Wade, a geek from #yxe. I talk about roleplaying games, LARP, software development, and culture.
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
Joined January 2019
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One of the worst things about being a middle aged gamer is that sometimes games aren't cancelled for reasons like "player is too hung over" or "player forgot they had an exam the next day", but instead things like "player died suddenly".
Real life sucks sometimes.
I don't know which TTRPG GMs need to hear this, but:
Your scenes run too long, you should be cutting and moving onto the next thing sooner.
(it is me. I'm the TTRPG GM that needs to hear that)
I know a TTRPG will not be for me if it feels like, most of the time, in any given scene in the game there's only one obviously supported mode for getting through the scene and on to the next thing. Especially when it is usually "combat".
PoMoAnachro - also: pomoanachro.bsky.social retweeted
Libertarians took over a town in New Hampshire. They gutted the government, slashing every “wasteful” service.
Including garbage pickup.
Due to this, the town was soon overrun by bears. The libertarians fled.
That failed experiment is now happening on a national scale.
PoMoAnachro - also: pomoanachro.bsky.social retweeted
Now, you can ask: "what if my tasks at work are simple enough to where GPT does solve it all, easily? Can't I just use it for that?"
Congratulations. You may have discovered the path to being unemployed. If the AI does everything you can do, *why would they keep you around*?
PoMoAnachro - also: pomoanachro.bsky.social retweeted
once you learn how the sausage is made in your industry, some of the glamour falls away
once you've worked in three or five industries, you realize it's all sausage, humans have never produced anything that wasn't sausage, and if you think you see non-sausage— nope, sausage
Today's TTRPG hot take:
Recommending World of Darkness to run an Underworld (the vampires vs werewolves movies) game is about as wise as recommending using D&D to run a Lord of the Rings inspired game - lots of similar setting bits, but you'll be fighting the system all the way.
Hot take:
Players dithering & avoiding making decisions in a TTRPG is sometimes just indecisive players, but often a symptom of a system that makes it impossible to make informed choices.
It has become such a trope because The World's Most Popular RPG is very guilty of this.
The TTRPG world is not ready for this hot take because it is entirely too accurate.
PoMoAnachro - also: pomoanachro.bsky.social retweeted
The more I think about this the angrier I get. That many admin and faculty think LLM written papers are a grading problem (unearned grades) rather than something that strikes at the very core of our endeavor (nothing is learned!) encapsulates the failure of higher ed leadership.
PoMoAnachro - also: pomoanachro.bsky.social retweeted
Hot Take: The Five Room Dungeon became a thing because games like WotC D&D and Pathfinder were so bloated no one had the patience for anything more than 5 rooms.
I feel Vampire: the Masquerade fans asking what generation Count Orlok would be in the 2024 Nosferatu movie just kinda demonstrates how far removed a lot of the fandom actually is from how vampire stories work narratively.
A lot of it is the D&D equivalent of "Coffee shop RP" which is popular in a lot of fandom RP - just hanging out, being in character, having the kinds of conversations your characters would have with each other and with NPCs. It isn't bad, just not what D&D is aimed at.
These days I have limited hours to get my entertainment in. So I want my entertainment to have *punch* - exciting, impactful stories, engrossing tactical decisions, satisfying creative work, it is all good.
Coffee Shop RP mostly seems ideal for if you have too much free time.
Players who come into an RPG with a "build" all pre-planned out are usually players who find character advancement fun, and by doing all that in advance they rob themselves of fun.
Often, they treat actually playing the game as just a chore to get through to finish their build.