How do you feel about tracking equipment and encumbrance?

Are these two different things to anyone else? “My hoodlum has a knife, some lockpicks, and a lucky charm” is different than “I’m carrying 12 of 50 pounds for light encumbrance”

Which should be prioritized more in a campaign: realism or drama?

Also really depends on genre, heh.

What has the more authority: GM rulings or game rules?

I put rulings but that’s because “I’d love to have fun but the book says no” is kind of stupid. But I do not really like when the GM unilaterally, capriciously, changes things. I like having a workable mental model of how the game works. One that doesn’t include the GM’s mood.

I had the same thought on a lot of these. It depends

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but DND doesn’t do Star Wars well. There’s no adventuring day in the source fiction, really. Jedi are hard to model- they either shine too bright or don’t live up to the fiction. Force powers don’t really map to existing DND systems. Class+Level is very coarse, which makes it hard to model some concepts. DND is almost entirely a combat game, but I guess Star wars is mostly fighting so you won’t feel the absence of other systems that much.

I’m sure it’ll be make some people happy. The previous d20 Star wars games had their fans. I just don’t think it’s something I’d enjoy, and it’s a shame this is going to suck the air out of star wars tabletop game options.

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.

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.

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.

“Top-down mandates to use large language models are crazy,” one employee told Wired. “If the tool were good, we’d all just use it.”

Yep.

Management is often out of touch and full of shit

Sounds like a good start

The cap was in place because the Social Security benefit doesn’t increase above the that income.

I don’t think that’s necessarily a good reason for the cap to exist. I expect it’s a compromise to get rich people and idiots on board.

The Oatmeal did a comic worth reading about this: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

Some people are really loathe to do any self reflection or assessment. I gather their sense of self and worth is very fragile, and looking too hard might make it collapse.

Like, some people you could say “Eating meat is bad for these reasons” and they’ll just lash out. Not enough emotional HP to tank the hit.

I’m not rich to the point of no longer needing to labor, but I did hit the social security cap one year. I was pissed when I learned why my take home jumped up. I would have rather kept paying.

It’s selfish to want to keep a little more of your vast wealth like you describe. That’s cartoon villainy.

Right. Cognitive dissonance. We all suffer it sometimes. I guess it takes uncommon courage and clarity to work through it. Most people would rather do the least effort to preserve their sense of being a good person.

Being sexist is bad

They are good

They don’t like this show because it has a woman lead

That’s sexist

But they’re good

Can’t change “sexism is bad”. Can’t change “they are good”. Only thing left to change is the reason they don’t like the show. Easy-peasy.

It’s kind of insane to me that there’s an annual cap on social security payments. If your salary is high enough, you stop paying into it partway through the year. That’s ass-backwards. You shouldn’t pay anything for the first chunk of money, and then pay more as you make more.

It’s always been pretty bad for large chunks of the population. This seems like a low point, but there have been many lows in living memory. Civil rights movement in the 60s. Vietnam war. War on drugs. Countless cruelties done to non-whites and queer folks.

Even the idealized stuff of “buy a house on one income” was more for white people than anything else. Redlining, mortgage discrimination, “and then the white people burned down our house” were all realities.

This country has always been deeply racist. The wealthy ownership class has largely been soulless ghouls. Maybe they build libraries and museums for a while, but they still oversaw tremendous suffering and poverty.

if you tell people that certain opinions are not allowed to be expressed, then they will tell you another reason they dont like the show. That is what happens. If you want the actual reason, you have to allow it to appear.

This is interesting. I feel like people are allowed to say “I don’t think women should lead”. They just don’t like the consequences of having that opinion. They want to say something cruel or afactual without anyone uninviting them from parties.

Many fans are seeing this star trek as being a vehicle for removing masculinity from the show,

If that’s true, it’s another example of conservatives having atrocious media literacy. There’s ample masculinity in the show. Perhaps they’re upset that it’s not exclusively the kind they want to see. Conservatives are not known for enjoying other perspectives and new takes.

Which I guess is your first point again. They have unwelcome beliefs so they’ll contort them into something they feel has less consequences. That’s easier than admitting maybe they’re wrong or their beliefs are bad.