This is what I always say. Put the tickets in order and we'll do them.

Management always pushes back.

There are Chinese ghouls in one of the games, but I think they're feral.

And apparently this guy that I missed https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Zao

I don't think all games are emulating slot machines. Chess, for example, has no random factor and no hidden information.

Many games use random factors and other tricks to feel rewarding.

I have a thesis that there's a difference between s good game and a fun game. Something can be one, the other, both, or neither.

That's mostly what the dark souls games do. The rotting zombie soldier that can hardly stand up straight is less of a threat than the giant black knight, and you can tell by looking at them.

Unfortunately, it seems a lot of people don't really care about it, and so the people making games don't really spend the effort.

I dislike levels in action games. Just pick one. Either I click on his face and he dies, or you abstract the attacks and use the stats to determine the results.

It was bad in Morrowind 20+ years ago. And yet people keep doing it.

Ass creed Vikings had archers on this side of the river: easy, identical archers that side of the river but 30 levels higher: deadly. Garbage.

I had someone in a tabletop RPG group say to me with a straight face that critical analysis is stupid. "Sometimes a story is just a story and there's no other meaning." Like, as if Dracula is just a story about a guy that bites people and that's it. Or Animal Farm is just about talking animals.

I got the impression that she had taken from her literature classes the idea that you have to "find" the "correct" meaning in the text. As in, it's there and you have to solve it like a puzzle, and there's only a small set of correct answers. That's kind of a fundamental misunderstanding of how it all works. You have the text, and any meaning you can explain and defend is there. Many popular texts already have a lot of stuff already written about it, but that doesn't mean those are the only possible answers. You can easily write an essay that examines Dracula through a feminist lens.

She really just seemed kind of sad and incurious overall. I think about this a lot. I think a lot of people are like her.

I don't really know how to fix this. Probably spending a lot more money on education would help.

I'm just going to go scream into the void for a while.

I know pre 1.x.x is kind of a wild west for versioning but uh is there any logic to the version numbers here? I'd think a new feature would be a minor version bump, not patch

Really hoping for a total conversion to another rule system.

Great game. 5e is kind of bad.

They should probably limit how many swipes you get instead of having your swipes go into the void.

Play a system that accounts for this.

Fate gives you fate points to spend when you do t like a roll. It also gives you "succeed at a cost" if your fate points are exhausted or not enough.

You can still just roll with it (pun intended) and die to a random goblin if that's fun. But you also have agreed upon procedure for not doing that. "It looks like the goblin is going to gut me, but (slides fate point across the table) as it says on my sheet I'm a Battle Tested Bodyguard, so I twist at the last second and he misses (because the fate point bumps my defense roll high enough)"

This is pretty easy to import into DND, too, if you like the other parts of it

I think I played Ironsworn once. It was pretty okay. We played it GMless, if I'm thinking of the right game. I didn't really like that group that much, but it was an okay time.

PbtA really rubs me the wrong way and I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe because the two times i've played it, I didn't really like the person running it or how they ran it.

But strangely, I really like Fate. Maybe because it's biased more towards success. When I played PbtA and BitD I always felt like my character was a fuckup.

I remember being annoyed back in the 90s that ICQ was better than AIM, but everyone just wanted to use AIM. On ICQ you could message offline people, change your display name, and other stuff I don't remember. It kind of was a big influence in my "wow, people are a bunch of lazy morons" impulse I need to push against even now.

T-shirt. Boxers. Sometimes a wizard robe. I work from home.

I don't buy vinyl because I don't have a record player, nor do I want to dedicate space to it. My apartment is large by NYC standards, but not that large.

However, I do buy music (usually via bandcamp) directly from musicians I like. I don't really use spotify or other streaming services, and I certainly won't pay a monthly rental fee for music.

I like having a collection. I like being able to keep it forever. I like that I can have a brief, personal connection with the musician (via the message box in bandcamp, or at the merch table at a show).

But it's not for everyone. People have different ways of relating to music. Some people just don't care that much about the individual album or musician.

I hate this kind of video so much. The hyperbole in caps, the pandering, the nonsense. I don't know if I can even unpack what's gross about it.

But apparently there are a whole lot of people watching them.

Maybe it's part of an elaborate vampire hunting scheme. It seems like something idiot PCs would do in a role playing game, and the protagonists of "What We Do In the Shadows" would fall for.

I don't think poor clarity is tightly coupled to vocabulary. Poor clarity often comes from extra words and poorly organized text.

"John walked to the grocery store"

vs

"The man known in his building, but not throughout the entire city, as John, took it upon himself to walk the winding streets of Brooklyn on foot until he reached a open storefront that sold mostly, but not exclusively, groceries"

The latter is pretty limited in vocabulary but is a mess.

How much is system specific? I don't really play DND or other d20 games much anymore. Playing Fate now, for instance.

I's probably because they're adhering to their in-group's beliefs. The in-group (conservatives) doesn't like renewables, so they don't. When pressed for why, they don't really have a good answer, so they'll desperately grasp for anything that's remotely plausible.

We're all susceptible to this, and it probably had advantages for ancient humans.