tsolarprincess
106 posts
Latest Posts by tsolarprincess
I did in fact get some sexual encounters ruined by laughing
Hey, your arms are going to shake when you hold yourself above someone for a while during missionary. It won't ruin the moment.
Hey, your thighs and lower back are going to start aching eventually, and you'll need to change positions or slow down. It won't ruin the moment.
Hey, your tummy is going to make noises when you're anxious during your first few times with them. It won't ruin the moment.
Hey, you're going to burst out giggling sometimes. It won't ruin the moment.
Hey, you're going to dislike one, two, or a few things you thought you would've liked. It won't ruin the moment.
Hey, you're going to struggle to finish sometimes. Or keep it in. It won't ruin the moment.
Hey, you're going to stumble around sometimes. It won't ruin the moment.
Hey, you're going to need to take a few deep breaths sometimes. It won't ruin the moment.
Hey. You won't ruin the moment.
And if they say that you have, they don't deserve a moment with you.
♡♡♡
when u get anxiety medication for the first time
my kid has started to write stories and like, no lies, they’re funny as fuck
A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. “Do I look like a fool?” said the frog. “You’d sting me if I let you on my back!”
“Be logical,” said the scorpion. “If I stung you I’d certainly drown myself.”
“That’s true,” the frog acknowledged. “Climb aboard, then!” But no sooner than they were halfway across the river, the scorpion stung the frog, and they both began to thrash and drown. “Why on earth did you do that?” the frog said morosely. “Now we’re both going to die.”
“I can’t help it,” said the scorpion. “It’s my nature.”
___
…But no sooner than they were halfway across the river, the frog felt a subtle motion on its back, and in a panic dived deep beneath the rushing waters, leaving the scorpion to drown.
“It was going to sting me anyway,” muttered the frog, emerging on the other side of the river. “It was inevitable. You all knew it. Everyone knows what those scorpions are like. It was self-defense.”
___
…But no sooner had they cast off from the bank, the frog felt the tip of a stinger pressed lightly against the back of its neck. “What do you think you’re doing?” said the frog.
“Just a precaution,” said the scorpion. “I cannot sting you without drowning. And now, you cannot drown me without being stung. Fair’s fair, isn’t it?”
They swam in silence to the other end of the river, where the scorpion climbed off, leaving the frog fuming.
“After the kindness I showed you!” said the frog. “And you threatened to kill me in return?”
“Kindness?” said the scorpion. “To only invite me on your back after you knew I was defenseless, unable to use my tail without killing myself? My dear frog, I only treated you as I was treated. Your kindness was as poisoned as a scorpion’s sting.”
___
…“Just a precaution,” said the scorpion. “I cannot sting you without drowning. And now, you cannot drown me without being stung. Fair’s fair, isn’t it?”
“You have a point,” the frog acknowledged. “But once we get to dry land, couldn’t you sting me then without repercussion?”
“All I want is to cross the river safely,” said the scorpion. “Once I’m on the other side I would gladly let you be.”
“But I would have to trust you on that,” said the frog. “While you’re pressing a stinger to my neck. By ferrying you to land I’d be be giving up the one deterrent I hold over you.”
“But by the same logic, I can’t possibly withdraw my stinger while we’re still over water,” the scorpion protested.
The frog paused in the middle of the river, treading water. “So, I suppose we’re at an impasse.”
The river rushed around them. The scorpion’s stinger twitched against the frog’s unbroken skin. “I suppose so,” the scorpion said.
___
A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. “Absolutely not!” said the frog, and dived beneath the waters, and so none of them learned anything.
___
A scorpion, being unable to swim, asked a turtle (as in the original Persian version of the fable) to carry it across the river. The turtle readily agreed, and allowed the scorpion aboard its shell. Halfway across, the scorpion gave in to its nature and stung, but failed to penetrate the turtle’s thick shell. The turtle, swimming placidly, failed to notice.
They reached the other side of the river, and parted ways as friends.
___
…Halfway across, the scorpion gave in to its nature and stung, but failed to penetrate the turtle’s thick shell.
The turtle, hearing the tap of the scorpion’s sting, was offended at the scorpion’s ungratefulness. Thankfully, having been granted the powers to both defend itself and to punish evil, the turtle sank beneath the waters and drowned the scorpion out of principle.
