Notices by clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone), page 2

all I want to do is bring more beauty in the world but instead I have to do things like "think practically" and "deliver value efficiently" and "buy groceries"

@jplebreton yeah, I see what you mean. like if they really committed there wouldn’t be a header at all

@jplebreton I honestly love the aesthetic of "no title bar" but if that's what we're gonna do I need the OS to have plan-9-esque affordances where I can like hold some key and click anywhere on the window to drag it or whatever

love playing the game of "what tiny region of the window's header is actually capable of being dragged"

game,,desgin

These kit kats are really good tho!

@neauoire oh yeah I gotta get around to that

like when have u ever seen a price go down lmao

weekly reminder that supply & demand economics aren't real and have never been real

@SymbolicCity They're very worth it! Strange books that take big swings.

@SymbolicCity The Wizard of Earthsea is also a great one (but not really the sequels! as much as I love them)

@QuietMisdreavus my thing about D&D is that it gives me nothing to hold onto the second I'm not crawling a dungeon. And honestly, that's fine, I love crawling a dungeon! But if you want to play a game about going on a fun adventure with your friends, it's really not gonna help you with any of that and will leave everyone who isn't a professional improv-er hanging and feeling incompetent

@QuietMisdreavus When my Brainer (a weirdo psychic) in Apocalypse World gets her hands on someone, I can roll to read the deep corners of their mind and ask questions like "What are your secret pains?" and "With whom do you crave forgiveness, and why?" and, oh boy, getting answers to these questions provides -way- more interesting depth and nuance than any amount of skillful improv or acting ever could.

@QuietMisdreavus so I'm obviously a huge hipster and would only play D&D if it were the moldvay basic red book, but this is actually what I really love about most of my favorite games: they give me nuanced & powerful tools for creating interesting characters, relationships, conversations, emotional moments, etc, entirely through engaging with mechanics and leaning on my character sheet.

@SymbolicCity honestly, I think most people I see are honing their style of play on television (hence my thread from a while back https://xoxo.zone/@clarity/113183080865479002), which has established itself as a form as being almost entirely blow-by-blow with "montage" being the exception to the rule. But you're right that modern writing style also leans on the exact same techniques, so it's pretty inescapable wherever you look. Maybe GMs could stand to read more Borges lol.

@SymbolicCity yeah, absolutely! That's "tell don't show" in a nutshell. The whole thing about "showing" as literary advice is that it leaves things up to interpretation. There's already a ton of ambiguity inherently in ttrpgs, no need to insert more!

I am -not- an actor or an improv theater person but I can still run a good game. Don't let the professionals and their podcasts fool you. You can lean on the amazing flexibility of conversational language to communicate all the information you need and have a great time doing it.

This is related to a common problem I see these days (in myself often!) which is struggling to zoom out. If you don't LARP out a sword fight blow-by-blow to make sure the details are right, you don't need to act out every word your characters ever speak, either! "I exchange pleasantries with her for a while before eventually cutting to the chase, drilling her on what exactly her relationship with the suspect is." And you can rewind to specific moments if you want to give the scene color.

@apophis yeah absolutely! IRL, we have all sorts of emotional responses and even thoughts outside our control, and then we post-hoc reason about -why- we had them and then use that reasoning to inform our choices & beliefs.

@SymbolicCity Oh, yeah, for sure! very important to give the players the feeling that they have that sort agency. I'd also avoid describing emotions as immediate reactions to events (since the players will have better instincts for managing those themselves) vs like, vibes or senses: "something about the way she just did that is really annoying"