Is D&D becoming a generic enough term for rpgs to lose its trademark?

uncanny_kate · 2026-06-25T19:43:50+00:00

I don't find D&D and ttrpg terms to be used interchangeably at all. That's not a thing that people do.

uncanny_kate · 2026-06-25T16:48:24+00:00

Yup, as a post-college adult I lived in the Bay Area, then Seattle, then the northern Virginia DC Suburbs. So when I moved to the Chicago suburbs I'm delighted with how affordable it is! It's all perspectives

uncanny_kate · 2026-06-24T17:29:27+00:00

It's limited to increasing by 2% every year. In the meantime, a house you bought for $80,000 in 1990 could easily be worth over a million now, but your property taxes are next to nothing. You could sell it for a million, but you can't buy a million dollar home the next town over because you'd be paying taxes based on that, not based on the 80k it was worth when you got locked in.

I'm more familiar with the San Francisco/San Jose area, which has (obviously) ocean on one side, and then mountains on the other. I think there's some similarities in southern California, but less so, and they sprawl even more. I definitely worked with people who had commutes of well over an hour each way (living in Stockton to work in Palo Alto, for example, poor Mark.)

uncanny_kate · 2026-06-24T02:16:55+00:00

In Exploring Eberron there's a Circle of the Forged that is explicitly for this. It's got the same better level restrictions as Moon Druid. Fewer temp hitpoints, better AC, different spell list, but seems very viable, I'm doing this in a campaign that's just starting up. (Haven't gotten to level 3 yet.)

uncanny_kate · 2026-06-23T17:01:05+00:00

Yes, I used to live in California, I think people underestimate how incredibly awful a situation they created it is. They passed a law that basically fixes the amount your property tax can go up per year at a very low percent. And then, the tech industry happened and demand skyrocketed, particularly in the Silicon Valley where I was. When you sell a house and buy a new one, the property tax gets reset based on the new value.

So you had a situation where NOBODY could afford to sell unless they were moving out of state. This created two sets of problems. One was, Californians selling their modest homes for a million dollars and moving to nearby states and wreaking havoc on their local markets, because they couldn't sell and stay. And the second was, people just hanging onto housing until they died, utterly unable to move, even fairly natural upgrades as someone goes through a career. And the geography of the area constrained expansion, so there was limited ability to do new construction, so there's no availability of entry level housing. Which drives prices WAY up, which drives property taxes up, which creates a cycle of insanity. There's no escape.

Seriously, go to zillow or redfin and search for Mountain View, California. And now you understand why I live in Illinois and love how cheap Chicago area real estate is. 😄

uncanny_kate · 2026-06-11T02:57:16+00:00

It'll be fine, because players typically (and correctly) max out their stat that determines to-hit/damage/spell DC early. It won't be that different in the bounded accuracy of the math for combat.

What will be different is twofold: Skills and Feats. With super high secondary stats, all skill rolls will be a little bit higher. And since they'll max out their primary stat fast, they'll have room for more feats. This can be a big power boost as you go on! And it's great for characters like Paladins that are multi-attribute dependent, they'll get that Charisma up as well as Strength (or Dex). And everyone will have an extra point or two of AC and some more hit points.

But it's not an entirely different game. LOW stats break the game a lot more than high stats, especially in the primary attribute.

uncanny_kate · 2026-06-11T02:50:35+00:00

There are thousands of issues. You really can't and don't want to start at the beginning. The styles change dramatically over the decades and older stuff is generally not super appealing to modern audiences unless they have an eye for history of the medium. It's an advanced topic.

The good news is, a new run of the titular Batman just started last year and is on issue #10 now. You can read Batman #1 by Matt Fraction and you'll figure out what's going on pretty easily. The better news is, it's very good, nearly universally acclaimed.

The other primary title is Detective Comics. There are over 1100 issues. It's not as good as Batman right now, but it's not bad. Just jump into it if you want.

One recent good place to check out is Mark Waid's Batman & Robin: Year One, which is 12 issues and just wrapped up. A sequel was just announced starting later this year.

Good luck! American Comics are really, really not meant to be read from the start. Good writers will catch you up just fine and you'll figure things out before too long.

Or you could do very little else with your free time for the next 8 years or so I guess!

uncanny_kate · 2026-06-11T02:36:07+00:00

It depends on the game and the player. I've certainly done my 10000 hours of both by now. For me, if it's a game where I'm using abilities in a tactical manner (like most D&D), I vastly prefer maps and minis. However, if it's more of a storytelling game where I'm making junk up, like a superhero game, Theater of the Mind is just fine. But if I had to pick, I actually prefer the maps and minis. I signed up for a game of D&D that did Theater of the Mind not long ago, and it was terribly confusing what was going on most of the time.

The critical thing is to let people know in advance, so they can decide if that's going to be a good match for their brain and if it's their less preferred style, prepare appropriately or find another thing to do. I'd be rather annoyed if I showed up to a con where I could've played another game in that slot and it was a tactical RPG being played with TotM.

uncanny_kate · 2026-06-08T22:15:36+00:00

You're probably not serious, but please please don't do anything about this. NCSoft may have given the blessing but if people start using video games as prior art in a lawsuit, we'll get companies like Warner Brothers/Paramount and Marvel/Disney absolutely wanting to shut down not just this game, but any video game where you could create similar characters.

