hey man listen, im sure you just didnt know because hes just a funny haha tweets guy but dril is literally an outspoken nazi on twitter and has made mulitple tweets with nazi dogwhistles and literally responded to someone going "its not a joke, i fucking hate jews". like theres screenshots and posts and stuff about it out there and im sure you could dig through his twit. none of my posts about this ever get picked up because no one wants to admit the internet funnyman is a bad guy but hes like. a literal actual nazi. take that as you will

disclaimer for my followers: do not start shit with this person. I swear to fucking god. be cool.

not to be rude but I looked this up:

on twitter's website, where I found nothing;

on twitter's mobile app, where I also found nothing;

on DuckDuckGo, where I found nothing except the "(((keebler elves)))" tweet, which I think you could reasonably argue was in poor taste but hardly seems like a sincere endorsement of fascist beliefs;

and on Google, where I again found nothing except the "(((keebler elves)))" tweet and people talking about the keebler elves tweet

so, like, with all due respect I think you're either misremembering something / conflating him with someone else, or someone is fucking with you. I'm genuinely not sure what else this could be referring to, other than his recent slew of tweets mocking the nation-state of Israel, which - speaking as an antizionist Jew - I think are good and funny

the main reason I'm posting a response to this ask at all is because I get asks like this a lot. like, every couple months at this point. but usually they're not about dril, who 1. barely uses this website and barely ever has, and 2. has bigger things to worry about! usually they're about Some Trans Woman who I may never have even fucking heard of. I've gotten asks calling latina trans women "white" and accusing them of being turbo-racist because they Disagreed With Someone One Time. I've gotten asks trying to convince me that a woman I've never spoken to is a sexual predator based on literally zero evidence of any kind. and it gets fucking tiresome. okay? it's really, really fucking tiresome

so I figure I'll post this one because it's illustrative, and because it won't stir up shit around someone who might actually get hurt by it. please stop doing this. please stop sending me completely unsupported asks about how such-and-such is a terrible person.

at the bare fucking minimum send me actual concrete Posts that I can look at, because then I can actually judge for myself whether it's something worth getting upset about. otherwise there's basically a 10% chance I look into it, find nothing tangible, and shrug, and a 90% chance it goes straight into the trash.

while this post has prompted us to evaluate whether we should include some kind of "thanks for backing!" card in our fulfillment, its also very funny to just send people mystery objects

I just received a large brass coin with an emblem of a cartoon rat on it in the mail. It was literally the only thing in the envelope – there wasn't even an explanatory card. I presume this is a reward from one of the several dozen crowdfunded tabletop RPGs I've backed over the course of the past decade, but I genuinely have no recollection which – if any – of them it might be, so it's honestly all a bit sinister.

art comic

I have never believed in any personalized distribution of eternal Light. No Lord God is going to see to it, no celestial accountant. It would be hard for one individual to bear so much suffering, especially an omniscient one; in my view they would collapse under the burden of all that pain, unless equipped in advance with some form of defense mechanism, as Mankind is. Only a piece of machinery could possibly carry all the world’s pain. Only a machine, simple, effective and just. But if everything were to happen mechanically, our prayers wouldn’t be needed.

— Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones)

Honestly it's weird that roleplaying as we know it evolved from historical wargaming.

Like for example DBA rules contain some suggestions for running campaigns with narrative and "propaganda" so I wouldn't say that it's something incompatible, and 0E looks way more like wargames than say PbtA games do, but storytelling games were a feature of artistic salons for way longer and they appear much closer to roleplaying than rulesets for reenacting ancient battles on tabletop.

Salon games didn't have skill checks but neither did wargames and it's strange that nobody came up with simplistic skill checks to add uncertainty and realism to the game

I think the line is a lot clearer when the role of dice and rules in tabletop roleplaying games is correctly understood.

"Uncertainty" and "realism" are, at best, secondary to what the dice are actually doing. Even most tabletop RPGs get it wrong when they try to explain themselves – they'll talk about the rules as something to fall back on to prevent schoolyard arguments (i.e., "yes I did!/no you didn't!") from derailing the story, when in fact it's the exact opposite.

If we look at freeform roleplaying as an illustrative parallel, we see that, while newly formed groups may in fact fall to bickering when a consensus can't be reached about what ought to happen next, mature and well-established groups tend instead to fall prey to excessive consensus-seeking: the impulse to always find an outcome that isn't necessarily one which everybody at the table can be happy with, but at the very least one which everybody at the table can agree is reasonable – and that's a lot more constraining than one might think.

