#but i remember THIS PART i was particularly D8 in shock coming in from the old anime cause holy wtf did things Get Real | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

the-nysh · 11 months

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One of the biggest shocks from reading Trimax vol5 for the first time, after coming in from the 98anime, was the horrific contrast between Vash's destruction of July.

98 anime: the city was destroyed, but miraculously no one was killed. Resulting in a hellish aftermath where everyone (1.4mil people) fought and killed each other for survival in the fallout. Which sounds like a hugely unprecedented disaster, but all those subsequent deaths (loss of lives & livelihoods) were an indirect consequence of Vash firing his Angel Arm on Knives.

But in Trimax? :) Oho.......what a difference, where Vash's horrors are taken to the extremes in ways the 98anime could never show!

Cause everyone--ALL those kind people Vash ever knew and loved in that city were killed by his own hands! Swallowed up into the void (his 'gate') as the direct consequence of firing his forced-activated Angel Arm on Knives. (Reacting in a mix of fear, anger, hatred, revenge, or even aimed in cornered self-defense...all to get Knives to stop. At such a terrible cost.) Where everything else became unintended collateral in that moment, like an unleashed black hole tearing right through the city, causing indiscriminate mass destruction with no survivors or even any bodies left to be found. (Even Knives' body was irreparable.) Utterly and completely lost. Just like Vash's memories. Where it's no wonder he developed amnesia from the traumatic incident!! Cause OH does he SUFFER immensely for it once he fully remembers...

Where his life's long-wandering search (his original goal's 'destination') to finally confront and punish Knives for the death of Rem and causing the Great Fall in the first place, only led to another unprecedented catastrophe engulfing everyone he loves in July, but this time caused by himself! Nooooo--!

Flooded by his returning memories, his guilt, grief, despair and torment reach an inhuman degree of self-loathing and agony. (Warping to such a grotesque visual perception of himself within his own mind--cursed to bear this nightmarish reality he cannot escape or part from.) Utterly repentant for the horrific loss of life and monstrous sin against humanity his arm caused--as his greatest mistake he cannot undo, knowing that he's (already) a mass murderer who inherently wields the terrible power of death & destruction he never wanted to unleash or become!!! Not like that! ;o; (Cause just as he told Knives beforehand, "I'm not like you!" and then look what happened! Knives may hate and kill humans, but in the tragic irony and twisted reversal of that moment, Vash acting on his fear and hatred for Knives swept up and killed all those humans he loved along with it! aaaaa!!) And in Vash's distraught state of mind, fully taking the blame and responsibility for what he's done to July, how can he ever hope to atone or find peace or forgiveness for that....

(Cause he knows...he knows, that no matter what he does differently or how he chooses to bear the pain, the weight of all that guilt, that grief, that truth...can never escape him.)

"(I am a murderer)...All those people, those lives I extinguished...they were so kind..."

Significant even when it's described from the perspective of others, like Dr Conrad, who sees Vash having a terrifying power 'greater than anyone's ever seen or possessed' (even greater than Knives!) Zazie sees Knives & Vash as the 'natural enemies of humanity,' and even Midvalley views (them) as a 'higher existence that could will humankind's complete and utter extinction' on biblical scales of calamity...so just imagine holding all that feared power from Vash's perspective, knowing the disastrous extent and severe consequences of it being misused or going out of control again, at the risk of razing the entire world and everyone you love along with it. By naturally being a destroyer (whose very existence is a 'gun') who struggles against that by choosing to be a protector who saves instead! (No wonder Vash tightly binds and suppresses that other side of himself) And just...contending with all of that, and all that he's capable of unleashing, is the inhuman burden and reality Vash is forced to live with....

But even then, if his first confrontation with Knives at July resulted in so many collateral deaths, already breaking his promise to Rem years ago (by inadvertently killing those she sacrificed her life to save, ugh meaning his attempt to keep her memory alive and ensure her sacrifice for humanity wouldn't be in vain had already failed long ago) and his second confrontation led to Fifth Moon, then....what can Vash do the next time? Continue his usual pursuit to stop him and risk unleashing a third calamity?? What must he change in his approach, and what of his ongoing reason to live now?! Cause he can't just continue his 'send Knives to hell' mantra as his sole reason to keep on going anymore, as July already proved how attempting that backfired spectacularly, practically condemning Vash to suffer his own personal hell, intensified to the nth degree in exchange. As usual, even with the many revelations this volume, Vash still doesn't know or have any definitive answers to those questions yet. BUT by progressing the hard way even just from the little things, this becomes his ongoing struggle to figure out...

#trigun #trigunbookclub #commentary #long text post #vol5's been really kicking my ass with the Suffering #there are SO many things i want to say but i just...fail to english :'D #but i remember THIS PART i was particularly D8 in shock coming in from the old anime cause holy wtf did things Get Real

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radramblog · 3 years

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Dice, ranked

Players of tabletop games, among other things, tend to get to hoard-like levels when it comes to amassing collections of the tools of the trade- dice. As a result, people tend to get pretty obsessive about their favourites- ones they’ve paid excessive amounts for and therefore are extremely fancy, ones associated with a particularly memorable moment from one game or another, ones they send to jail for rolling too many ones.