___
A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. “Do I look like a fool?” sneered the frog. “You’d sting me if I let you on my back.”
The scorpion pleaded earnestly. “Do you think so little of me? Please, I must cross the river. What would I gain from stinging you? I would only end up drowning myself!”
“That’s true,” the frog acknowledged. “Even a scorpion knows to look out for its own skin. Climb aboard, then!”
But as they forged through the rushing waters, the scorpion grew worried. This frog thinks me a ruthless killer, it thought. Would it not be justified in throwing me off now and ridding the world of me? Why else would it agree to this? Every jostle made the scorpion more and more anxious, until the frog surged forward with a particularly large splash, and in panic the scorpion lashed out with its stinger.
“I knew it,” snarled the frog, as they both thrashed and drowned. “A scorpion cannot change its nature.”
___
A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. The frog agreed, but no sooner than they were halfway across the scorpion stung the frog, and they both began to thrash and drown.
“I’ve only myself to blame,” sighed the frog, as they both sank beneath the waters. “You, you’re a scorpion, I couldn’t have expected anything better. But I knew better, and yet I went against my judgement! And now I’ve doomed us both!”
“You couldn’t help it,” said the scorpion mildly. “It’s your nature.”
___
…“Why on earth did you do that?” the frog said morosely. “Now we’re both going to die.”
“Alas, I was of two natures,” said the scorpion. “One said to gratefully ride your back across the river, and the other said to sting you where you stood. And so both fought, and neither won.” It smiled wistfully. “Ah, it would be nice to be just one thing, wouldn’t it? Unadulterated in nature. Without the capacity for conflict or regret.”
___
“By the way,” said the frog, as they swam, “I’ve been meaning to ask: What’s on the other side of the river?”
“It’s the journey,” said the scorpion. “Not the destination.”
___
…“What’s on the other side of anything?” said the scorpion. “A new beginning.”
___
…”Another scorpion to mate with,” said the scorpion. “And more prey to kill, and more living bodies to poison, and a forthcoming lineage of cruelties that you will be culpable in.”
___
…”Nothing we will live to see, I fear,” said the scorpion. “Already the currents are growing stronger, and the river seems like it shall swallow us both. We surge forward, and the shoreline recedes. But does that mean our striving was in vain?”
___
“I love you,” said the scorpion.
The frog glanced upward. “Do you?”
“Absolutely. Can you imagine the fear of drowning? Of course not. You’re a frog. Might as well be scared of breathing air. And yet here I am, clinging to your back, as the waters rage around us. Isn’t that love? Isn’t that trust? Isn’t that necessity? I could not kill you without killing myself. Are we not inseparable in this?”
The frog swam on, the both of them silent.
___
“I’m so tired,” murmured the frog eventually. “How much further to the other side? I don’t know how long we’ve been swimming. I’ve been treading water. And it’s getting so very dark.”
“Shh,” the scorpion said. “Don’t be afraid.”
The frog’s legs kicked out weakly. “How long has it been? We’re lost. We’re lost! We’re doomed to be cast about the waters forever. There is no land. There’s nothing on the other side, don’t you see!”
“Shh, shh,” said the scorpion. “My venom is a hallucinogenic. Beneath its surface, the river is endlessly deep, its currents carrying many things.”
“You - You’ve killed us both,” said the frog, and began to laugh deliriously. “Is this - is this what it’s like to drown?”
“We’ve killed each other,” said the scorpion soothingly. “My venom in my glands now pulsing through your veins, the waters of your birthing pool suffusing my lungs. We are engulfing each other now, drowning in each other. I am breathless. Do you feel it? Do you feel my sting pierced through your heart?”
“What a foolish thing to do,” murmured the frog. “No logic. No logic to it at all.”
“We couldn’t help it,” whispered the scorpion. “It’s our natures. Why else does anything in the world happen? Because we were made for this from birth, darling, every moment inexplicable and inevitable. What a crazy thing it is to fall in love, and yet - It’s all our fault! We are both blameless. We’re together now, darling. It couldn’t have happened any other way.”
___
“It’s funny,” said the frog. “I can’t say that I trust you, really. Or that I even think very much of you and that nasty little stinger of yours to begin with. But I’m doing this for you regardless. It’s strange, isn’t it? It’s strange. Why would I do this? I want to help you, want to go out of my way to help you. I let you climb right onto my back! Now, whyever would I go and do a foolish thing like that?”
