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

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  • 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.









  • 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.







  • Why are each of your lines wrapped in ellipsis?

    …what many anti-fifth-edition positions miss is that it’s not about learning a new system, it’s about compatibility across a vast ecosystem of disparate settings and campaigns…

    I don’t think 5e is especially compatible with disparate settings and campaigns. It’s not an actually generic system like Fate or GURPS. It’s got underbaked or entirely missing whole RPG subsystems and mechanics (eg: social conflict, succeed-at-a-cost, metagame currency). It’s highly opinionated in other regards- hit points, class and level, resting. You can hammer the peg into the hole, but you could do that with anything.

    It’s not a good system for modeling anything outside heroic fantasy.

    It’s certainly a popular system, but many things are popular without being good. But, if your top priority is going where people are, by all means stick to D&D 5e, reddit, facebook, etc.




  • I don’t really have a lot of empathy for people who don’t want to learn a new rule system.

    First off, most of those people barely know 5e to begin with. You could swap them into another system and they’d probably perform about as well.

    Aside from that, maybe they don’t mean to sound anti-intellectual, but they kind of do. It’s okay to read and learn new things. I’ve had potential players put up more of a fight than it would’ve taken to just read the thing.

    Related, I think there’s like a literacy crisis. Many people don’t seem to read or think great.


  • So many people see the prompt “what I’m looking for” and write “my keys”.

    A. That’s not a terribly funny joke. It’s fine, but not great.

    B. It’s not original.

    C. You are wasting valuable space. Now the other person has a little less information to make a good opening message. Do you really want that many people messaging you about your keys? Really? Why are you setting yourself up for unhappy outcomes?

    Most people don’t think very hard about this, and hope it’ll just work out.