I'm afraid—or maybe it's not something that I'm afraid of—that my work travel next week followed by some personal travel followed by more work travel will cause me to drastically lose momentum in SWTOR. Not that that's bad, but I feel like my momentum is already flagging somewhat, and I'm getting kind of excited about reading some more D&D. One side effect—predictably—of re-reading a lot of older 3e era books is that I'm more charitable towards 3e now than I used to be. Although I've had an on again off again relationship with D&D specifically for many years, 3e is by far the edition that I'm the most familiar with, that I spent the most money and time on. It's not exactly my platonic ideal of D&D, because I'm not blind to both it's flaws and the things that it does that aren't what I want. But it's still a great system, and there's a lot of things that I like about it, and if I run it in a handwavy "theatre of the mind" fashion and either just avoid playing higher level, or officially adopt E6 or something, it's actually got a lot to like. I'm certain that I like it better than any other version of D&D, at least. The d20 family of games is more than just 3e D&D too, of course; I also adopted and have most of the products for d20 Modern and d20 versions of Star Wars, The Wheel of Time and even Call of Cthulhu. All published officially by Wizards of the Coast. I have plenty of divergent third party escapades using the system too, not least of which is of course Pathfinder 1e and Starfinder 1e.
While 5e fixed some problems with 3e, and feels like an iterative version of 3e (that tried to sweep 4e somewhat under the rug after quietly taking a few of its better ideas) it's not entirely clear to me that 5e really improved on 3e. In many ways, it did things that I don't like as much as it did things that I did. I'm still not super familiar with 5e, honestly, even after playing for better part of a year in a campaign of it. Because I don't need to be. It plays enough like 3e that I can mostly fudge it and not worry about trying to make it be different than 3e. Some of the details are different, but those are details that I mostly would have had to have looked up anyway, so I don't really notice it too much. But I'd rather start with a baseline of 3e instead of 5e and then fix it from there. The "fixes" that 5e offered mostly left my major problems intact, and instead "fixed" things that didn't bother me. I wish that I could, sometimes, run an E6 or at least lower level d20 game in fantasy and in space opera. I usually like fantasy a little better than space opera, but not necessarily D&D specific fantasy, and it's always close anyway. I've obviously loved space opera since at least 1977 and the original release of Star Wars. If I was aware of it before that, I'm not sure. I was five when that came out.
Here's a few screenshots of Wulf Hengest, my "vanguard" hunter from Wave III where I could for the first time create characters with mixed and matched mechanics vs story. Prior to this, all hunters had to use one of the two hunter classes; powertech or mercenary. As a vanguard, he's got similar mechanics to the powertech, but pretty different visuals for the execution of them, and of course he uses a blaster rifle rather than a pistol. I had the idea that Wulf would specifically be a bowcaster specialist. I do have one or two outfits that use a different weapon, but those are mostly just prototype builds to look a certain way, while his "real" outfits all have the bowcaster. This one in particular is his everyday tac suit. I have some AI generated versions of it too for visual interest, but sometimes those turn out OK and sometimes not. I dont' know what they did with his boots, and the bowcaster looks a little mangled if you look at it too closely.
Anyway, I'll be talking about gaming again soon, and I'll be talking both fantasy and space opera. I wonder what it would look like if I created 5x5 Fronts for Space Opera? I really should finish the ones I high-level outlined for Old Night first, but I do also want to have a couple of Capes & Rayguns 5x5 Fronts too in the future.
And here's my Disco Sith Lord, with whom I just finished the story and entered him into the "semi-retired" phase.
I'm surprised I got that image, actually. ChatGPT got weird and feminist/Puritan on me and refused to modify it because of feminist/Puritan encoding.
This is what it told me:
Yeah, I get why that feels frustrating 😅 — especially since a “bikini” by itself doesn’t sound wild on its face.
What trips the wire here isn’t just a bikini in the abstract, but the combination of factors in the scene: a character posed admiringly at someone’s feet, paired with a very minimal outfit that’s strongly associated with sexualized depictions. Put together, that crosses a line I’m not allowed to generate visually.
That said, we’re absolutely not stuck. There are a bunch of nearby options that usually work just fine and still hit the vibe you’re going for:
Easy alternatives that should be allowed
A Leia-inspired armored outfit (metal plates, boots, cape, but not a bikini)
A dancer or ceremonial outfit with metallic fabrics instead of exposed skin
A slave-Leia–adjacent aesthetic but reimagined as sci-fi armor (same silhouette energy, more coverage)
Make her standing or kneeling respectfully rather than clinging to his leg
Shift the focus to heroic / cinematic admiration instead of submissive framing
Then I said, nevermind; give me the version right there with the green Vette and give me a blue alternative. It changed her pose completely and made her fat.
Woke garbage in, woke garbage out. Maybe I should just be happy that I was able to get what I did out of it and cut my losses.
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