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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • The average person is a heady cocktail of stupid and ignorant. We all are, to one degree or another.

    I feel like one of the problems is we’ve let “everyone is entitled to their opinion” mutate into “everyone is entitled to their own facts”. We just kind of let anti-vaxxers walk around like it’s no big deal. We let people wear maga hats and don’t treat it like a clear and present danger or the threat that it is. We’re too polite about this shit.

    If someone walked up to you and was like “I’m gonna shoot you dead later” while holding a gun and a map to your house, you probably wouldn’t be like “Cool I respect your opinion.”

    I mean, some people would. Some people are pacifists, and I guess they’d just get in a death camp politely.



  • Musk seems like the kind of D&D player who would

    • Build a horrible character (frankly impressive in 5e, which is pretty simple in terms of choices to make at the start). Like, a bard with 8 charisma, or a rogue with no dex
    • Or, pay someone else to build their character, and then not know how to play it.
    • And/or induce the other players to murder him (in the game)




  • I’ve found that when the players hit an outright failure, a lot of the time they just draw blanks or zero in on this one specific solution. It’s a weird tunnel vision.

    Like, they want to talk past the doorman and he says no after they roll. Good players on their game will then think about other options. Sneak in the back. Set off an alarm. Impersonate someone who lives there. But i’ve just had so many players that just get stuck on this, and will try to spend 10 minutes on “What if I ask him nicely?”

    I’ve started including a spiel about this in my session 0. “If an obstacle in the world has exactly one purpose in the story, and you attack it dead on, you may fail. Especially if it’s not also your strong suit. For example, there is a doorman of a fancy apartment building. His entire role in life is to look at people, and only let them in if they’re authorized. If you walk up to him, not authorized, and go ‘Hey bro let me in’, that will be a very hard check. That is shooting fire at the fire elemental. Disguising yourself will be easier, but still is in his domain of ‘Looking at people and only letting authorized folks in’. But going in a back door so he doesn’t see, setting off the fire alarm so he evacuates, calling on the phone and telling him his car has been towed, those ideas hit him where he’s weaker.”


  • I’m glad you liked the comic.

    I read the tweet as saying “Actually learning about history, the good and the bad, is better than avoiding it to whitewash (pun intended) slavers and spare their feelings”

    How did you read it?

    This also reminds me of a separate post I saw about how social media, and tweets especially, is a really bad format for communicating. The length constraints and incentivizing being clever don’t make for fertile ground for ideas. Most people aren’t going to read an essay, sadly.


  • I also can’t imagine someone getting offended about people mentioning the Tulsa Race Massacre or the fact that the founding fathers held slaves.

    Actual racists aren’t going to be offended by those historical facts, they just might argue that they were justifiable in some way. Which is obviously super fucked up, but it’s not like racist people are going to deny the fact that slavery happened or that black people got massacred by white people in history. They literally get off on that shit.

    Many racists definitely do get offended by those facts. It’s because they’re coming at it from an emotional place, and the historical facts make them feel bad. Instead of dealing with that, they lash out. Not all racists are intentional about their racism.

    I link this a lot, but it’s worth a read https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

    Which is why the tweet seems so strange to me. Black people getting enslaved and massacred and persecuted? That slaps? I fucking hope not.

    That wasn’t the intent of the tweet and that is a bizarre misreading of it.



  • Don’t put important details behind failable skill checks and just dead end it there.

    Like if they find a book with ciphered text, you might be tempted to be like “make an intelligence + investigator check to decipher it”, and if they fail be like “you can’t figure it out”.

    It’s better to do some sort of degree of success or succeed at a cost so the game keeps moving forward.

    Like, on a bad roll they translate it but whoops awaken an angry spirit that’s now attacking them. Or they make some progress, but realize they need the key to fully crack it. The note in the margin says it’s at such-and-such flophouse, owned by the PC’s most annoying rival group.

    I’ve done too many “you rolled … 0? Ok. Well you have no idea what this altar means” and then later regretted it because the players didn’t have a vital clue.






  • I’m reminded of the abyssal words in Elden Ring’s expansion. There are signs that tell you “Don’t let them see you!” and “You have to hide and run!”. You find an area with some tall grass and some creepy eye-monsters. And sure enough, if they see you they come running at you. They’ll knock you over, grab you, and explode your head.

    Clearly you’re supposed to sneak by them.

    But…

    spoiler

    You can also parry their attack, and then just kill them.

    Or just fucking book it and run past them, but that’s way harder.




  • Sometimes things are mutually exclusive.

    Also I don’t know what “pro private transit” means to you. Do you mean more space dedicated to cars over people? Often people want “more parking” and “more lanes”, and those things don’t solve the problems they’re facing, and are bad ideas.

    You have to take more of the ideas out of your head and put them into the words you write if you want other people to follow you.