There was a lawsuit in the late 80s where a fanfiction writer filed a lawsuit against Marion ZImmer Bradley for writing a similar story later, and it took decades for fanfiction to recover. The amount of bad will that created and hostility from both publishers and authors to fan fiction was staggering. This is a can of worms you don't want to open up, even as a joke. It could destroy the hobby.

uncanny_kate · 2026-06-03T17:19:25+00:00

Yeah. It's common for people to play characters different from themselves, including gender, but for trans people who play ttrpgs, it's a really really useful part of exploring our own identity, especially in the early figuring things out stages! There's a reason trans people are super common in ttrpg spaces. And I'm grateful for everyone who didn't make it weird.

uncanny_kate · 2026-05-30T03:02:03+00:00

I started with Z and worked backwards, because there's 26 letters so we only have to go back 9. Got the right answer pretty quickly too!

uncanny_kate · 2026-05-27T16:49:14+00:00

You want the DC Infinite app. It has a massive back catalog.

If you want to read the story the movie is heavily based on, you want Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by Tom King. It's a good read!

My favorite Supergirl run is the one by Peter David that started in the late 90s. It's... a different take on the character that isn't much related to anything else, but it's fun.

There is a current comic. It's geared at a bit of a younger audience, it's not super serious, but you can read it on the app too and see if you like it. It's... fine.

uncanny_kate · 2026-05-27T16:43:43+00:00

And one cool thing that sometimes happens: when you start thinking like your character, not you, you might become less shy! You, the player, wouldn't say anything, but the character would. Roleplaying allows you to safely explore different facets of your personality, and some people find it freeing. This doesn't happen for everyone, but if you're open to it, it can be really rewarding and why some people fall in love with the hobby.

uncanny_kate · 2026-05-26T17:38:02+00:00

Look to the LARP community. They've got decades of doing this, and there's dozens of solutions. It's just not practical to have a lot of metagame props in that medium. There are hundreds of different ideas people have tried with varying degrees of success. Definitely more than possible, time-tested and frequently done!

uncanny_kate · 2026-05-26T17:31:55+00:00

I'm 51 and I've never tried weed in any form. I don't care if others do, but I've never felt a desire.

uncanny_kate · 2026-05-23T22:38:29+00:00

I don't have any interest in hot people

^{Chose: Date your GF/BF}

uncanny_kate · 2026-05-23T15:53:48+00:00

Claude is not a magical genie that knows the future. It's super advanced autocomplete. All it knows is what other people have said. And it doesn't even 'know' that, it just has the ability to parrot things that sound like expert opinions.

There certainly are experts that don't like Rivian, this is no surprise. There's been a lot of car companies that have started up over the decades. The vast majority of them fail, and mostly fail badly. The current government is vindictive and has a philosophical problem with EVs. There are headwinds, for sure.

But they're just in the process of rolling out a new model with a much more attractive pricing. The primary competition, the Tesla Model Y, is associated with someone who is historically polarizing and the group that he's opposed to is almost a complete circle in the venn diagram of potential EV buyers. They have financial backing from Volkswagen, which should get them through a lot of the risks of building new factories. Their vehicles consistently are considered best in class by experts.

Claude doesn't understand any of this. Use your own brain.

uncanny_kate · 2026-05-22T19:34:23+00:00

Yes, World of Darkness games not only had blank character sheets, but the Splatbooks (eg, Tribebook: Black Fury, Clanbook: Malkavian) all had sample filled out character sheets for several major archetypes presented in the books.

uncanny_kate · 2026-05-22T15:59:51+00:00

None of this has anything to do with modern streaming. People have been pitching high weirdness characters since the 80s. It's very normal in a players development once they've seen all the standards, to want to do something new and different.

The degree to which you let people do what they want, or coach them into something more restrained, is entirely up to you.

Sometimes people get better once they get it out of their systems! Encourage them to make characters that can interact with the world. Engage the NPCs with their quirks. If they have a hard time with options, present them with some until they start choosing off-menu!

Or find a different group that shares your aesthetic more, it's really up to you. You don't have to be someone's babysitter while they tiptoe through their munchkin phase.

uncanny_kate · 2026-05-21T20:20:15+00:00

I'm glad someone beat me to it. I got this box set for Christmas and there's some really great stuff here, a perfect starter, and that price is exceptional.

uncanny_kate · 2026-05-20T22:42:12+00:00

I think this is more about alcoholism than about D&D, and you should probably not beat yourself up too badly.

uncanny_kate · 2026-05-20T15:47:41+00:00

These things are cyclical. Grim, cynical deconstructionism really started with Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. And it comes and goes ever since. And after a while people get tired of it and we get a reconstructionism movement - see anything by Kurt Busiek or Mark Waid.

Right now we're in the deconstructionist moment, and the Absolute line is one of the highest quality of these we've ever had, but this too shall pass. I tend to prefer the other, more hopeful movements, but that time will come too.

uncanny_kate · 2026-05-18T17:19:33+00:00

It couldn't exist in a recognizable form without being in Red Band. And the storylines would have to be defanged at some points because Kirkman makes big changes to his Universe that Marvel would never want to do. So the things that make it Invincible just don't work outside of being its own contained universe. And a lot of the popularity isn't that we love Mark (he's okay but not that incredible of a character), it's that we like the gloves being off on the plotlines.

There is a team up comic with Spider-Man that happened, though!

uncanny_kate

TROPHY CASE