Yeah, I think there’s a big difference between “I thought they were going to investigate the smith, but they’re really suspicious of the wizard now and want to check her out first” and “they decided to forget about the whole civil war for the throne thing and open a BBQ joint for the local goblins”

Nowadays I’d probably just explicitly be like “Hey, so, when we started this game we agreed on a certain tone and direction. Specifically, it was going to be about a power struggle for the throne. Running a restaurant business in D&D sounds wild, but that is really a different kind of story and a different game. If you want to do that, let’s talk about it. Otherwise, I’m asking you to stay more on theme.”

Though I say that and my best game had plenty of “beach episodes”. One time literally, after they saved some sahaugin from being subjugated by a siren.

I ran a game in near future New York and used Google maps and street view for guidance. Worked well. None of the other players lived here, so I think the visuals helped them.

I had one really good game of Vampire. Lasted a couple years. We still talk about it sometimes, and its best scenes. Like how one PC saved an NPC by jumping out a 10th story window with her. Or the time they had a huge in character fight because the job they’d tried to do went sideways.

But I’ve also had a couple really bad games. There was one where they just didn’t read and retain anything from the books. One of the players on like session 4 was like “wait. How do I get more blood? Do I like… Bite people?”. My friend what do you think was happening in the other scenes when people were hunting for blood? They also didn’t retain anything about the different factions, so they didn’t really understand anyone’s motivation. It was bad. Still feel bad about it.

At one of my old jobs, we had a suite of browser tests that would run on PR. It’d stand up the application, open headless chrome, and click through stuff. This was the final end-to-end test suite to make sure that yes, you can still log in and everything plays nicely together.

Developers were constantly pinging slack about “why is this test broken??”. Most of the time, the error message would be like “Never found an element matching css selector #whatever” or “Element with css selector #loading-spinner never went away”. There’d be screenshots and logs, and usually when you’d look you’d see like the loading spinner was stuck, and the client had gotten a 400 back from the server because someone broke something.

We put a giant red box on the CI/CD page explaining what to do. Where to read the traces, reminding them there’s a screenshot, etc. Still got questions.

I put a giant ascii cat in the test output, right before the error trace, with instructions in a word bubble. People would ping me, “why is this test broken?”. I’d say “What did the cat say?” They’d say “What cat?” And I’d know they hadn’t even looked at the error message.

There’s a kind of learned helplessness with some developers and tests. It’s weird.

Try not to think too hard about how most of the evidence points to shorter work weeks being better on pretty much every metric.

Or that most of the “return to office” mandates are counter productive cruelty.

I think I saw an article that claimed most office workers in the UK do like 3 hours of work a day, and the rest is puttering and looking busy.

Our system is stupid and it’s stuck stupid because of people. It’s not physics. It’s not biology. Like there’s not much you can do to fix like humans need to eat and sleep, but the workday is just made up.

It’s kind of annoying and distracting. It makes me think they have some emotional damage (don’t we all?) and then I start wondering what else is going to break under stress.

A sincere apology and owning fault is a power move. Apologizing four times because the chair made a weird sound when you adjusted it makes you look sad and impotent.

You’re probably not telling the total truth, but maybe consider that one person being unpleasant 30 years ago isn’t a good reason to abandon an entire form of media for your entire life. Let it go. The librarian is probably dead by now, and they don’t have to matter to you anymore.

I say this all the time! I use it to try to discredit conservatives when they make up reasons why we can’t have good things. Like, look, you love the library, and you know conservatives would make up all sorts of reasons why it couldn’t ever work. When they’re going on about how free buses (or whatever) couldn’t work, it’s the same

As more people are laid off, “I gotta go to work” becomes less compelling.

Maybe we should, like, storm one of these ice facilities, have our own bastille day.

I don’t know PBTA well but I believe so.

Basically, every scene and character can have ‘aspects’, which are things that are true about them. They’re free form. Sometimes they’re just there, like if you’re in a bar it might have “Bubbling with drunk banter” or “Loud Pop Punk Soundtrack”. Aspects can then affect what makes sense in the scene. “Loud Pop Punk” can make it easier to move without being heard, but harder to make a speech because no one can hear you, for example.