___
A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. “Do I look like a fool?” said the frog. “You’d sting me if I let you on my back!”
“Be logical,” said the scorpion. “If I stung you I’d certainly drown myself.”
“That’s true,” the frog acknowledged. “Come aboard, then!” But no sooner had the scorpion mounted the frog’s back than it began to sting, repeatedly, while still safely on the river’s bank.
The frog groaned, thrashing weakly as the venom coursed through its veins, beginning to liquefy its flesh. “Ah,” it muttered. “For some reason I never considered this possibility.”
“Because you were never scared of me,” the scorpion whispered in its ear. “You were never scared of dying. In a past life you wore a shell and sat in judgement. And then you were reborn: soft-skinned, swift, unburdened, as new and vulnerable as a child, moving anew through a world of children. How could anyone ever be cruel, you thought, seeing the precariousness of it all?” The scorpion bowed its head and drank. “How could anyone kill you without killing themselves?”
legitimately my first feminist awakening as a ten year old child was realizing that girls were expected to respect “boy stuff” but boys were never expected to respect “girl stuff”
Only people who can solve my three riddles get to date me.
“they were flirting with you” and how was i supposed to know such a thing when everyone speaks in codes and puzzles
You tell your cowgirl gf you want to bring toys into the bedroom and she brings out a handsaw, a vaguely rake-like implement, and two semispheroidal objects with handles
Children please stop calling the slightest hint of sexual desire “gooning” I’m going to strangle all of you
in an interesting case of linguistic convergent evolution, the english words scale, scale, and scale are all false cognates of each other
things that happened to me when i was a woman in STEM:
an advisor humiliated me in front of an entire lab group because of a call I made in his place when he wouldn't reply to my e-mails for months
he later delegated part of my master's thesis work to a 19-year old male undergrad without my approval
a male scientist at a NASA conference looked me up and down and asked when i was graduating and if i was open to a job at his company. right before inquiring what my ethnicity was because i "looked exotic"
a random male member of the public began talking over me and my female advisor, an oceanographer with a pHD and decades of experience, saying he knew more about oceanography than us
things that have happened to me since becoming a man in STEM:
being asked consistently for advice on projects despite being completely new to a position
male colleagues approaching me to drop candid information regarding our partners / higher ups that I was not privy to before
lenience toward my work in a way I haven't experienced before. incredible understanding when I need to take time off to care for my family.
conference rooms go silent when I start talking. no side chatter. I get a baseline level of attention and focus from people that's very unfamiliar and genuinely difficult for me to wrap my head around.
like. yes some PI's will still be assholes regardless of the gender of their subordinates but, I've lived this transition. misogyny in STEM is killing women's careers, and trans men can and do experience male privilege.
"Men in dresses are seen as bad, but women in pants aren't!"
is not the statement that "men can't be feminine but women can be masculine in society" that you think it is.
Let me introduce: women with facial hair. Full beards. Mustaches. Bald women. Bodybuilder women. Women with visible body hair. These aren't "more acceptable" than men in dresses.
Pants don't have a gendered association anymore, while dresses do. There is something to be said for that, but it certainly ISN'T "masculine women are acceptable now."
Towards less annoying RPGs
My relationship with the RPG genre is an unending love/hate. I love its core elements. I enjoy roleplaying, exploring, doing side quests, leveling up, immersing myself, freedom of choice, replayability, rich stories and settings, flexible mechanics, dungeon crawling… basically, everything normal people love about the genre.
But sometimes developers make very specific design choices that drastically worsen the experience. What I’m going to say now is less of a unambiguous flaw and more a subjective preference – I’m not claiming this approach will work for everyone. I’m just describing what I would find enjoyable and comfortable.
(And just to be clear – I’m talking about the CRPG genre specifically. I know that things should work differently in something like X-COM, no need to bring it up)
Inventory. God, inventory. One cannot overstate how much I hate dealing with inventory. Sorting. Selling. Crafting. Choosing equipment. And it’s not the concept of inventory that bothers me – it’s not the fact that I have to manage gear – it’s the technical and UI aspects of just about every single concrete implementation. In retro games it was shit, but it was understandable shit, but modern games have no excuse.
