The theory is simple: instead of buying a household item or a piece of clothing or some equipment you might use once or twice, you take it out and return it.
I would usually be sad to see another original RPG go 5e compatible but Neuroshima was infamously poorly designed ruleset, possibly worse than Shadowrun. I probably won’t be running it, but may steal statblocks for my 5e game if I need weird stuff again.
I still think about an eye opening experience I had at a bar. Was chatting to some dude and he mentioned he was playing DND. I asked what edition. He didn’t know. He didn’t even know there were other editions. I can’t even guarantee he was actually playing DND and not some other RPG.
There’s a whole lot of extremely… Casual? I guess casual is the word? Casual DND players.
In terms of sociology, economics, and politics, a demographic that takes up the smallest fraction of the population is not necessarily labelled the “minority” if it wields dominant power. In the academic context, the terms “minority” and “majority” are used in terms of hierarchical power structures.
You can feel sad. I’m also unhappy about how I’m often viewed as a threat.
But it’s not personal. They’re not looking at me, jjj, and saying I specifically scare them.
Maybe you meant something else by “take it personally”?
Like there’s a difference between not being allowed into the bar because it’s full and because you got drunk and smashed a chair last time. The second is personal.
Seen a lot of posts on Lemmy with vegan-adjacent sentiments but the comments are typically very critical of vegan ideas, even when they don’t come from vegans themselves. Why is this topic in particular so polarising on the internet? Especially since unlike politics for example, it seems like people don’t really get upset by...
If you accept that there are moral/ethical problems with eating meat (contribution to climate change, health concerns, animals being killed and eaten, whatever), and choose to eat meat anyway, and encounter a vegan, what has to happen?
You can accept that they are making a better choice, but then you have to accept that you’re making a worse choice. Most people are cowards and protect the ego at any cost. Rather than shrugging and saying “yeah, i should eat less meat. Good for you taking the high road”, which requires accepting that you’re not being the best, you can instead grab onto any reasons why no it’s really them that sucks. That’s easier, more comfortable, and doesn’t require any painful introspection or changes.
It’s the same mechanism when people get mad at cyclists, pedestrians, people who go to the gym, people who don’t shop at Walmart, whatever. They’re doing something that makes you feel bad in comparison. Most people are terrible at that and will lash out instead of doing anything productive.
Alternatively, or maybe additionally, people are really tribal, and once they adopt the idea that vegans (or cyclists, or people driving small cars, or people wearing sandals, whatever) are in the outgroup, then they enjoy being hostile to them.
People are ego driven emotional morons. All of us. Me, too. It’s terrible.
No, people don’t dislike vegans or vegetarians because of their choices, they dislike them because they lord their, what they think “better” choice over others.
I’m not sure we agree on what “lording over” is. Like if someone says “Sorry, I can’t eat that, I’m vegan” is that lording it over you? Pretty much every vegan I’ve encountered has been polite, and at about the level of someone with a food allergy. Sometimes they check the ingredients label.
“Making a better choice” doesn’t “make you a better person”, necessarily.
And also like I said in my post, just accept that you’re not always going to be a perfect person. None of us are. You don’t have to get mad at anyone else for that.
I’m glad you had such good experiences, but I just don’t have the trust with most people to be happy with that kind of unilateral “the dm goes by his gut”.
I do like Fate, which is very narrative, but I try to run it in a very consensus focused way. The players have a lot of input (partly because the rules say they do!), and I do a lot of “Jumping in the driver’s window and taking control of the car sounds like something an ‘Action Movie Hero’ could do with difficulty, how about try to beat a 5 on the dice to succeed free and clear?”. That is, explain my reasoning and get player buy-in. I don’t really like when the GM just decides everything.
Like, let’s say they fail the roll. One style is for the GM to just decide “you jump, but the car turns suddenly and instead land on the front of the car! You roll off the hood and land roughly, take some damage and add prone!” That’s a lot of decisions. I prefer instead “ooh you rolled a 2… Ok, do you wanna fail outright and like just miss, or succeed at a cost? The cost could be like, your backpack snags on the window and falls off, but you get inside.” The player could accept that, or be like “oh what if I get inside, but it freaks out the hellhound in the back of the van and it goes berserk”.
