Kids these days who think that being a bard is just about swinging swords and playing lutes disgust me. Where’s the pizzazz? The showmanship? The seduction??
you ain’t a real bard until you seduce your way out of at least 19 situations that would normally end in combat
You’re not a real bard until you make your DM cry because you seduced the Big Bad that they’ve built up to for 10 sessions
Once a bard friend rolled a 1 for a seduction and ended up killing a girl and tried to hide the body. He was caught, rolled low on deception and they all thought he was fucking her corpse. He then tried seducing the guards and rolled low again so all the guards had boners while arresting him and the DM had to sideline the entire game and make up a dungeon for the rest of us to get our stupid bard out of. But we didn’t. So for like 3 nights the DM essentially ran 2 different games, one of us questing without ol’ corpsefucker and then the adventures of corpsefucker: escape from boner castle.
He seduced his way out, naturally.
A true bard
In my current game of D&D, we have “The Music”. As in “it is time to face The Music”. It is a party that consists of a Bard, a Bard, a Ranger, a Barbarian, and a Warlock. Beyond the obvious, the Ranger (my character) has some bard powers and plays a wicked fiddle. The Barbarian can both dance and play the bagpipes quite well. The Warlock is currently learning how to sing so she can be the front person for our band. Oh yeah, and the lowest charisma in the party is 14, average of 17.
We may not be seducing everything in sight, but we are definitely the bard party. We’ve now successfully intimidated a war party of Efreeti-like beings (which would have crushed us like the bugs we were) via playing bag pipe death metal. We later befriended them via a wall punching contest, but that’s another story.
As a writer, you should try to give your villains plausible motivations, backstories, etc. A villain is much more interesting if they think they’re the hero of their own story.
As a DM, this is still great advice in theory but in practice you should ABSOLUTELY NEVER DO THIS because your players will discover your villains’ tragic backstory, look at their motivation and find it sound, and end up adopting the villains, going rogue from the Celestial Intervention Agency to avenge the wrongs done said villains and ensure their freedom, accidentally kidnapping the President, and plunging Gallifrey into a civil war.
For me, also known as “hey Spoon, why are there two Pantheon wipes in your D&D setting?”
… because my players sided with the sympathetic villain who just wanted to stop the exploitation of their people… by eliminating the gods themselves, even the ones who had nothing to do with it.
I used to use LJ for this type of thing. Keep it friendslocked so I wouldn’t scare away randoms. LJ is not the proper place for much of anything now, however, so I needed to find another outlet, and Tumblr has won that lottery. I apologize in advance for this, but I think I need to type this up and post it; please ignore as needed. Writing down my thoughts via pencil and paper seem to be too limiting for me. I want need and crave someone to reply or even to let me know that they’ve read this.
To let me know that I exist, that someone sees my struggle, and to empathize.
Empathy. That’s been one of my problems as of late. I feel like I can’t get a break, even though none of this is happening to me directly. I tend to react to others’ emotional turmoil, problems, and issues as though they were my own. It is very handy when trying to comfort a friend in what is happening to them, but it is very painful to experience over, and over, and over again. I’m completely drained of my emotional capacity to do, well, just about anything. My tears are on a hair trigger, my rage is being barely held back, and my focus is completely shot – and mostly about things that aren’t happening to me directly. The world is a crappy place sometimes, and I feel like it has been particularly crappy to myself and my close friends as of late.
I was diagnosed with my first anxiety disorder four years ago this month. I was later diagnosed with severe depression and I knew I needed help. I started going to therapy two years ago (also this month). For the first one of those years, I was getting better. Therapy was helping a great deal, my daily mental state would sometimes go above a 5 (on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is the worst day I’ve ever had). I still had some bad days, but that’s progress, right? I knew I was in a somewhat precarious state, that something major could still send me back to where I was or even worse, but I was getting better until November. Today, I’m in a worse state than I was two years ago. My daily mental state hasn’t gone above a 2 this week.
Part of my problem is that I’ve been in crisis mode for too long. I feel like I haven’t had a rest since November. I feel like I’m constantly fighting, constantly putting out fires, constantly afraid, and constantly suffering since then. I lost hope in November, my brain has been trying to catch up ever since, and I’m exhausted. Every day is another step toward something worse, every day is pacing toward an end where I can no longer exist. Each morning, I find out whether or not I will be able to receive the medical care I need to survive, and each morning I have to wrap my head around the concept that some people would wish to see me die. Some of my own family even agree with these hateful words, without realizing what effect it would have on anyone… what effect it would have on me. Most people with those viewpoints don’t care at all – basically, the “shut up snowflake and grow up!” mentality that I loathe so much. “If you don’t like it, leave!”
Leaving. That’s actually something I’ve been considering. I would need to leave the US entirely, and that’s a huge can of worms that I’m not going to go into depth here about. Suffice to say, this is another source of my current woes – the idea that I’m going to let someone else win makes me quite angry. I don’t want to leave behind others in a similar situation to myself, I want to fix the situation – to make things better. I have to accept that I’m simply not able to do that, and that hurts. I can’t make people see that caring for people and protecting their right to thrive is important. I can’t make people feel empathy.
Then there is the fact that leaving would potentially kill me.
My entire coping mechanism for, well, anything at all at this point, is being around my friends. They can smile, laugh, and for a while I feel a lot better. Lately that feeling doesn’t last beyond that night, but that’s a lot better than nothing. Leaving the US means leaving my friends behind. Leaving all semblance of comfort and protection behind. Making my situation worse in the short term for the hope of a better situation in the long term. I’m not sure which situation is worse, and I’m afraid.