Most of these problems come from simulationism – trying to make things work like they do in real life, rather than in a way that’s fun, convenient, and balanced.
Here’s how I would implement inventory in my dream CRPG game. First I’ll go over some general ideas, then move on to more radical modest proposals. I’m going to use Skyrim as the canonical example of having done the most wrong things, but, of course, it’s not the only game committing the corresponding sins.
Logically Separate Semantically Different Aspects of Gameplay
Why does Skyrim store quest items stored in the inventory? You can't sell them, you can't drop them, and you can't eat them. The fact that they’re sitting there alongside metal ingots and soul gems is just annoying; there's no real need for it. Semantically, quest items aren’t items – they’re markers of quest progression. So they belong in the journal, not in the inventory.
And such it is with everything. We mix together semantically different aspects of the game simply because, on the simulationist level, they're all basically “items.” We don’t dump, say, potions, spells, and perks together, we put them into different panels and subject to different presentation, because they do different things. Likewise, we shouldn’t lump potions, weapons, and vendor trash together. Those do even more different things!
Retro games like Arcanum were especially bad with this – everything literally goes into one grid. Enjoy your inventory Tetris. Dark Messiah of Might and Magic puts spells into the inventory, and while there's a UI justification for that, it still leads to some unintuitive moments. Many modern games, at least, allow you to filter by type, but that’s not enough – items still follow a unified UI logic regardless of their function.
No. Weapons and armor should go under the Equipment tab. Consumables – into the Potion Belt. Ingredients – into the Crafting Pouch. Those should be entirely separate gameplay systems, rather than a single mixed system.
A game that does it right is Hogwarts Legacy. Gear goes in one place, potions in another, ingredients in a third. The process of swapping a hat and the process of drinking a potion use completely different mechanics – and so they should. The fact that other games handle both using the same logic is just a holdover from older design conventions.
Hogwarts Legacy also shows why this isn’t just a minor convenience issue. Look at how it handles crafting ingredients. Throughout the whole game, I had to open my inventory to check my ingredients only once – and that was just to see if it was even possible for the purpose of writing this post. Otherwise, I never needed to. When I’m gathering or buying ingredients, the game shows a pop-up with how many I have. When I go to a crafting station, it tells me what I can make and what I already have. When I need the info, it’s there automatically. When I don’t, it’s out of my way.
That drastically reduces cognitive load. I always have a general idea of what I have and what I can craft, and I never need to consciously dig through menus. Compared to something like Divinity: Original Sin, where being a crafter means spending half the game obsessively scanning menus and peering at icons in a grid – it’s incredibly relaxing. I tend to skip crafting in RPGs because of that cognitive friction, but in Hogwarts, crafting was genuinely fun.
Segregated Burden Mechanics
Here, I’ll use the word “burden” in a broad sense: burden is anything that limits how many items you can stuff into your inventory. It could be based on a literal weight in kilograms, or on a limited number of slots in a grid, or on anything else.
Once again, we should separate systems by their mechanical logic. The burden that prevents you from wearing too much heavy armor, the burden that stops you from hoarding potions, and the burden that limits how much loot you can haul out of a dungeon – are all fundamentally different systems. They affect different things and serve different purposes. They shouldn’t be lumped together.
In some games, burden is simply superfluous, and removing it wouldn’t have made the game worse (e.g. Witcher 1, Planescape: Torment). In games where you need it, it shouldn’t be done via thoughtless simulationism. Developers need to understand exactly what they’re trying to limit and what behavior they want to incentivize.
An example of this done right is BioShock. You have limits on how many medkits you can carry, how much ammo, how much money, how many tonics. But those are different limits! Your ability to carry a limited supply of shotgun shells has nothing to do with how much money you can hoard. And items that aren’t consumables at all – like weapons and tonics – don’t take up any burden space whatsoever.
Clearly Indicate an Item’s Usefulness
Thankfully, modern developers are catching up to this. But not everyone. They all need to hurry up.
In Arcanum, figuring out whether an item is useful for crafting, needed for a quest, or can be sold safely is hardly easy. When I played as a technologist, I obsessively hoarded anything that even looked like a crafting component, not having a way to find out if I’d need it later. Eventually, I gave up and looked up all the recipes. It turned out that 80% of it could’ve been thrown away. My second character was a mage, and I had a much easier time. But then, much later, I found out that some seemingly useless, irreplaceable items were required for the shrines of the gods quest… and so I had to run around from vendor to vendor trying to find the one I sold those items to.