It’s more like writing a story together. The GM still has more power, but it’s more like a 60/40 split than 90/10
One of my old groups quite memorably had a like hour long in character argument after a mission failed. I just sat back and watched them argue.
When it was over one of them was like “…we’re not really mad, right? I feel like we just had a fight but we didn’t.” No one was real life mad. it was pretty intense
I’m used to paying almost no attention to stats aside from vaguely knowing what my character is better at, and threat them and the rolls in same way as I did when starting - don’t care what are the odds, don’t care about the roll, I just start with describing an action I want to do and figure out the stats as an afterthought. And it makes for such a better experience
Reading this again, it made me think about how it’s super important everyone is on the same page with play style and goals.
If I sat down expecting to play like fantasy special ops where everyone knows their role and is extremely competent, but one person wanted to play goofball “whose line is it anyway?” I would probably be pissed. It’s not that either of us are playing wrong, but we’re essentially playing two different games.
To me, in that scenario, if the goofball signed up to play the healer archetype and is instead bashing rats with their staff or trying to start a rat burger business with the cave goblins, it feels like they’re not doing their job. They’re a catcher that’s not behind the plate, or a shortstop who wandered off to center field, to make baseball metaphors. We definitely could have a fun afternoon sitting in the grass watching the clouds, but we instead agreed to play baseball. Get in position.
From their perspective I’m probably taking things too seriously and who cares about all that combat and rules? I do. I care. If you don’t want to play a rules heavy combat game why are you in a DND group? Play fate or bitd or some pbta games. I would love to do that. But like, intentionally. Where we all agreed on what we’re doing.
Which brings me to the worst combination here: someone who wants a light fun game without all the complicated rules, but refuses to play anything other than DND. Though that’s probably because DND is a mega brand and some people don’t know what else is out there.
Anyway. I apparently have some pent up frustrations here.
I certainly have preferences here. I think Deep-Niche rules can be kind of tricky, as you sometimes don’t use them often enough to properly learn their complexities. Overall I definitely lean toward the blunt side, especially in wargames, but I think a game can succeed with all different types of rule if they’re implemented...
I think sometimes there can be a tradeoff of blunt wide that it can make disparate things feel too similar.
Sometimes this is fine. But some players might object. Like in Fate Core, a game I really enjoy, the difference between shooting someone with your rifle and zapping them with your wand is typically mechanically zero.
I’m fine with this, and happy to distinguish them in the narrative or via what kind of aspects you can create (ie: a rifle can create SUPPRESSIVE FIRE but a wand can’t). Some players might not be.
I dimly remember some ultra light RPG that was just roll a d6 and try to get over or under your stat depending on your action, and it just felt disconnected and unsatisfying. Extremely wide and blunt.
That’s probably the one I was thinking of. Ironically it felt more gamey and less, I don’t know, literary, to me in a way I don’t like. It’s like mad libs. Nothing really meant anything because it was just incoherent and random.
I’m still holding onto Bandcamp and hoping they don’t enshittify. It’s even Bandcamp Friday today where they give their share to the musicians.
I like it because I build a library of music I keep, so some months I don’t pay anything at all. But depending on what you listen to it might not be the best. I still like it more than renting music.
I find it really interesting how different people have radically different relationships with music.
You’ve got like depth first listen to everything. Listen to stuff on repeat until you know it by heart. Listen to it once and forget. Critical analysis of lyrics. Getting all the words wrong.
I tend to listen to the whole band’s discography if I like them , and if there’s only a song or two I like I don’t really stick with it
I mean… it’s not like the place is filthy. No piles of dirty clothes or dishes.
Also I’m reminded of a woman I know who has a very nicely decorated home, but mounted her TV so none of the ports are accessible. Want to plug something into the hdmi port? Well, you can’t. TV looks nice on the wall, though.
I mean if you’re going to simplify D&D that’d be great, but a lot of people would hate it.
