Of all the stuff that a DM does, the most important one is to be the keeper of the secrets. To know (or have a way to find out) the off-screen canon game state. Like, the characters have a treasure chest that they haven’t opened. It’s your job as DM to know what’s in there.
Only way that can work for my school of playing is that if in the Storyteller’s section there would’ve been “Storyteller, before your group does anything else, you need to decide the canon truth about these things:” followed by a checklist where you could literally check, circle, or write in the actual truths. (Like Starforged and Burning Empires both do.)
And “meta plots” where stuff is gradually revealed module by module are right out.
That said, maybe this sort of truth-fuzziness is more OK for stuff that’s ancient history compared to stuff that’s more directly relevant? Although in my game world I have secretly decided on the true nature of the gods, the elements, the timelines, the old ones, and the planes.
I’ve worked from the other direction for the most part (or perhaps gone from both directions at once). Like a Lisp program.
I use modules heavily so when I get a new module, I’m like “OK, so these guys are sorta like the al-Badia so I’ll just have them be al-Badia, while these are like The Old Ones so I’ll have them be the Old Ones, and these other guys are blood cultists and maybe they can be part of the same blood cult as the ones from that other module” etc. A suggestion I first picked up from Prescott’s Trilemma. It makes everything super interconnected.
Have your character break their own internal logic, and you’ve sunk the story along with it.
Yes ♥︎
But troupe play…? Your one character can do things that are bad for your other character? My dorks have gotten so brazen with troupe play that they jump in and start portraying all kinds of NPCs, secure in the knowledge that I’d step in if the NPC really did have a hidden, un-self-evident agenda, like if the NPC is secretly questing for a specific ring and just biding their time to grab it or w/e.
This is a stance issue more than a resolution granularity issue. I sometimes think of “are we pretending that we’re writers or are we pretending that we’re characters?” as two different modes of play. That you sometimes (or maybe always) switch in and out of, as all writers sometimes inhabit their characters, although not necessarily vice versa.
I’ve deliberately tried to steer away from “camera”, “cut” langauge for the most part, to encourage first-person play. And no game board or minis, and inist on saying “I do such-and-such” instead of “[character name] does such-and-such]”. Although the latter is tempting when the same player has ten characters in a situation.
I feel like we’ve gradually drifted towards a “sim”* stance where the first few years it was impossibly hard for them to not act on stuff that they knew but their character didn’t, to that now being second nature and they have to remind me that “yeah, our other characters know that but we don’t” and I go “oh, yeah!”. The investment is no longer in “this is my hero who will rule this world” and now more in the game world as a doll house, seeing what would happen to the best of our ability.
I used to be so intimidated by simmy players and systems but in my heart of hearts envied them and now here we are with the world’s awesomest and simmiest campaign.
*: Not in the Forge sense of that word. Think more Sim City, Sim Tower
I mean if the planet goes then car culture also goes. 🤦🏻♀️
Mad Max is a utopia compared to the unlivable mess we're heading towards unless we pull the breaks.
Right. The time for a soft and just landing woulda been in the 1960s or even the 1980s (or, ideally, in 1896 when we were first thinking about this stuff). We didn’t, so now we’ve got to slam the brakes a li’l harder. 2023 broke new records in fossil fuel extraction & burning; we’re going in the wrong direction. 😭
No, fuck the self-proclaimed “master race”, that’s not what I’m going for here. As you say, the brownshirts are gasoline populists and climate deniers or delayists. Let’s keep fighting fascism.
The label “climate justice” is broad and a lot of the stuff under that label is cool but some of it’s another form of delayism.
Unfair distribution of resources and tasks is wrong and evil, but it has been a problem for ages; it predates recorded history (even some animals do it) and is now the worst it has ever been, but I’m never giving up on trying to fix that. Another world is possible.
So far, so much in agreement. When I criticize parts of what’s put forward under the climate justice banner, I only mean to say this:
Holding the fate of world hostage until we’ve solved a problem that humanity hasn’t been able to solve for thousands of years even though we’ve thrown brains, blood, guns and love at it isn’t exactly something I’m sympathetic to now that we’re this close to the edge or possibly over it already.
We didn’t tie regulating freons to a six-hour workweek. We didn’t connect fixing the Y2K bug to equalizing bank accounts. My number one goal is averting doomsday. If that means we have to end up with 10000 years of Mikael Wiehe lyrics then I can live with that if we saved the planet. Anyone pulling the breaks on averting the crisis from either side of the proverbial aisle, whether they’re Exxon or Bakunin, needs to sober up and start living their life right. When a stick destroys the Earth, we’re not much happier if it’s called the people’s stick.
Now for the good news. The same thought virus that created the climate crisis also exacerbated social injustice: capitalism. One way or another, this is the end of the self-proclaimed “laissez-faire” systems of unchecked exploitation. Telemachus has sneezed one too many times. Putting the kibosh on capitalism to save the trees is probably best done through regulatory frameworks that we can also use for justice, and vice versa. So there can be a common path forward here.
If XHTML is all good and Textile/RST/Pandoc is all bad, then YAML is half bad. Like Textile and its ilk, I can’t easily write YAML without tools. But the good thing is that if I am looking at a YAML document, I can more or less understand the gist of what’s there.
Note that NO is no longer a boolean literal in YAML 1.2 (which came out in 2009) so Norway hasn’t been a good example for almost 15 years. The two remaining strings to watch out for is true and false. I’m not sure I agree with this decision; since I was resigned to the idea that I can’t eyeball a YAML document’s validity and bug-free-ness, and that’s a pretty huge downside to a document format but the upside is how human-friendly it read.
has-paid: no
delivered: yes
Nice! But no longer possible in the current version.
I’m still not at a level where I feel comfortable with the YAML I make without linters or parse dry runs or Emacs modes although I’m getting more and more comfy with it.
But if all strings had to be quoted, it’d lose its human readable appeal. Might as well use JSON at that point (and many do, since JSON is more used than YAML or at least that’d be my guess).
There is this whole “deep work” productivity culture obsession with hating on notifications, and when I do hyperfocus I often turn notifications off. That needs to be easy to do, and I do that all the time.
But there is a level of focus just before that depth, and it’s just as valuable, maybe even more valuable since it’s not as obsessive and not as neglectful of my well-being as a whole, and I can’t get there if I’m in check-check-checking hell.
I would love for the good people of @synths (and anyone else who might see this, of course!) to go to my album Psychedelic Ghost Stories, select a single song based on the title, listen to it (or as much as your patience allows if it's not your bag), then report back if you think the title is a good fit for the music.
A simple "Listened to this song, good fit/bad fit" is fine, but you're very welcome to say more/offer details if you want.
Listened to "The Siren Call of the Benjolin Welcomes Me Home", bad fit. Feels more pushing than pulling, departing than arriving. Good song, good title, just bad fit. 🤷🏻♀️