I'm Frankie, I play TTRPGs too much. I will be reblogging and/or posting a lot of furry arte and some of that's going to be kink stuff so heads up
AKA Nerts but that's going back a while


estrogen-and-spite
@estrogen-and-spite

Especially because all these rules almost always boil down to "use these terms to mean what I say they mean or I'll get angry at you." Examples:

  1. I don't care what you personally believe the difference between a drake, dragon, and wyvern is. In your story they can refer to wingless lizards with four legs, flying lizards with four legs, and flying lizards with two legs respectively, but in this story they're all flying lizards with four legs but drakes are venomous, dragons breathe fire, and Wyverns have an electric eel style shock and that is equally valid.

  2. Wizard, Sorcerer, and Warlock do not mean "Mage by training, mage by birth, and mage by pact." They mean those things in Dungeons and Dragons but I will lick Satan's taint before I bow to WOTC on terminology. If you want to use those terms to mean those things, go ahead, but if you um ackshully a random non DND Fantasy story about those terms...why? Why do you want to try and limit someone else's imagination? (also even DnD didn't use those terms until 3rd edition)

Just...let people play with their imaginations, okay?


fwankie
@fwankie

reminding me of a conversation I saw on discord way back that was just a head on collision of someone talking about "5e" (D&D) and someone else talking about "5e" (Shadowrun) and they were both trying to talk about why wizards are bullshit


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in reply to @estrogen-and-spite's post:

this reads to me like to not impose these rules between fantasy worlds?
because within a fantasy world, all its unique arbitrary rules feels like part of the fun

i feel like a similar principle applies to sci‑fi terms like the specifics of hyperspace, warping, wormholes, etc.

ahh, fair enough!
i think that with space operas, which is just fantasy but in  ⁠S ⁠p ⁠a ⁠c ⁠e ⁠, it's a little more permissible to throw out the meanings of technical terms since they've already thrown out all other science for its cosmos.
....then again, if, for example, star wars had ever used the term ”quantum leap“, then i'd probably classically leap out of my body.

and i guess that it drives me up the wall when characters say things like ”less evolved“, so it makes sense that it'd be the same way for people who are more familiar with the scientific context of terms like hyperspace, warpdrives, and wormholes.

that said, are there not specifics about e.g., wormholes that we can't know that can then vary between each sci-fi world?
just as you'll know that a drake is a scaly reptile creature no matter where you read it (regardless of their intelligence, etc. in that specific world), you can know that a wormhole is a means of transportation based on general relativity.
but specifics, like whether it's strictly for moving to different points in the same universe, or whether it could transport you to an entirely different universe, feels fair game to me.

and i keep reading and rereading about cultural appropriation, and i keep getting confused by it in the context of harm reduction in not-super-obvious cases.

like, in the case of ”witch“, the term had definitely evolved beyond just the corrupted pejorative definition—
...okay, but i guess that i'm a bit peeved with how certain taoist practices are depicted on tv, and saying that the term had ”evolved“ would far from satisfy me, so i doubt that it would be the same for a Scandinavian person with witch ancestry.

guess that i don't know where i stand in this, then??
i'll let other people have their fun, but i'll probably now start saying that i'm dressed up as a ”pop culture witch“ instead of just ”witch“ for halloween, and happily neologize my own magical people terms if i'm not playing with tropes based on pop culture use of these terms.

Guy who has only seen The Boss Baby, watching his second movie: "This movie is riddled with inaccuracies and plot holes, like a toddler who is not wearing a business suit."