In this sense, the role of picking up the dice isn't to build consensus, but to break it – to allow for the possibility of outcomes which nobody at the table wanted or expected. It's the "well, this is happening now" factor that prevents the table's dynamic from ossifying into endless consensus-seeking about what reasonably ought to happen next.

Looking to the history of wargames, this is precisely the innovation they bring to the table. Early historical wargames tended to be diceless affairs which decided outcomes by deferring to the judgment of a referee or other subject matter expert, but the use of randomisers increasingly came to be favoured because referees would tend to favour the most reasonable course, precluding upsets and rendering the outcomes of entire battles a foregone conclusion. This goes all the way back to the roots of tabletop wargaming – people were literally having "rules versus rulings" arguments two hundred years ago!

(This isn't the only facet of tabletop roleplaying culture which has its roots in wargaming culure, of course. For example, you can draw a direct line from the preoccupation of early tabletop RPGs with punishing the use of out-of-character knowledge to historical wargaming's gentleperson's agreement to refrain from making decisions based on information that one's side's commanders couldn't possibly have possessed when re-creating historical battles.)

To be clear, I don't necessary disagree that salon games could have yielded something like modern tabletop RPGs. However, first they'd have had to arrive the the paired insights that a. excessive consensus-seeking is poison to building an interesting narrative; and b. randomisers can be used to force the breaking of consensus, and historical wargames had a substantial head start because they'd figured all that out a century earlier.

my goal for possum creek's brand style is a little bit "what if a group of alchemists ran a farmer's market stall" and a little bit "what if some cringy dykes had a marketing budget"

I just received a large brass coin with an emblem of a cartoon rat on it in the mail. It was literally the only thing in the envelope – there wasn't even an explanatory card. I presume this is a reward from one of the several dozen crowdfunded tabletop RPGs I've backed over the course of the past decade, but I genuinely have no recollection which – if any – of them it might be, so it's honestly all a bit sinister.

aesthetics lack any fundamental political stance; any aesthetic-based subculture can harbor both leftwing and rightwing sentiments. from punk to cottagecore, fashion and music and art are just aesthetics, and will be enjoyed by anyone of any belief, regardless of how progressive you think the community should be

Hi David "Prokopetz" Prokopetz,

I did this to you. Me, personally. That rat is caused by my hand. Consider it a "just in case" safety measure, should you ever get lost and need to choose between two guards or two paths.

See you,

Jay Dragon

Wizard of the Possum Creek

(genuinely fr this is me and this is so fucking funny, do u actually wanna know what its for or do u enjoy the mysteru)

I just received a large brass coin with an emblem of a cartoon rat on it in the mail. It was literally the only thing in the envelope – there wasn't even an explanatory card. I presume this is a reward from one of the several dozen crowdfunded tabletop RPGs I've backed over the course of the past decade, but I genuinely have no recollection which – if any – of them it might be, so it's honestly all a bit sinister.

Never understood the collective vehement resentment of small talk lol i hate the painful grind of small talk as much as the next person but i think id rather shrivel up and die than be denied nuggets of joy found in standing in an elevator and having a middle aged woman compliment my nails or bonding fleetingly with a cafegoer over the city's temperamental weather it's so integral to nurturing & cultivating the soul i think

honestly like i get the poly(nesian) vs poly(amorous) thing, and n(on)b(lack) vs n(on)b(inary), and i’ll change to polyam or ply or enby if asked to avoid confusion, but i also need yall to know that like…its okay for one abbreviation to have multiple meanings. theres only 26 letters and we can reuse some of them, no one is “stealing” anything.

Animal Crossing did not attack Air Conditioners.

'i need a big strong butch who will princess carry me-' wrong i need a weak 5'4" rabbit in the headlights looking butch who is scared i'll try to bite off her head like a praying mantis when we're done

i guess my point is i want you to kill the dead tranny in your head. no sorry it’s not a sex thing this time. i just can’t stand the idea of us looking at eachother as corpses waiting to happen.

When I was a very suicidal trans activist in Texas, Benjamin Sisko saying “sure, you would [die for your people]. Dying gets you off the hook. The question is: are you willing to live for your people?” changed and possibly saved my life. It’s up there with “if we are going to be damned, let us be damned for who we really are” from Picard. Star Trek not only shows us a better world, it teaches us how to make it there

Of all of the hairsplitting privilege-related terminological distinctions that people have tried to introduce on here, one that I have actually found useful and striven to adopt in my own speech and writing is the poor/broke distinction. I now wince whenever someone describes a thrifty PhD student from a middle-class background as "poor", for example, even though I know that in common usage there's nothing wrong with saying it that way. It's a useful distinction that I didn't previously have a good linguistic handle for.