Alexandra Erin Profile picture
Sep 1, 2018 12 tweets 3 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
Quick #DND thread.

So, since @moofable's character Dirt, Friend of All Living Things, invited the Raven Queen to the town's victory festival, at the end of the party she left him with a thank you gift: a box containing one death and one life.
Here's a fun DM thing: I did not, at the point I came up with this and said that, know exactly what that means and I still don't. (This tweet does not contain a question.) It's a closed box. Ornate. Dark. Bird motif. A literal and figurative black box.
IF you were a writer doing an ensemble story about adventurers, and you had a McGuffin like this, you would probably have some idea of not only what it would do but also what need the recipients would have for it, later in the season or whatever.
And you could also guarantee that the heroes figure out exactly what it is and how it works right when they need to.
When you're a DM, a game runner, the main story-weaver of a collaborative story, you might have some ideas but you can't control what's going to happen or dictate when the party will decide what.
So you can provide them with something like this as a formally defined magic item with exact parameters and then let them figure out when it will be useful on that basis.
Orrrrrrrrrrr you can define it in mythic terms and let them figure it out for themselves. If one of them happens to come up with something cool that fits the brief you've given them, the outcome will be like one of those great scripted moments.
This is the biggest lesson I've learned as a storytelling DM: if I come up with a big set piece where there's some solution I think will be perfectly solved by using their one-shot mystic McGuffin, no matter how broadly I think I'm hinting or how obvious it is, it's a crap shoot.
Buuuuuut if I give them something portentous and important like a box that contains one life and one death and let them figure out what it means, they'll create their own opportune moment.
And you're way more likely to get that kind of climactic season finale moment that you're dreaming of seeing.
A tabletop roleplaying game is collaborative. If you want to tell a great story, you have to realize that you can't write the players' parts for them. It's better to give them pieces to play with than write a script with their parts blank.
By the way, ~400 new followers I gained yesterday for my thoughtful and reflective political threads: around these parts, Saturday is game day so expect a lot of out-of-context Dungeons & Dragons posts starting in an hour or two.

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More from @AlexandraErin

Oct 8, 2018
So, electric kettles. Let me see if I can't convert some other white US-born people over.

Here are some reasons:

1. You can set specific temperatures, not just heat things to a boil. Get closer to the ideal temperature for your tea, spend less time waiting for it to cool.
2. If you need boiling water to pour into or over something, not just like a single serving for instant whatever, you've got it in a nice kettle with a spout and an insulated handle.
3. You never have that thing where surface tension has stopped the water from actually boiling even though it's at temperature, and when you move it and disturb the water it explodes all over your hand (Google it, if you don't know this thing.)
Read 10 tweets
Oct 8, 2018
Twitter's specific policy on Dehumanizing Speech is better than I had feared; it's more specific, covering only comparisons to animals (vermin, pests) or tools for a specific purpose. You can give feedback here. Mine focused on implementation. blog.twitter.com/official/en_us…
The Dehumanizing Speech policy being specific is important because if (let's dream big here) it is enforced as written, you can avoid getting suspended for talking about TERFs by saying their beliefs are garbage or their actions are garbage.
My feedback focused on the unequal way in which Twitter's existing policies have been supported. White guys making clear references to genocide, murder, stalking children, etc., get "We have to look at context, this was clearly not serious" replies while their victims get banned.
Read 6 tweets
Oct 7, 2018
For the record, I do hope Brett Kavanaugh's life is ruined. I hope his marriage has been irreparably strained. I hope his social life is in the toilet. I hope he feels no joy at his win. I hope he only stops waiting for the other shoe to fall when it does, like a guillotine blade
My ~*preference*~ would be that he suffer some sort of institutional consequences, even if it was merely not being confirmed to a lifetime position on the highest court in the land, where he will have power over millions.

But the right decided that's off the table.
I hope anyone who comes before the SCOTUS who is even tangentially liberal, left, or Democratic makes an issue out of his participation in the case so that he has to spend his whole career justifying and defending his presence on the bench.
Read 8 tweets
Oct 7, 2018
Well, @RadioFreeTom thinks saying "No problem." implies there's a problem so forgive me if I'm not crowning him a king of situational analysis. What he's calling Trump's "rhetorical excess" is largely projection. The idea that we win by *not* pointing out what they're doing...
...just gives Trump and his party the full benefit of that projection, in that they get to smear their opponents while being insulated from accurate accusations. We've been ceding control of the narrative to them for decades now and it hasn't worked.
The reason @RadioFreeTom wants the Democrats to settle down and be good little children is because up until two hours ago HE WAS A REPUBLICAN and when this is all done he hopes there's a slightly more couth and presentable version of the Republican Party that's still in charge.
Read 6 tweets
Oct 7, 2018
We've got GOP voters talking about drinking liberal tears with their beers, we've got a GOP president lying his backside off to his rally and then telling Jeanine Pirro he wants to hold women "liable" for talking about rapes... I don't see the centrists asking them to be civil?
Isn't it weird how absolutely no pundit wrote an editorial saying that Lindsey Graham's fire and brimstone sermon isn't going to win over the middle? Isn't it strange that no one tells Chuck Grassley that his angry interruptions are going to hurt his party?
There was a lot of talk about whether or not Kavanaugh's vitriolic testimony would hurt him but I didn't see a lot of neutral or centrist-identified people saying that it *should*.
Read 5 tweets
Oct 7, 2018
So let me tell you another reason we need to not back down, not sit down, not be quiet: coward that he is, Donald Trump is at his most dangerous when he feels like he's on top of the world.
The horse race headlines are saying that Donald Trump had his best day as president, and I'm sure he felt it. He just came through a knock-down, drag-out fight and won a battle that people had been telling him to drop for weeks, so right now no one can tell him anything.
If he gets it in his head that maybe he should fire Rosenstein? No one's going to be able to talk him out of it. He might even do it just to extend the high, or see how far he can take it.
Read 8 tweets

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