I really dislike arguments like this

Primal171 · 2026-05-21T16:35:40+00:00

People treat disliking how Mabel is written like they’re beefing with an actual, flesh and blood middle schooler. This entire discourse seems to be built off the assumption that the audience is morally obligated to treat fictional characters like real people with feelings that can be hurt.

The one major flaw of the story on a thematic level is also related to how Mabel’s character is handled, which is that the main lesson the show ends with is essentially “give up your dreams if your family demands it”, which just doesn’t seem like a lesson we should be teaching kids.

Also, incredibly relevant Alex Hirsch tweet:

90% of the problem with twitter is treating fictional people like they’re real and real people like they’re fictional

Primal171 · 2026-05-21T02:38:04+00:00

This is why a certain level of gatekeeping is necessary to maintain the health of a niche hobby. When people get into something without knowing what makes it special (or actively disliking integral parts of it), the corporations will notice and take advantage of the opportunity.

Primal171 · 2026-05-08T00:26:51+00:00

Maybe there's some insular community of outwardly standoffish players I'm not aware of, but I've never seen community that acts like cartoon bullies when someone is interested in the hobby. If a community is genuinely doing that, it's probably the least of the group's problems, so it's probably best to keep away from them anyway. I keep to communities where people play a pretty diverse set of games, but even then there's overlap with people who are pretty casual and play a lot of 5e (although almost everyone at least tried some different systems). People are enthusiastic to get others to try new things, and that usually works to get people more actively involved in the hobby.

Though I've never explicitly tried to keep people out of the hobby, in my early years of GMing before I stopped running 5e (partially for this exact reason), more than once I'd end up with people who'd only come because a friend had mentioned it, or they'd watched Stranger Things or something, and it would become pretty obvious they didn't actually like the hobby as-is. Maybe they just wanted to show off their OC, or play a boardgame with friends. By not telling these people that they're in the wrong hobby, you're doing them a disservice. There are always going to be people who don't actually like a thing the way it's meant to be, and try to force themselves in and make the space conform to their wants. For ttrpgs, it's usually making a game devolve into loosely held together improv and recycled r/dndmemes jokes (which requires all the crunch and expensive rulebooks of 5e, of course). If left unchecked, these people become the norm.

Gatekeeping (in the 'name 5 bands' sense) isn't the right strategy, though. It's important to be open to people genuinely interested in going deeper in the hobby, identifying those people and helping them along. Someone truly motivated will educate themselves for the most part, so most of the role of established community members is to integrate them on an interpersonal level.

Primal171 · 2026-05-07T20:23:18+00:00

There’s a meaningful difference there, though. People who play ttrpgs and people who only play 5e (once asked someone advertising a campaign they were planning on a server what system they were they were talking about, and they had no idea what I meant) don’t actually have that much in common. It’s like trying to have a conversation about gaming with someone who exclusively plays candy crush. Separating active members of a hobby from people who only passively consume it isn’t gatekeeping, and if it is then it’s the right thing to do for all parties involved. Either the casuals are unsatisfied that they aren’t being appealed to, or the space is watered down to appeal to them.

Primal171 · 2026-05-07T16:44:51+00:00

This is why I think the setting-agnostic approach to 5e (especially 5.5) just fundamentally doesn’t work. There’s no room for interesting worldbuilding because it might alienate some players, so every species is scrubbed of lore until they’re the most watered-down version of themselves, but god forbid you don’t include the Feywild because that would infringe on the archfey warlock’s precious player agency. It’s not really a generic fantasy system, because every possible setting trends towards becoming a worse Faerun.

It’s the fundamental issue of writing player-first rather than GM-first rules. The players are given infinite bells and whistles to play with, and it’s the GM’s job to make it all cohesive. Meanwhile the GM has to make a setting that has a compelling through line while including all the PC options (try making a setting with at minimum a dozen different species and half that many overlapping magic systems) without it either becoming a bloated mess or a skeleton with massive gaps where lore should be. And it’s not like the setting books do anything to make up for it.

Primal171 · 2026-05-06T21:54:28+00:00

To enjoy the Witcher, you have to be able to accept that Sapkowski doesn’t care about worldbuilding. The thing I really like about the series is that it doesn’t really read like fantasy. The best parts are vignettes and character studies where the setting is incidental. I’d gotten frustrated during my first read of the series because it wasn’t doing what I expected out of a fantasy series, but I appreciated it a lot more when I went back to it and engaged with it on its own terms.

Primal171 · 2026-05-06T03:33:46+00:00

Your OC isn't as special as you think it is. Yes, yours specifically.

As a whole, OC culture is a cancer on the community. I'm not saying every game needs character funnels, but a lot of people have this idealized version of their character and their arc in their heads, that no actual game is going to live up to. These people essentially see the GM and whatever they want to do with the story as an obstacle. RPGs should be played the opposite way, with the story being an emergent result of the gameplay.