Most of the new crowd of TTRPG players I’ve played with want to hangout with friends, do some silly improv bits, maybe have a cool moment where they kill a goblin in a creative way, and go home
I routinely tell people that Fate is more in line with how people new to RPGs imagine them to go. It’s sad watching D&D crush the creativity out of players. “I’m a pirate, surely I can sing a sea shanty!” “Sorry, you only have 8 charisma and no proficiency in perform because you’re a fighter.” “But I’m a pirate.” “That’s just flavor.”
Though it does have a higher burden on the players to actually be creative. “Bob the fighter” works fine in D&D, but not so much in Fate.
I don’t think he understands or really believes that there are impartial laws. He thinks when he’s being prosecuted it’s just personal bullshit targeted at him, so he can do the same to anyone.
I got stuck on a lunchtime video conference today with some people in my department and a vendor. I hate meetings at noon, but with timezones being a factor, it was the only available time the vendor could meet. Usually, I’m only on these for technical consultation, so I rarely need to speak other than to clarify a point or...
I never turn my video off to eat. If we’re having a meeting time during eating time, you all can watch.
One time the head of product scheduled an excruciatingly early meeting , and I stayed home, so they had me on the big TV while I was eating a bowl of Cheerios.
Blades in the dark is such a monkey’s paw for me. I’m happy people are playing something that’s not dnd nor a close relative, but I don’t actually like it very much.
It felt very downward spiral to me, which I do not like at all. I’ve got “and you’ll never fully recover” enough in real life. The book (or maybe just a quick start pdf the guy in my old group gave us) was like “horrible things will happen to your character! They’ll suffer and break! It’s going to be fun” and I was like no thank you.
Also I didn’t really like the group I played it with that much, so that didn’t help.
Maybe! The way stress, harm, and trauma worked seemed to be pretty baked in, but I haven’t done a lot of digging. You could probably make some hacks to allow easier recovery, but I’ve been happy with Fate instead.
How rental ‘libraries of things’ have become the new way to save money (www.theguardian.com)
The theory is simple: instead of buying a household item or a piece of clothing or some equipment you might use once or twice, you take it out and return it.
5e has an advantage of not requiring doctorate in quantum physics to run (ttrpg.network)
I would usually be sad to see another original RPG go 5e compatible but Neuroshima was infamously poorly designed ruleset, possibly worse than Shadowrun. I probably won’t be running it, but may steal statblocks for my 5e game if I need weird stuff again.
About the bear...
So, I’m just assuming we’ve all seen the discussions about the bear....
[Serious] Why do so many people seem to hate veganism?
Seen a lot of posts on Lemmy with vegan-adjacent sentiments but the comments are typically very critical of vegan ideas, even when they don’t come from vegans themselves. Why is this topic in particular so polarising on the internet? Especially since unlike politics for example, it seems like people don’t really get upset by...
ribbit (lemmy.world)
The holy grail of DMing
The Power of Bluntness (www.bastionland.com)
I certainly have preferences here. I think Deep-Niche rules can be kind of tricky, as you sometimes don’t use them often enough to properly learn their complexities. Overall I definitely lean toward the blunt side, especially in wargames, but I think a game can succeed with all different types of rule if they’re implemented...
deleted_by_author
I really like this song! (lemmy.world)
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/14976953...
A snapshot of heaven (lemmy.world)
How would you save D&D if you were the new CEO?
The question is discussed in this podcast episode....
Trump threatens to prosecute Bidens if he’s re-elected unless he gets immunity (www.theguardian.com)
Time magazine called the ex-president’s plans ‘an imperial presidency that would reshape America and its role in the world’...
How was your day, Lemmy? Because mine was mortifying!
I got stuck on a lunchtime video conference today with some people in my department and a vendor. I hate meetings at noon, but with timezones being a factor, it was the only available time the vendor could meet. Usually, I’m only on these for technical consultation, so I rarely need to speak other than to clarify a point or...
Downtime fun in Blades in the Dark (ttrpg.network)
After a vegan blue cheese won the Good Food Award, panicked dairy cheese makers forced the foundation to disqualify it (boingboing.net)