jjjalljs, jjjalljs@ttrpg.network

A good post.

I personally find DND unsatisfying for many reasons (little to no degree of success, static magic system that encourages hoarding, the primary defense is all or nothing avoidance, very coarse progression, some character concepts are simply not representable, etc)

But what is even more annoying than that is when players respond with “but you can just change the rules!”. I know! That’s true of any pen and paper game! It’s not some unique property of DND. But sometimes I don’t want to do the work of designing a system, and I almost never want to play some stranger’s pre-alpha homebrew.

This supports my hypothesis that most players “playing” DND could easily swap to some other rule system and not even know. Many of them would probably be happier in other systems.

I’d rather spend N minutes reading a list of book recommendations than 5*N minutes watching a video. Presumably the target audience for books is literate.

I’m tired of video.

On the one hand, this might help fence sitters that are like “there’s no content there”.

On the other, I just don’t personally care for a stream of random images like Instagram et al do.

There’s something off about a video about books.

It’s not “retire and live a life of luxury” money, at least in many parts of the world.

It’s a lot of money in terms of paying down debt and covering rent for a while, though.

Poor emotional regulation.

Someone speaking another language makes them afraid (maybe they’re talking about me) or feel bad (I only know one language am I stupid?). Getting angry at the other person is easier on the ego than healthier options.

I love mage, but its magic is so involved and powerful I wouldn’t want to use it in a game unless everyone was a mage. You don’t really want one players options to be “I hit him with my club” and the others to be boundless.

Awakening 2nd edition was really good, imo, but I never actually got to play Ascension

I used nWoD for fantasy games. The core dice pool system works pretty well, and few things are tightly coupled to any setting in particular.

I mostly don’t like d20, so when someone tells me they’re doing a game about secret vampire societies in it, I’m a lot more disappointed than if they ported a system I like or am neutral on. Also 5th edition in particular makes a lot of assumptions about how things work.

Isn’t that what people were calling it anyway? Well that’s nice I guess.

I dunno man. I’ve had a lot of conversations with players that go like “do you think your character is the first to come up with this hijink? If it works, why doesn’t the entire setting revolve about this infinite damage trick you’re trying to sell me?”

Like, if it was as easy as casting Charm Person on the king to become the new ruler, other people would already be doing that. Therefore, there must be reasons why it doesn’t work.

No you weren’t. Not by anyone credible, anyway.

I remember reading the help file as a kid and then it made a lot more sense.

I noticed this some years ago talking to a friend on AIM. He’d end most of his messages with lol

Oh, I thought the pearl jam was a jar full of jawbreakers at first. Pearl jam makes more sense with the bread.

My parents are difficult. Not the worst people and not monsters, but at many times unpleasant.

Plus it was a house in the suburbs. Not ideal for socializing or culture.

And lastly, living with parents in the suburbs would be huge negatives for dating.

Still, the costs for defendants, even if ultimately exonerated, have been enormous, with many having their mugshots blasted by the government and some forced to languish in jail or have criminal charges hang over them for weeks and months

Fundamental flaw in the legal system right there.

In several high-profile cases, the prosecutions fell apart because they relied on statements by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officers that had no supporting evidence or in some instances were proven by video footage to be blatantly false.

Prosecute the liars. Ruin their lives instead.

All it takes is one cop to be like “he was resisting arrest and I feared for my life so I had to shoot him 17 times in the back”.

My parents told me Santa was real but when I was seven or so I figured out there were just too many houses. I wasn’t mad about it but it was weird.

My friend has a toddler. They told her Santa is a fun game people play, and not to ruin it for other kids. That seemed to work.

I don’t really use LLMs.

Today at work I was working on someone with something, and we realized our list of tuples was backwards. He was like “oh I’ll have chatgpt fix it”

I was like, [(x[1], x[0]) for x in stuff]. Took about zero seconds. Delegating to the chatbot might have felt impressive if it got it right, but it was also such a trivial task I wouldn’t think to use it.