What we need is simple: every item should clearly indicate what it's used for. What’s for crafting, what’s for quests, and what’s safe to sell should be evident.
Shared Party Inventory
Praise be to Allah, the smartest designers are beginning to figure this out, too.
Skyrim had one completely unnecessary system. Companions could carry items, effectively increasing your total capacity. But to make use of this free capacity, you needed to access their inventory directly, playing inventory Tetris, moving items between your backpack and theirs. This was made worse by the horrible UI. The Outer Worlds handled it better – companions directly increase your carrying capacity, with all items going into one shared pool. No micromanagement required.
And that’s how it should be everywhere. The only items that deserve to be “nailed” to a specific character are the ones they actually have equipped. Everything else goes into a shared stash. There is absolutely no reason to make the player decide which party member carries the crafting ingredients and the vendor trash. Those resources exist at the party level, and making players juggle them between individual inventories serves no mechanical purpose. It gets especially bad when your party composition changes, and you’re forced to transfer items manually from one character to another. Virgil, you little shit, where did you run off to with all my stuff?! I’ll kill you ୧༼ ಠ益ಠ ༽୨
Reworking Vendor Trash
Some items serve no purpose other than being sold to a vendor when you get to the town. This is realistic, but at times it’s mechanically ridiculous. Take a look at Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. There’s no burden system in that game at all; your inventory has no limits whatsoever. But vendor trash still exists. The only mechanical difference between a vendor trash item and an equivalent sum in cash is a few extra clicks at the vendor. The only “decision” it introduces is whether you want to sell now or after you level up your Finance skill. But come on, what kind of dumbass lick even levels Finance?
What should happen instead: vendor trash automatically converts to money when picked up. That’s it. Loot exists, hassle doesn’t.
Some games have a vendor trash mechanic that actually adds interesting choices. In Skyrim, your tastiest loot is the stuff that weighs little and sells high. That’s a solid dynamic, especially since much of the loot in Skyrim isn’t purely vendor trash: armor and weapons looted from enemies also have value. But not every game needs this. In, say, The Witcher (any of the three), that mechanic is completely superfluous. Designers should consider how this system fits into the rest of the gameplay – if there’s no clear, compelling reason to include it, then don’t. Don’t add it just for the sake of simulationism. Gameplay systems should exist for a reason, and “genre convention” is a weak reason.
A game that gets this right: Dishonored. Not an RPG, but same principle applies – valuable items exist in the world, but when you pick them up, they just turn into money. Done.
Burden Only Makes Sense During Missions
I was elated when I played Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous and saw that burden is completely ignored while you’re at the base.
I hope I don’t need to elaborate – given everything else, this one’s obvious. Having a burden system while dungeon delving? That makes sense and serves a need. Having it while you’re in town? Pure simulationism for its own sake, with no gameplay value.
Cosmetics and mechanics are separate
Time after time, I end up looking like a clown who lost a bet. This happens in RPG games, too – why? Usually because the gear with the best stats doesn’t match my aesthetic preferences. Around the time Mass Effect came out, devs finally began adding the option to hide your helmet without losing its stat bonuses, which is a good first step. But we should go further. Stats and looks should be logically separated. I want to look like a sleek rogue-assassin in leather armor. I don’t care that glass armor also counts as light and has better stats – trying to stealth around dressed like a disco ball feels ridiculous.
A game that gets this right: Hogwarts Legacy. You can reassign the visuals from piece of gear to another, and some pieces of gear are visual-only. You build up a collection of visuals in a separate tab (not in the inventory!), and you can apply them to any item. I don’t have to ruin my character’s gender-envy-inducing face with a pair of glasses with eyes popping out on a spring.
Cosmetics doesn’t just mean character appearance. In Skyrim, any vendor trash can potentially be used to decorate your house, which could be an argument against homogenizing them into cash. But then make decoration into its own separate mechanic! Have the player collect decoration into a catalog and place them around. This is how it works in Hogwarts Legacy, too – the Room of Requirement decorations can be transfigured out of thin air if you’ve unlocked them.