I feel trapped, surrounded by negative things that I have no choice on, surrounded by things completely out of my control. One of the focuses on my therapy has been to point myself at things I actually can control and resolve them. This was one of the ways I was making things better for myself – I was able to focus on just the things I could change, improve them, make things better, then take another look at a situation. From there, I would find another thing I could change (however small), change that, and repeat. Sure, the big things weren’t going to go away on their own, but having a better grasp at the situation at hand would let me stand up against it more easily. That’s… not the situation I’m in right now. I feel as though nothing is in my control, and even the parts that really are under my control are so tied down with my anxieties that I can’t touch them anyway.
My beloved is in pain, and I cannot do anything about it. Just typing that sentence sends me into tears. I want to be the person that can make things be all better, the proverbial hero that can save the day, the person that can be helpful to everyone, even for just a little bit. It is a core part of my personality… and I can’t. I’m not even useful from a comforting perspective anymore; I’m so burnt out that I’m subconsciously avoiding conversation topics with them over the idea that it might cause one or both of us even more pain.
If that statement sounded any alarm bells, congratulations – you saw what my therapist saw this week. She brought up the idea that I have codependency issues on top of everything else now. It isn’t too surprising, given my personality type and mental state, but it is also not a formal diagnosis. I basically have a need to help others when I can, and that need can make things worse for me. Often, as of late.
I don’t know what to do. I try to put on a mask so I can interact with the world, so I can be the person that I know I should be deep down, but that mask is slipping more and more often. Close friends aren’t the only ones noticing how I’m losing it now, and I’m not even sure if putting on the mask is even with it anymore.
If someone seriously speaks of “white genocide”, make no mistake, they are a NAZI.
They literally mean that the genetics for white skin are recessive so if white people all intermarry with other races the genetics for white skin could eventually (over the course of centuries) disappear.
So by “white genocide” they mean “interracial marriage”.
In other news, fascism is a hell of a drug.
God, white people are so privileged our “genocide” doesn’t even involve getting killed.
BRUH ARE U KIDDING ME THE HIGHWAY I LIVE NEAR HAS BEEN UNDER CONSTRUCTION FOR LIKE 4 DAMN YEARS AND IT TAKES THEM 6 MONTHS JUST TO FIX A DAMN POT HOLE
The hell do you mean “capitalism could never”??????? Last I checked, the UK is still a capitalist nation. The US could never because the US doesn’t invest in public works to the same level as other comparably large economies because we spend all our money on the military.
Whaleologist is right but….fuckin what? You can seriously do that shit in 15 hours. I honestly am amazed. That’s how you know I’m a fucking American, like, my goddamned mind is blown.
This isn’t an issue of capitalism or even public works investment.
This is an issue of how American budgets work, because America is the most idiotically designed country you could ever imagine.
American budgets are not organized by need, they’re effectively PRESCRIBED. There’s no pool of government funding that is assigned according to where money needs to go at any given time. We assign budgets in advance and they’re extremely difficult to change. Guaranteed if you ask any American politician about this, they’ll tell you it’s to “reduce government waste” by making people use their resources carefully instead of taking on unnecessary projects.
This is not what actually happens.
Because if you DON’T USE 100% of your budget every year, you will be assigned a lower budget for the next year, “to prevent government waste.” So they prescribe you a budget in advance and then you HAVE to use all of it, or else it’s a NIGHTMARE to do anything new in the future – you have to go through a billion hoops to get funding for a new infrastructure project that is a one-time expense. It’s not cheap to build a new thing, but because it’s a public good that will last a long time, you don’t need to budget for it every year – but the one year you do need to budget for it, it’s an enormous pain in the ass because everyone responsible is desperate to “cut government waste.”
So with American construction projects, especially on roadways, you basically have a system where people are FORCED to take longer than necessary just to use up their budgets. It is literally a regular occurrence in America for a road to be torn up for no reason, just so they can spend money filling it back in for the next four months.
And that’s why the crumbling, outdated, and underfunded infrastructure in America is an embarrassment to western civilization.
And the fact that this fucks up transportation, stresses people out, makes us all sicker and more miserable, and forces us to sit in traffic wasting gas that we have to spend a bunch of money on because one of the things we never invest in is mass public transit (because of heavy lobbying by the automotive and oil industries) – all of that should probably not be considered a coincidence.
In the name of “efficiency” and “cutting government waste,” we’ve invented the most fucked up, purposefully wasteful mandatory maximum budgeted spending that has totally eliminated our ability to respond to short term budgetary needs. Potholes take years to fix, construction goes on for years even as nothing actually gets done, etc. All because the budgets HAVE to be wasted in order for anyone to keep their funding – and notice how much of American budgets go toward things like “administrative costs”.
Our entire country is a money laundering conspiracy.
American capitalism is the most wasteful garbage budgeting system on earth.
It is fundamentally designed to be inefficient and stupid, because doing it this way allows us to keep government spending (on public goods) as close to the absolute minimum as humanly possible in order to preserve the lowest possible tax rates on the people who ‘matter’ to the people who are making the decisions – which of course means the wealthy donor class created by the dramatic shift in economic policy under Ronald Reagan.
Because every single goddamn problem in America is Ronald Reagan’s fault.
The Department of Miniature Marvels just found its newest member: artist and photographer Vatsal Kataria, who recreates locations he visits in his dreams as miniature models and then takes beautifully lit, atmospheric photos that recreate scenes from his dreams.
“I created miniature versions of the places I saw in my dreams. It took me about two months to create all of them. I saw these places in my dreams and it was a bit challenging to turn my imagination into reality but the whole process was fun and awesome.”
