I swear, I’m seeing the western equivalent of wumaos servicing Meta here. Only at least the wumaos got paid; it made sense. These idiots are doing the labour for free!

An “obvious” typo you missed when you wrote it. When you read it back after posting. In a post where you were putting on airs of being smarter than everybody.

I fucking love it when that happens and love to rub it in.

“Jeffrey doesn’t always eat people. Just sometimes. We should totally go clubbing with him and spurn him later if he eats one of us.”

You understand that no matter how much you kneel down to service Meta, Zuck the Fuck won’t be trickling anything down on you that isn’t a bodily fluid, right?

And hey, I’m not going to kink-shame. Just pointing out that if that isn’t your specific kink, you might want to wake up to there being zero dollars trickling down to you.

“Yes, Jeffrey has, in the past, killed and eaten gay men. But we should wait and see. It’s impolite not to invite him to the party!”

It will always be … a name that doesn’t exist and has never existed?

(Hint: BURMA. It’s hard to sound smart when you can’t even get a single fucking name right! Especially the name that “it will always be” for you. Holy fucking shit!)

You know, you have access to search engines too. You don’t need to be lazy and treat the rest of the Internet as your personal stenographer/research assistant.

Fucking HELL, despite how increasingly easy it is to find information, it cannot keep pace with just how utterly fucking lazy people are getting.

Not HK and Hong Kong.

Also some people in Hainan will refer to the “mainland” as opposed to Hainan island.

It turns out words can be used in multiple ways. It’s not all about Taiwan.

These are real RPGs, not the computerized abominations that try and fail to approximate them.

For when it’s happening at your table, sometimes I think you just have to shut down the game if the players are unengaged and dicking around, falling asleep, etc.

For stopping this happening? Nothing. People are stupid. (All of us.) For some that expression of stupidity comes in the form of reading one word in a text and assuming the rest without bothering to read further. You can’t fight that.

Hmmm… Closest to but not over a target number would be entertaining, yes.

Being able to build up hands would be a plus, maybe through some kind of rummy-style mechanism where you can pick up others’ discards, etc.

Suits having areas of coverage: hearts are for physical well-being, for example, or clubs for violence, or whatever. You get the value of the card only in the area of coverage, otherwise you get a reduced value (say 1) for each card no matter what the value.

Going back to the rummy-style hand-building, combos of cards have special effects. Triples/quadruples. Runs (both in-suit or out-of-suit).

Maybe some assistance mechanism where physical cards are swapped/gifted/whatever.

That’s the problem with going from a parody. Read the ORIGINAL parody: Ayn Rand’s works. (She’s her own parody.) Atlas Shrugged is filled to the brim with casual misogyny … held up as virtue. 'Cause that woman wuz cray-cray.

The drow are certainly evil, but they’re not simply evil. They have their own set of values that they typically adhere to pretty fanatically, and a rather alien culture to go with it. The drow have no word for love (ssinssrigg translates to something closer to a possessive fondness), they view successful betrayal as virtuous, and ultimately the advancement of personal power for the glory of Lolth is their greatest ideal.

So … Lolth is Ayn Rand?

My boss is on Lemmy too. I won’t exactly be surprising him with it.

Tell me you don’t have an office job without saying you don’t have an office job.

OK, for some really weird reason I can respond to you but not to @jasondotjson@cupoftea.social. So I’ll put my response to his question here. This is not a response to you, just me working around a weird problem:

Could you tell me a bit more about your problems with moves? Is it just that they’re 2d6 or is it something with the way they’re usually structured?

What they most remind me of are the “drama deck” of games like Torg, Shatterzone, and Masterbook. When those were introduced I saw what they were trying to do: by providing a mechanical benefit to doing something other than “I try to hit him with my sword/gun/whatever”, they were trying to induce people to do more creative things. And while some elements of the drama deck were very effective and innovative ways to reflect the ebb and flow of dramatic situations (not just combat), the “approved actions” part (which is what “moves” look like to me) was, as far as I’m concerned, an abject failure.

The intent of an approved action was simple: if you succeeded at an approved action, you got to draw a new drama card for your hand. The approved actions were things like “attack”, “defend”, “test of wills”, “trick”, “taunt”, etc. And the problem with them was that people, to get that mechanical advantage, would contrive just the DUMBEST THINGS IMAGINABLE to get that sweet, sweet card draw. A lot of situations that were plenty dramatic without the drama deck started becoming farcical instead.

These “moves” look to me like the drama deck’s “approved action”. Only somehow even worse since they’re always there, not switched out on you. They feel like a proverbial “Chinese Restaurant” menu: one from column A, two from column B and then people act as if this somehow liberates them. To me it feels like it constrains them. I don’t even see what problem they were trying to solve by having these, which makes understanding their appeal impossible, as you can imagine.

I call it bass-ackwards when (and I freely admit that I may have this wrong because, as I said, the various attempts to explain the system tend to suck because they’re all breathlessly talking as if narrative, rules-light systems are new and unique to PbtA) you say what you’re going to do and then look up a list of approved “moves” to see which is least distorted when applied to the situation. I don’t really find menus of permitted moves liberating or free-form. I find it rather constraining and ugly.

Again you’re talking as if rules-light, narrative-focused games are new and unusual. They’ve been around since the (late) '80s. What you are calling “freeing” and new and exciting to you is Tuesday to me. Or any day that ends in ‘y’ really.

That isn’t the part I don’t grok.

What I don’t grok you touched upon, however: the “moves” (and all the other related paraphernalia like the “playbooks”). That whole bass-ackward game mechanism is something that I look at and fail to understand at any level, beginning with “what problem is this trying to solve?” and ending with “how is this intended to be fun?”. I also keep hearing the claim that the game is “hackable” but when I look at “hacks” they seem like “jack up the paint job, insert a whole new game, lower the paint job”. About the only thing constant across the PbtA that I can see is that 2d6 system of bass-ackwards rolling.

I think the problem is that I was playing cinematic-feeling games beginning in the '80s. (Late '80s, to be fair.) A game being “cinematic” isn’t new to me. And the parts of PbtA that are actually new … I just don’t grok the appeal of. As in I don’t like it and I don’t understand what it is people who like it see in it.

I don’t like Savage Worlds, as an example, but I see what some people enjoy in it. It’s just not for me. I can see what they were going for. I can see how someone might enjoy the outcome of it. I just happen to not like the system. Ditto for GURPS or even D&D: I don’t like it, but I see what the appeal could be.

With PbtA I don’t understand it enough to even see what it is people like about it. And I can’t find an “explain like I’m five” overview that closes that comprehension gap. All of the intros seem to presume I know what’s appealing and are intent on showing me how to do it. None of them explain the actual appeal, leaving me lost.