I'm not an expert, I know nothing about ornithology or biology or zoology or wildlife science or animal behaviours or animal intelligence, but sometimes I think about the fact that birdwatchers in Toronto observed a raven learn how to mimic crow calls, make a nest with a crow and raise a pair of crow-raven hybrids the birdwatchers referred to as cravens and I just think. That's gotta be love, baby.
watermelynn-witch asked:
hey so you know how scooby doo has his own snacks?
what are alice snacks
r0zeclawz answered:
yes theyre called “delicious meal-os” and its a box of miniature spaghetti and meatballs on tiny plates
an-evolved-dinosaur asked:
Are you particularly surprised by WOTC saying in their newest feedback response video that they're pretty much reverting to the 2014 rule for anything that doesnt get a high positive feedback? How much of that do you think is 'the deadline is looming' and how much is just the result of their design intentions.
prokopetz answered:
I think as long as Hasbro sticks with their “5E is evergreen and must appeal to all D&D fans equally” policy, the game’s authors will never be allowed to make a change that doesn’t focus-group well ever again.
@kyliafanfiction replied:
Even Hasbro has to know that nothing can appeal to everyone, right? They know not everyone likes every version of RISK™/Monopoly™ etc? I get the joke about business executives being detached but like... are they really not seeing how this can't work?
They're not dumb, they're just thinking like a toy manufacturer.
One of the basic pieces of orthodoxy in toy manufacturing is that you want to segment your target audience in a particular way: specifically, you want to be able to divide your audience up into fully distinct demographic buckets which have no interests in common. That way, you can be confident of exactly who any given piece of marketing is targeting. Without that total market segmentation, you run the risk of competing with yourself for the same audience, which is inefficient.
(As an aside, this is one of the major reasons why children's toys suddenly became so strongly gendered back in the 1980s. The toy manufacturers landed on gender as their primary audience segmentation strategy, and to achieve that, any given toy needs to be only For Girls or only For Boys. Anything with crossover appeal creates a risk that your For Boys marketing will accidentally appeal to girls as well, or vice versa, and now you've got two different arms of your marketing strategy competing with each other for the same audience's attention and dollars.)
With board games, this is basically fine. Most groups don't play a wide variety of games; one group might have Monopoly as their "game night" standard, and another might have RISK, with groups that are equally interested in both being the exception to the rule. Your audience is effectively self-segmenting. Critically, you don't need to own a copy of Monopoly to play RISK, or vice versa.
With Dungeons & Dragons, however, every group needs copies of the core rulebooks (or the equivalent digital/VTT subscription products) in order to play. You can't tidily segment that audience, because no matter what you're trying to sell them, it all flows back into that central pool of "people who buy Player's Handbooks". Half of your audience only being interested in campaign setting A and half of your audience only being interested in campaign setting B would be fine if they were completely separate games, but since it's ultimately all D&D, what you end up with in practice is campaign setting A and campaign setting B competing with each other for the same pool of potential purchasers.
If you're thinking like a toy manufacturer, that just won't do. From your standpoint, there are only two acceptable outcomes: either every D&D group can be treated as potential purchasers of every D&D product, or the outliers can be shaved off into some other audience segment with no crossover marketing appeal to muddy the waters
Presently, Hasbro has opted for the former approach, which is why we're seeing stuff like the Forgotten Realms being canonised as the Dungeons & Dragons setting, with all the other campaigns being watered down and repackaged as tourist destinations which characters from a Forgotten Realms campaign might occasionally visit, or the move away from focused, topical sourcebooks and toward big, messy guides-to-everything which package supplementary material like cable TV bundles in the hope that you'll be willing to buy five things you don't want in order to get one that you do.
(If Hasbro ever opts to try the other tactic, the result would probably be D&D fissioning into multiple completely separate games, each aggressively marketed toward a specific demographic. They'd... probably use something other than gender as their audience segmentation strategy for this purpose? Though I've gotta admit I'd be morbidly curious to see which D&D campaign settings Hasbro's marketing wonks decide are For Girls!)
Which one is closest to Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar series, I wonder.
Weirdly enough, probably Dragonlance. It's got pretty-boy ogres, angsty minotaurs, a whole order of knights who ride telepathically bonded dragons and sometimes have forbidden romances with their dragons as campaign-critical plot points, Politics™ – it's basically even more transparently informed by a specific brand of 1980s romantic fantasy than The Forgotten Realms, and knowing Ed Greenwood's creative antecedents, that's saying something!
girl is your penis big and with wheels because i think i just saw someone drive it out of the parkinglot
Buh buhh find meaning in alleviating the suffering of your fellow man. Boom. Done. Absurdism solved.
Congratulations you solved absurdism by doing absurdism
My favourite Da Vinky twins trans ally moments:
Can women be twinks? Can men be butch? Instead of asking these incredibly niche questions ask yourself this, if they weren't allowed to do so, who would you have enforcing that ruling?
and then, I hope this kind of re-framing opens your eyes about how silly that would be, to enforce as such.
But really, this is what they mean when they say "kill the cop in your head."
What good does it do you to try and police people more?