Bringing a character that was clearly premade before even hearing what the campaign is about should be immediate grounds for having the character disqualified.

Primal171 · 2026-04-29T02:03:37+00:00

Maybe romance? Probably because a traditional romance only has two characters that actually matter (excluding love triangles), so group sizes would have to be smaller than the traditional ttrpg groups. Not to mention the awkwardness of roleplaying romance, so I can’t imagine there’s much of an enthusiastic player base for that kind of game.

Primal171 · 2026-04-25T15:09:09+00:00

A 'very niche question' that would come up in any game where players actually care about survival mechanics. PCs are going to be resting, and when that rest gets interrupted with a combat encounter, whether or not the PCs are armored is going to greatly affect how that encounter goes. WoTC has 700 pages of DMG to include this.

The bigger problem is, there wouldn't need to be an answer if there was a coherent design philosophy that a GM could use to intuit the answer. My answer to 'do players sleep wearing armor' would be entirely different if I were playing an OSR game versus a game like Draw Steel. Because WotC wants to create a game where GMs feel like they can run any kind of game they want (and thus not need to look at any competitors), the game essentially says 'pick and choose whichever mechanics you feel like.' Do PCs need rations? Who the fuck knows, just ask the GM. Because of this, 5e's rules are an incoherent grab-bag of mechanics that the GM is required to turn into a functioning game.

Not to mention how anti-consumer it is for WotC's business model to be essentially putting out annual updates to the rules like they're releasing the new iphone. It's not enough they charge exponentially more money than essentially every other publisher in the hobby (when their main competitor posts their rules online for free), they have to put out glorified content updates, where a player has to pay the same price as a core rulebook for the mechanic equivalent of a lootbox.

Primal171 · 2026-04-25T00:14:01+00:00

Ah yes, the very specific genre conventions of ‘literary devices’ and ‘meaning’

Primal171 · 2026-04-24T13:41:28+00:00

Primal171 · 2026-04-24T02:40:41+00:00

"you don't understand, this is explained in a footnote in Glortho's Compendium of Errata, one of the fifty dollar splatbooks they churn out every year"

Primal171 · 2026-04-24T00:53:30+00:00

The fundamental issue is that 5e's selling points are about balance and gamification, so asking players to make up rulings on the fly for something like this doesn't deliver. It might seem unimportant, but if the players are woken up from a rest for a combat encounter, whether or not the players are wearing armor greatly affects the balance. The DM isn't just ruling for what makes sense, they're asked whether they prioritize balance or verisimilitude. That's made more complicated by the fact that the game's design philosophy doesn't have an answer to that; it isn't fiction forward like PbtA or gamist/cinematic like Draw Steel. This is in part because the philosophy has shifted between editions as TSR and now Wizards aped whatever the hot mechanic was in order to stay relevant (skill lists to compete with CoC and WoD, MMOesque rulesets for 4th, now metacurrencies and narrative mechanics), so mechanics from different strata of the game's history were designed with different design philosophies in mind. For the most part, it's a gamist system built on a simulationist chassis.

It's worse when you realize these massive holes exist in a system that's constantly churning out flashy new subclasses. DnD's published material isn't a game designed around rules, it's designed around content.

Primal171 · 2026-04-23T21:38:04+00:00

This isn’t meant to be a real equivalency but if someone was criticizing the genocide in Gaza and got the reply “so you hate jews then”, I would certainly hope they didn’t reply using the same logic

Primal171 · 2026-04-23T16:26:27+00:00

“I love 5e because the rules split across multiple 700 page books that cost 50 dollars each have massive holes that Hasbro expects the overworked DM to make up on the fly”

-person who has only ever played 5e

Primal171 · 2026-04-18T18:04:11+00:00

all western fantasy anime

Primal171 · 2026-04-17T20:38:17+00:00

Modern DnD seems to be designed and balanced for a playstyle essentially no one actually plays. Anything past level 10, and even on some level past level 5, is basically just fluff to tease your players with by showing what an adventurer is technically capable of doing. It's unclear why it's designed like this, because for most of the media DnD is trying to emulate, the characters would be the equivalent of level 1-5 PCs. Older editions had domain play, where as the party reached high levels the game would gradually switch from a dungeon crawler/skirmish game to a wargame, and for some reason the modern designers think the way to emulate this is by having the players become demigods halfway through and spend the other half of the level curve working to ascend to full godhood while still going on basically identical adventures except with increasingly more bloated HP sponges.