I’ve never really understood this (except for dice jail, they know what they did). I got two sets of dice (lost the d6 from one of them, replaced it) and they work fine for just about everything. So I’m probably not the guy to turn to for this sort of topic.

What I haven’t seen is someone discussing on a meta level the ups and downs of each dice, and therefore, ranking them into an opinionated list. And since opinions are fun and I thought this would be as well, I’m going to spend some time writing about and ranking dice.

#7- d4

I feel like the d4 being the worst dice is not a controversial opinion. They’re incredibly awkward to actually roll, requiring a bit of extra effort to clear the first edge on the table, and considering the piddly numbers that come up it never feels worth it. They are also incredibly replaceable, being easily substitutable by a d6, d8, or even a d10/12 in a pinch.

This is of course avoiding the most important point, which is that it’s not hard for dice to end up on the floor, and stepping on one of these fuckers is worse than any lego piece. I know someone who has a metal set of dice, and its d4 is sharp enough to draw blood. Yikes.

#6- d10

The d10 has always bugged me design-wise. Like, I’m sure there probably wasn’t that much of a better way to design this dice- the odds one side/evens another strikes me as strange, as is it theoretically being substantially more likely to roll from an odd to an odd than an odd to an even, or vice versa, based on the way it’s laid out. Of course, I’m no expert.

Much like the d4, you could probably replace this with a d20, but it’s less cumbersome, so I imagine few bother. It’s also got bigger numbers on it, which is nice, but I swear every time I look at a game’s rules I forget whether the 0 is supposed to be 0 or 10, especially since it differs between systems and in some cases lower is actually better. Should I be happy about rolling a fat nothing? We just don’t know.

#5- d6

As tempted as I was to put this at #6 for shits and giggles, I really can’t justify doing that based on my reasons for keeping the classic dice this low. And in fact, that’s entirely why this is so low, out of spite. So many fucking board games use d6s, to the point that other dice are seen by the vast majority of people as an oddity.

And the “standard die” is so boring. It’s a cube. The most perfectly generic object in three-dimensional space. They don’t even put numbers on it, where’s the fun in that? Bleh.

#4- d12

Right in the middle, we have the d12, which may be an odd choice. The reason I’ve put the d12 in the dead centre is that it’s the one I have the least opinions about. It’s the forgotten dice, to me. I can’t remember the last time I’ve played a game where I needed it, even though I’m sure it hasn’t been that long. Whenever I’m gathering all my dice back up, I always count that I’m missing one, and it’s just about always the d12 I’ve forgotten.

It is the most forgettable die. And for that, it gets the forgettable slot.

#3- Percentile die

Unlike it’s perennial counterpart, the d10, the percentile dice is interesting. It’s got really big numbers on it, giving it a completely different look, and 00 is not nearly as confusing as 0.

But what makes the percentile die the most fun is that rolling d100, which is what you’re typically doing with it, is so fun. Because if you’re rolling that, typically there’s a huge variety of different effects that could happen, and both you and the DM are rubbing your hands with glee at how things are going to land. Because it’s likely something they’ve spent a lot of time working on, and can’t wait to see play out- and in my experience, a happy DM is a happy player. Unless it’s a kill-happy DM, but honestly, if there’s a d100 involved at least my character is getting horrifically mutilated in a fun and unique manner.

Of course, there are some games in which the d100 is a standard stat check. And in those games, the percentile is likely less interesting, which is fair. But I haven’t played many of those games.

#2- d20

The wizened among you will realise what #1 is now, and hold your horses, we’ll get there, but first is the runner up. The d20 is iconic to role-playing games, to a point where there’s multiple games, softwares, and media (podcasts etc) that use it as part of their branding. It’s standard for D&D, the most popular tabletop RPG out there, and is commonly used by both its imitators and completely separate games for a huge number of rolls and checks and the like. Save for percentile, it’s the only one of these where searching just “d20″ only gave dice-related results on google images.

The d20 gets a lot of points for the joy of rolling a nat 20. It also loses a lot of points for the terror of rolling a nat 1.

D20s are not without flaw. The small faces make them extremely easy to over-roll into and off of things, if you’re a clown like me without a dice tray- though that can be a strength, with the extended roll time being that little bit more suspenseful. As mentioned earlier, they can be extremely polarising, with the gap between a successful and unsuccessful roll being potentially huge.

But I think mostly I’m just kind of biased because they’re a huge pain in the ass to use to track your life in MtG, even though you start at 20, unless you use a spindown d20, but those are often not considered acceptable in other tabletop settings. And I have so, so many spindowns at this point.

#1: d8

I guess I have to justify my choices, huh.

Look, there’s something about the octahedral die that I find incredibly satisfying. They’re a great shape, they roll easy, and 8 is a really nice number to do maths with. I’m actually shocked that board games ended up with d6 as the default when the maths of a d8 is probably so much easier to balance around. I blame the d6 monopoly on Monopoly.

Ironically I think the d6’s omnipresence makes me like the d8 more, as it feels like a little bonus.

They have the same odd/even divide as a d10, but the shape of each face is equilateral so it doesn’t feel as biased. It’s a fun dice that I get to use often. It’s not as polarising as a d20, nor as awkward as a d4. I just really like these. Humble and unassuming, I cannot possibly justify this beyond that.

I should go collect more.

#ramble #dice #tabletop #i should try and get a d100 #they seem fun

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