You can also explicitly create aspects. Turn off the jukebox and the aspect might change to “Weirdly Quiet Bar” or whatever. In a fight, you can use the “create an advantage” move. That’s for stuff that isn’t about taking them out of the conflict right now, but setting things up. Like pushing them off balance, disarming them, screaming “LOOK! A DISTRACTION!” whatever. If the roll comes out if your favor, you can create an aspect that’s true and can also be invoked for a numeric bonus on a dice roll. So if you pants the guy you’re fighting, he can’t run full speed to chase you because his pants are down. You can also invoke that if you want to kick his ass, for a bonus on the dice roll.

These are all free form and it’s up to the group to decide what it actually means. Most groups probably wouldn’t let you invoke “I’m literally on fire!!” as a bonus if you’re trying to sneak through a crowd.

Typically, as I understand it, you’re either trying to take them out of the fight or trying to create advantages for side of the conflict. On a dramatic success on trying to take someone out, you can also create a small advantage.

I enjoyed the simplicity of old video game RPGs where the price of the item directly scaled with the value of the item. Armor for 1000gp was just straight out better than the one for 300gp.

If we were all in the room, we could strangle Sam Altman or whatever other capitalist dog was calling the shots.

This is the best approach I’ve found.

Player says, “I make a sales pitch playing on Priscilla’s hatred of our common foe, and that’s why she should sell us these explosives for cheap” and doesn’t have to actually do a sales call. Roll the dice and decide if that means she buys in, makes a counter offer, or what.

Personally I find adding a lot of flavor that has no mechanical impact kind of distracting and tiresome in a different way. Like, sure, it sounds cool you slashed their ankles or whatever, but if it doesn’t do anything I need to discard that. I can’t, in most systems, then be like “ok he just got stabbed in the leg he’s off balance. I can take advantage of that!”. It’s just noise.

Some people have been like “You just don’t have any imagination!” but it’s not that. It’s that the flavor stuff is often actively not true, and it’s tiresome to hold two separate world states in mind at the same time. One where the fighter just stabbed the guy in the hand and threw sand in his eyes, and the other where he hit for 5 damage and his hand + eyes are fine.

(Contrast Fate, which explicitly encourages you to be creative about the scene, and lets you mechanically benefit as well.)

I kind of want to live in a world where people stop using tiktok because short form video like that seems bad for your brain.

I think the “I move and attack” stuff can get boring, especially if it’s slow. Like, if the players are speedy about it then you’re basically playing a board game, and that’s fine. I start to lose patience when you get the “can i move here? oh i can only move 30 feet. what about here? oh that will provoke. maybe if i cast misty step? oh i can’t cast two leveled spells in a round. Can I hide first? Oh that takes my action? Sorry I usually play rogue. Uhhh I guess I just shoot them.” mode.

I also kind of really want to spend more time in systems where the talky parts have rules, too. D&D tends to be just "wing it’ and “DM decides”. If you’re at the noble’s ball and try to make a big speech to convince the duke to flee before your army attacks, there’s not really a lot of structure there. It can be fine to just “talk it out, man”, but that runs into the problem where my character on paper has CHA 20 but me in real life rocks a solid 10 CHA. Or the other case, where the fighter with 8 CHA has a salesguy for a player, and he punches well above his on-paper skills using his real life personality, where I’m sidelined.

Honestly, just removing all the social skills from D&D would normalize the system.

But there’s also games like Fate, that handle social conflict and sword conflict with the same rules. Stab someone? Roll fight vs whatever they defend with. Stab someone with your words? Roll Cruelty vs their Composure. In either case, if your dice come out on top enough then they don’t get to go on.

I think some peopel who want more RP would hate this, since it gamifies it. But I’d rather have it than the aforementioned “real life sales guy hogs the spotlight” problem.

I used to use RPG.net a lot. They have pretty strict moderation, which keeps the place from turning into some kinds of shit holes. But you also can’t tell someone they’re a fool, or all Republicans are traitors. Takes some getting used to, but is probably worth it.

If those Internet duds that get mad about black people in video games spent like half that energy being mad about, like, wage theft, we’d be so much better off.

No. Your reading of it is unusual, in most contexts. It almost always means “agreement, and I have nothing of substance to add”.

It can be rude if the thing you’ve said should warrant a substantial response. Like if you wrote “my brother just died in a car wreck”, a thumbs up (or probably any emoji) would be an inappropriate response. Heavier stuff warrants whole words.

But if it’s like “Can you get cat food at the store? The kind we always get” then a thumbs up is an acceptable shorthand for "yes, I understand and commit to this request "