Even outside of video games, this idea is catching on. In D&D One, your familiar’s stat block is customizable independently of its physical form. So whether you prefer owls or ravens is a flavor choice – it doesn’t restrict your gameplay.
Enemy Gear Shouldn’t Be Lootable At All
In Skyrim, 99% of the weapons and armor you loot from regular enemies are vendor trash, except maybe in the very early game. In practice, your actual gear comes from treasure chests, shops, crafting, or boss loot. The fact that a bandit’s leather armor is anything but a pure vendor trash item is a weird holdover. It makes it harder to sort usable and sellable equipment, clutters up your inventory, and just generally adds noise.
If you want enemies to give you money on death, fine – just have them drop actual money. Leave gear for the actually meaningful rewards – chests, shops, crafting, and bosses.
There are exceptions. For example, in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, new weapons don’t just replace old weapons, they supplement them. Because weapons break so easily, even a weaker sword from a random enemy can be useful, just as a “trash stick” for mopping up weak mobs without wasting durability on your main. In that kind of system, gear is part equipment, part consumable, so different rules apply.
Consumables Should Be Free Actions
(For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to call these “potions,” even if they’re technically stimpacks or whatever.)
Compare real-time games like Fallout: New Vegas, where you can chug potions during the pause screen with zero hassle, to turn-based games like OMORI, where using a potion wastes your entire turn. The latter is common in JRPGs, but there’s a problem: the real opportunity cost of a potion isn’t its price or rarity, it’s the turn you just spent. All too often, you should have done something else with your time that doesn’t need a potion. So in practice, most potions have an extremely narrow window of usefulness. Anything from the previous tier isn’t just less useful – it’s fully worthless.
Make drinking potions a free action. Let me drink a whole handful of outdated potions to substitute for one on-tier potion. Let me squeeze a tuft of hair from a mangy mare. Potions should be an investment, you spending a resource to make a fight easier. They should actually make the fight easier.
A game that gets it right: West of Loathing. Even though the game is turn-based, consumables don’t eat your turn, which makes an otherwise dead-simple battle system surprisingly strategic.
Make inventory part of the prep phase
Time to tie everything together into one spicy hot take. This isn’t just a UI tweak, it’s a full-on rework of the RPG inventory formula. But I think it’s worth trying at least once, just to see if it works.
I propose offloading the whole inventory loadout process into its own dedicated preparation phase, separate from moment-to-moment play.
You have a base – maybe a literal in-universe hub like in Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, or a purchasable house in Skyrim, or a symbolic location, like Baldur’s Gate III camp. From there, you plan your next expedition. You choose your gear – armor, weapons, etc, which are semantically part of your build, like perks or spells, and not inventory items. Weapons get assigned to fixed slots: say, a sword, a bow, and maybe a third slot for something situational.
Potions should go into a limited but expandable potion belt (maybe its size grows with your Alchemy skill-equivalent). You pack what fits and what makes sense. Going up against fire elementals? Load up on fire resistance. Delving into a dungeon, scouting the wilderness, and infiltrating a mansion would need different loadouts. Once you’re geared up, that loadout is locked in. Your build is settled for the mission, and all the junk you pick up during it doesn’t interfere and doesn’t clutter. You don’t need to pause and compare equipment at every sword you find. Anything you loot goes into a separate “loot bag,” which doesn’t interact with your live build at all. And things like crafting ingredients? You’re only going to use those back at base anyway. Don’t make me think about them mid-dungeon. Hide them in a deep menu. Let me enter a flow state, where gear and numbers fade to the background, and it’s just me and the encounter.
Why This Works
– More Build Variety During the Game
The prep phase isn’t just about picking gear – it’s a hub for reshuffling your entire build. Respec your stats, swap spells, hand-pick party members. Suddenly it makes sense to have situational gear, like a holy sword that rends undead but can’t scratch a bear.
– Strategic Depth.
Prepping for each run becomes an actual strategic layer. Pre-scouting and knowing enemy types becomes valuable. The Witcher tried to flirt with this idea and tell us that the strength of a Witcher is in knowing the enemy, but it doesn’t actually pay off on a mechanical level. This system would.
– Reduced Cognitive Load.
During combat, you think about combat. When it’s builds, you think about builds. You don’t need to keep context-switching every five seconds. You can enter a proper flow state.
