I’ve sent this to many coworkers.

I wanted to introduce a jar where every time you sent a useless “hello” message you had to put double whatever you put in last time (starting at $1). People are empty headed idiots maybe losing +$1000 will wake them up.

It sounds to me like you’re struggling to suspend your disbelief.

Well, yeah. It looks stupid that someone takes multiple shots to the face and doesn’t react appropriately. Takes me right out of the game. Same as if a character inexplicably walked through walls or flew off into the sky.

Maybe some people don’t mind that but I don’t like it.

In this case, it’d be best to go back to turn based gameplay.

Yes. This was my initial thesis. Either do an action game, or do a stats RPG. Doing both at once clashes.

People do not all have the same working definition of “politics”. Many people seem to use it to mean “overt content about contemporary issues”, but that’s not really a good definition.

If your game has sentient creatures with agency and desires, it has politics.

For example, if your game has a king, there’s politics. Having the people accept monarchy is a political statement. It’s not as hot-button as, say, having slavery, but it’s still political.

You might not be surprised if your players react to a world with chattel slavery by trying to free the slaves and end that institution. The same mechanism may lead them to want to end absolute monarchy. They see something in the setting they perceive as unjust, and want to change it.

A lot of people are kind of… uncritical, about many things. They don’t see absolute monarchy as “political” because it’s a familiar story trope. They are happy to accept this uncritically so they can get to the fun part where you get a quest to slay the dragon. (Note that the target of killing the dragon rather than, say, negotiating or rehoming it is also political)

People then get frustrated because they feel stupid, and they’re being blocked from pursuing the content they want. They just want to, for example, do a tactical mini game about fighting a big monster that spits fire. They don’t want to talk about the merits of absolute monarchy or slaying sentient creatures.

It’s okay to not always want to engage in the political dimension. That doesn’t mean it’s not there. If someone responds to the king giving you a quest with “wait, this is an absolute monarchy where the first born son becomes king? That’s fucked up” they’re not “making it political”. It already was political.

If you present a man and a woman as monogamously married in your game, that’s political. That’s a statement. If you show a big queer polycule, that’s also a statement. The latter will ping the aforementioned uncritical players as “political”, because it’s more atypical, but both are “political”.

Some of this can be handled in session 0. But sometimes you learn that some people in the group have different tastes and probably shouldn’t play together.

I disagree that misses are a problem in the 3D games

It’s not so much about missing in 3d games. It’s about the game showing a bullet going into someone’s eye, and then that someone not reacting appropriately. Usually that’s because they have a lot of HP or armor, but the animations and mechanics are out of sync.

One solution, if you want to keep the weird HP bloat, is to animate “hits” when they have HP left, as misses. Only show the bullet hitting their face when their HP drops to zero. If they have HP left, animate them dodging or something.

The other solution is don’t do HP bloat, and have anyone die if they get shot in the face.

Or, don’t let people free aim like an action game.

Probably other solutions, too. Bethesda just does a bad job

Every Republican that leaves office, by whatever means, is good for the world.

I was at a major concert the other day waiting in line for the bathroom. So many men just strolled out of there without even looking at the sink.

I feel like trying to mix an action game (eg: click on their head!) and a stats game (eg: your precision stat gives you a 80% chance to hit their head!) almost always has bad outcomes.

Bethesda games are kind of the quintessential example of it. Everyone’s probably had the experience where there’s some half naked goon, you slam an axe right into his head, and… he just gets mad. Maybe your damage is low, his HP is high, or your accuracy is low so it “missed”. Fallout is full of “I shot this guy four times in the face and he didn’t die!” dissonance.

You could probably do a lot of work so the animations map to the outcomes better (eg: they dodge or parry), but Bethesda seems happy with just not doing that. So you get goons in Skyrim with 20 arrows in their face, because they’re higher level than you.

Well, thankfully I included examples other than magic.

However, I do think trying too hard on “martials should be like real life” easily leads to harsher limitations for them. It’s not always intentional. But when someone says “I want to leap 15 feet over the chasm” some people get all “you can’t do that! I can barely jump five feet and I’m athletic (they’re not)” and you have a whole digression where someone looks up human records and then argues about if 16 strength is really Olympic class and what about all your equipment and blah blah blah.

It’s much rarer for that kind of argument to come up with wizard types, in my experience.

Clearer rules up front help, though I feel like half of DND players have never read the rules.

I guess I’m lucky almost no one I know is trying to side hustle slop their way into money. I don’t think I would put up with that happily.

I wouldn’t mind ads on streaming media if they were limited to a few seconds at the start and end, and had some constraints (eg: no volume tricks to sound louder). Just a calm voice saying “This episode brought to you by WidgetCo. The best in Widgets. [logo] [url]” over a neutral color. That’d be fine. But the hunger for profit can never be sated, so it’s longer, more obvious ads more frequently forever. So they can all get fucked. I won’t watch at all.

“it seems silly that you can just go around the corner and suddenly you’re hidden. They know you’re there”

This was rebutted with “they know I’m somewhere over there, but not exactly where or when I’m going to pop out. I’m a 7th level rogue, I’m sure I have tricks you and I can’t even think of”.

Sometimes people get like selectively simulationist. They’ll ignore most of the game’s gamey bits (inventory management, hit points and recovery, magic) but some things throw them off. Usually things that are closer to lived reality. For example, someone having no problem with a wizard hypnotizing an entire room, but balking at a fighter climbing a tall fence.

There was also: “It seems like a lot of damage…”

“I’m pretty sure rogue is balanced around doing sneak attack almost every round. The fighter gets multiple attacks, but I don’t. Almost every other class gets a resource to burn like spell points or ki points or superiority dice. I have nothing. All I do is sneak attack. Without it, I’m a particularly accurate peasant that can run away real good. And I still miss about a quarter of the time, which means my whole turn accomplishes nothing”

I wonder if the DMG or something published expected damage per round or per encounter somewhere.

If you were an organization with ideas to push, would you just ignore reddit? It’s pretty cheap to pay people to manage social media, especially if you don’t care about some slop from LLMs.

If it’s “full of”, I don’t know. I don’t use it anymore.

It’s short sighted to hold such individualistic opinions.

That’s conservatism. They’re all selfish idiots. Many of them don’t even understand how they’re hurting themselves.

I’d rather spend billions on teaching people how to write better than AI slop, but here we are

The law allows union representatives to sue anyone for $6,250 if they can prove an individual falsely impersonated a union representative.

That is too small a fine.

I had a dm once say he was thinking about saying no about my rogue’s “I shoot, move, bonus action hide around the corner” loop. But then he said he realized if he said no, my character would suck and it’d be no fun.

I think that was the right call.

I don’t think I’d want this. The fun of Legos is in part from using your imaginary. You imagine the light saber doing stuff. If it actually lights up and hums that feels like it detracts from the experience.

This seems like an obvious improvement and I kind of want everyone who thought otherwise to be banned from working in decision making roles.

Mark is a good, kind person

No he’s not.

He has done tremendous, incalculable, harm to countless people. All of our lives are worse because Zuckerberg is an asshole.

Or when you get past where you can coast (calc 2 for me) you realize you don’t really know how to learn and study. It didn’t ruin my self image but I did change majors.