all quiet on the western front is a horrific vision of hell on earth, a glimpse into how war turns the innocent into killers and then discards them, a prescient cry of agony through time, and perhaps, if opened to a queer reading — [the audience begins to throw bottles at me, but as I flinch away, none other than hideo kojima himself appears to catch the bottles out of the air with his mouth like a protector wolf]
“I could not stop wasting time. It was crazy. I wanted to do something with my life, but instead I went to sleep, or sung in the shower, or sat and stared at the wall. I couldn’t even tell you about anything that I saw. I didn’t talk to anybody. The cicadas kept dying outside, and as I dreamed, my mouth grew thick and venomous with silence.”
there was a time in my life where I painstakingly trained myself out of using “likes” and “ums” for public speaking, and then when I started learning about like basic linguistics and shit I realized that fillers are completely normal and useful parts of language and now I use them even in text all the time. I feel like if anyone suggested that I should remove them from my speech at this point I would genuinely just be like “alright well you’re not ready to engage with the topic I’m discussing yet.”
until you stop needing communication & language to be just one specific way for you to view it as skillful, authoritative, persuasive, educated, etc. then you aren’t prepared to engage in deeper conversations about language. if you can’t handle “likes” and “y'know?"s then you certainly won’t be able to handle the ways in which multilingual speakers can use one language’s grammar while speaking in another, you won’t be able to handle AAC, you won’t be able to handle discussions with people with verbal tics or stutters… like you’re not going to be able to engage with a lot of language and therefore your understanding of language is not going to be enough, currently, to really get into studying the ways in which power interacts with language or analyzing creative writing on a granular level of phrasing, word choice, punctuation, spacing
Good morning Mr. Jigsaw I noticed that this trap has a time limit of 60 minutes but as per my accommodations through the school Center of Disability Resources I get time and a half on exams and quizzes is that still something I can apply to this game right now? Thank you for understanding have a nice day
nothing that stimulant medication and a coffee and an energy drink and a bump of coke and a good hard slap in the face and seven years in the harsh wilderness and a hug from a friend and a firm prostate milking and 250mg of MDMA crystals and a top of the line gaming PC and a tall glass of water and a distant memory of summer and piano lessons and four 20mg edibles and a sword that hungers for human blood and a well socialized tuxedo cat and a sushi dinner and a leather jacket and a power nap and a single beautiful rod of depleted uranium and regular estradiol injections and a typewritten sheet of paper bearing the solution to the hard problem of consciousness and nipple clamps and a lobotomy and a gun and another coffee can’t fix
so I've been considering trying to make a ttrpg instead of just criticising all the ones that exist, but I thought I should ask someone who would know - have there been any successful projects in the "universal" sort of scope in recent memory? every example I can think of is so granular as to become totally inaccessible, even if I appreciate what they aspire to do. somehow it seems that every design which aims to cover every use case somehow circles back to rigidity and prescriptivism, perhaps reflexively in order to retain a distinct identity as a "game" unto itself rather than a set of steps to construct games?
There’s no such thing as a “universal” tabletop RPG. Game rules by their very nature encode assumptions about how the game ought to be played. Any time a game claims to be universal, either it’s lying to you for marketing, or its designer has mistaken being setting agnostic for being unopinionated about what player characters actually do.
To pose an obvious example, it’s fairly easy to stat up the cast of Pride and Prejudice in GURPS, but the actual gameplay loop of GURPS has nothing interesting to say about the things that Pride and Prejudice is about – i.e., it can construct a game-mechanical model of the setting, but that model doesn’t have the tools to address the source material’s premise, and the latter is where the trouble starts.
About the best you can realistically expect to manage is to bash together a tabletop RPG which supports a grouping of closely related ideas about what player characters do. The trick is that the shape of play isn’t particularly tied to the aesthetics of the setting, so material that doesn’t seem to be closely related can often fall into the same grouping of gameplay assumptions.
For example, it’s feasible to construct a game which can do fantasy dungeon crawls, contemporary heist capers, and cyperbunk netruns, because in gameplay terms those are all fundamentally similar activities, with similar resource-and-reward loops, similar preoccupations with logistical play, and so forth – and it can be awfully tempting to look at a game like that and say “well, it can do fantasy, contemporary, and science fiction settings, therefore it’s universal”, but what the game assumes player characters are going to do within those settings is the important part, and that’s a much narrower remit.
Right, that does seem a much more useful way of framing the distinction. A game is only a series of interesting choices, but those choices are necessarily constrained by the types of decisions codified. I think the trouble I continue to brush up against is that, while I appreciate the persistent vertical and horizontal progression inherent to long-form ttrpg, insofar as it, to my mind, imbues choices with a sense of impact (if the story ends after I make eight choices, I can’t really become too invested in those choices - the consequences are only material for another seven “moments” of gameplay) -
The way that ttrpgs typically operationalise that progression is in terms of physical or material power, rather than in terms of how you as a player or character relate to other things, people or systems in any ongoing fashion. Gaining physical or material power is certainly a more intuitive way of representing successful interactions and creating more opportunities to make similar successful choices, or to widen the “space” of possible choices - but the application of that power is limited to amplifying the player’s ability to force resolutions.
It’s hard to imagine a system which can reconcile the space between physicality and relationships without either widening the space of choices within a single system of outcome determination (irrespective of whatever quantifying apparatus is used to perform that determination) to the extent that There Are No Rules, or splitting its attention between two mechanically and philosophically incongruous means of approaching narrative and conflict. Certainly these outcomes can be measured as statistical contests between entities with discrete “social” or “physical” abilities, but nobody alive has a magical score of charm that makes outcomes happen - the continuity of relationships and systems which enable relationships appears to fall entirely outside the scope of what can be modelled quantitatively.
Ultimately the ideal “game” of narrative and conflict seems to get stuck in between the aspiration to model pro-social, even dialectic relationships between complex individuals and the unfortunate fact that it still has to be a game with clearly delineated instances of success and failure… I don’t know whether that distance can be either shortened or traversed?
ALT