– Less Disbalance in Resource Economy
In Skyrim, consumable economy collapses very quickly. Either you burn through supplies too fast for them to matter, or you hoard so many that you end the game with a mountain of scrolls and potions you never used. Balancing that so that every possible player is well-paced is basically impossible. But if you can do the math on the resource economy on the per-encounter basis, it becomes much easier and more tractable.
– Sensible Recovery Mechanics
Every game mimicking D&D runs into trouble regarding the limits on “long rests.” Having unlimited long rests obviates a lot of challenges, but choosing a balanced way lo limit it is difficult. But if you return to base between missions anyway, boom – perfect place to recharge spell slots. No weird narrative gymnastics required.
– Actually Useful Base Building
Houses in Skyrim are places where you can store loot and save 10 gold on a tavern. Some people get a kick from walking around from chest to chest inside their giant gold-plated mansion, but was always fine with the cheapest hovel in Windhelm. Here, bases are more important: they are the places for you to prepare between missions. Just don’t get your base-building ideas from Fallout 4. Please.
Afterword for people who confuse simulationism with realism
If Skyrim required you to sit down and take a poop soon after you eat, complete with a QTE-based butt-wiping mechanic, that would indeed be closer to physical reality, but it would really hurt the fantasy realism of a hero from a Scandinavian myth.
Friendly reminder that this adorable, funky, purple haired science gremlin is thirty years old and living her best life with her emo alien femboy. And people say being in your thirties sucks.
What the media won't show
Daughter of the void Left out and annoyed Vengeant, quick to resent
Torch and snake and knife Controverse and strife For my pleasure and merriment
Morlocks - "The Golden Goddess"
My version of Eris was inspired both by the Greek myths and by Discordianism, a belief system from the 1960s in which chaos and discord are thought to be just as important as order. When I recently heard the song "The Golden Goddess" (about Discordian Eris) by the industrial rock band Morlocks, I just had to draw my version of Eris.
Culture of obedience and hierarchy
weird as fuck living in a culture where it's considered more impolite to speak up and defend yourself against someone treating you unfairly than it is for someone to be rude to you in the first place
Unbelievably dire.. how did we get here
They are also like this about fluoride in water
you know that phenomenon where vaccines are so effective that people forget how scary the original disease was? I think Americans are like this about government
listen the fact is that a lot of poor people ARE bad with money. i have terrible impulse control around spending 5 dollars here and 10 dollars there and i know so many people around me who have this problem too. but its not "this persons bad with money, so theyre poor"; its "this persons poor, so theyre bad with money". i dont know when i'll be able to get a little treat or eat out or buy myself something that will make me happy again so i have to do it now. idon't know when i'll afford food again so i have to buy it now. i don't feel confident in the fact i'll ever have the cushioning to genuinely enjoy expendable income, so instead of saving and hoping (only to have my savings routinely wiped out for moving, or medical costs, or a car accident), i spend it now so i can enjoy life now.
i think if you see poor people ebegging constantly but two days ago saw them posting about a fancy coffee and a pastry, you need to stop viewing "spending a few dollars you maybe shouldnt" as something that requires the Punishment of "can't pay the fucking bills". some of us, just like, need to feel like we have some kind of normalcy in our lives because being poor fucking sucks
I love talking to kids about disability bc
1. they often just Get It, and
2. they have 0 concept of disability as a tragedy or something pitiable.
I've watched kids get into an argument with a teacher bc they thought wheelchairs were cool. I told a kid that I can't stand for too long sometimes and they replied, "That's okay, I can't do cartwheels sometimes, but I just do other stuff then. You can sit down with me if you want". Today a girl asked me what the headphones on a classmate's desk were for and I told her that headphones are important for some kids because noises bother them, and she said she wished she had headphones at home, because her baby brothers make a lot of noise and it makes it hard to think. The idea that different people could use tools at different times is intuitive and simple and when accessibility aids are explained neutrally, kids don't see them as bad or unfortunate, they're just things that are useful.
Even mental disability!! In Kindergarten the other day one of the kids asked me why his table partner got stickers when nobody else did. I started off by saying, "Well, when you do your work well, it feels good, right? That's your brain giving you a reward," and the kid just right away went, "Oh, and the stickers are like his reward?" YES! You are 5 and have a better grasp on ADHD than most adults! Kids blow me away every day.