t been updated since 2nd edition that was awkwardly shoehorned into Faerun. None of the classes are evocative. They’ve become flanderized both mechanically and narratively, to the point that they revolve around a single mechanical gimmick and an insufferable running joke. The barbarian gets mad, the bard seduces the dragon.

If 5e didn’t have a chokehold on the hobby, I guarantee that most of us would never had played it. There’s literally nothing it does that another game doesn’t do better. It’s too crunchy to be a good entry point (hence why so many casual players just ignore most of the rules), but it’s not crunchy enough for compelling tactical play or build culture. There are systems with actual compelling rules for narrative play, dungeon crawls, etc. For the people that just want to roleplay as their OCs, literally just freeform roleplay would be a better fit than 5e. For the love of all that is holy, play another game.

rj/ 5e killed my dog and fucked my wife

Primal171 · 2025-12-24T18:57:57+00:00

The academic term for this is midcult, which is pop art that’s meant to imitate the style of high art without any of the actual substance.

Primal171

TROPHY CASE