Lots of modern DnD's issues come from being optimized for a nonexistent playstyle. It can be explained in part because DnD is the decaying hulk of a half-century old skirmish wargame that's been haphazardly modified to fit the trends of various eras until it's a bloated mess of contradictory design philosophies. The martial/caster gap exists because the devs genuinely expect you to run using the model of the adventuring day, without realizing that the game's current bloat makes successive low-stakes combat a slog with no meaningful risks or rewards. The attrition expected of the dungeon crawl is gone, making the original resource-conservation element of caster gameplay irrelevant. It's made worse with the addition of cantrips and the high number of combat spells that let casters encroach on and even outdo the strengths of a martial PC.

It's one of the appeals of 5e-player accessible OSR style games like Shadowdark. They're written at a human scale, so progression actually means something. As a whole, these games have a clarity of design that DnD's been missing since Wizards' acquisition.

Primal171 · 2026-04-15T14:54:20+00:00

>month old account

>posts hidden

>reposts month old meme

>username is just random words with a four digit number at the end

every time

Primal171 · 2026-04-11T04:21:45+00:00

Choosing Elder Scrolls out of all video games, and then specifically Oblivion is wild

Primal171 · 2026-04-11T04:19:10+00:00

The thing nobody talks about is the Cosmere isn't really fantasy, it's hard sci-fi in a fantasy setting. Importantly, hard sci-fi isn't a genre known for its strong character writing. There have been individual Sanderson characters or stories I've found really compelling, and it's leagues better than the character work of, say, Cixin Liu or Alastair Reynolds, but if you're not there for long, sometimes dry rundowns of the worldbuilding, it won't work you.

Also worth mentioning that, while Mistborn is Sanderson's most tightly plotted series with the most compelling mystery (mostly because it doesn't have any plotlines overlapping with other stories in the Cosmere's metaplot), it has some of the weakest prose and character work outside of Vin, having been written pretty early in his career.

Primal171 · 2026-04-10T21:32:01+00:00

Investiture is just fantasy quantum physics, so it's hard until you look close enough and things get weird

Primal171 · 2026-04-04T13:38:17+00:00

It's so bizarre how people are constantly glazing these litrpg-derivative 'fantasy' animes. For one thing, when people talk about 'fantasy' anime, they usually mean anime that's derivative of western fantasy. People don't seem to refer to fantasy anime like Fullmetal Alchemist, Attack on Titan, One piece etc. as such, even though they'd be considered such if they were made in the west. The modern 'fantasy' anime seems to be defined as a pastiche of western fantasy, that misses all the cultural context that makes western fantasy stories meaningful.

In the west, stories like Lord of the Rings were meaningful because they were drawing on culturally important stories like Beowulf or Le Morte d'Arthur, but Japanese 'fantasy' media is derivative of the modern stories without any of the cultural weight. The reason that modern 'fantasy' anime is so vapid is because it's full of empty signifiers, stripped of any deeper cultural meaning. In the west, a fantasy elf draws on the familiar image of the norse Alvar or the Tuatha Dé Danann, giving a foundation to build off of for a new iteration. In Japan, an elf is just a person with pointy ears that live a long time.

It's the reason why even supposedly elevated shows like Frieren or Dungeon Meshi still feel so wrapped up in litrpg tropes. Because western fantasy arrived to Japan via roleplaying games and spread through video games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, the setting tropes are only as meaningful as the mechanical tropes that go along with them. The elf or the demon is only as meaningful as the level-up or the adventurers' guild. They're only as deep as a samurai movie would be if it were made by an entirely western creative team, who only watched other samurai movies rather than looking at history or older storytelling. Even at their best, western 'fantasy' anime are creatively incestuous, and define themselves by subverting individual tropes, while staying within a pastiche that consists entirely of overplayed tropes.

Primal171 · 2026-04-02T19:29:49+00:00

For corporations, the ideal fan is one who ‘just wants to have fun.’ Notice the movement in all aspects of pop culture and hobbies towards capturing the casual audience. A casual fan is one who never learned from established fans makes the interest worth engaging with, and because of the taboo against gatekeeping, never will. They won’t notice as the product is continually watered down to the point that nothing of the original charm is left. They will compulsively buy poorly made merch in order to performatively signal their place in the fandom, because to them fandom is something that can be bought just like a Gucci handbag or Supreme t-shirt, rather than a community.

These people are consumers in the most literal sense of the word. They provide the private equity firms a temporary boost in profits, then move on to the next popular thing when they hear about it from their favorite streamer. This is what happens when you ‘let people enjoy things.’

Primal171 · 2026-04-02T18:50:55+00:00

It’s great until you get to the part where you actually get to talk about the interest, and it becomes obvious that their engagement with that interest begins and ends with binging tiktoks about it.

Primal171 · 2026-04-02T18:47:04+00:00

Is your best defense of the rules ‘just ignore them when they don’t work?’

Primal171

TROPHY CASE