New Jersey is fine. A lot of north jersey is overshadowed by NYC being right there. One of my friends moved here from florida, and one of her friends was like “Why don’t you move to jersey city? it’s cheaper” and she went “I didn’t move to new york to live in new jersey”. But even if you do live just outside the city and none of your friends want to visit, you’re still a short train ride away from it.

I don’t know as much about south jersey, but, like, it’s fine. And unlike, I don’t know, Iowa, you can usually get on a train to a world class city.

I don’t think you can eat deep dish pizza with one hand while riding the subway quite so easily.

I have very little patience for people who can’t or won’t do the hard thing. Like, yeah withdrawal is going to suck but sometimes you have to do something unpleasant to get something better.

I mostly keep it to myself though. A lot of people have this problem. Not just about smoking.

Conversations like

“I’m so tired I don’t know why.”

“When did you go to sleep and get up?”

“Uh sleep at like 3am and up at 7am.”

“Well that explains it. Why up so late?”

“… YouTube videos.”

“You should probably stop staying up so late watching videos so you’re not exhausted all day.”

“No.”

But I mostly keep it to myself because there’s not really anything I can do to make someone listen.

Most smokers I’ve talked to get really defensive about it. “it’s not that bad! Sugar is worse for you! It’s not like you exercise or anything! I don’t smoke as much as so-and-so!”

It’s pathetic, really. I’d respect them more if they could just own “this is bad for me and everyone around me.”

Many people are bad at delayed gratification and long term thinking.

D&D and Pathfinder are like Baseball and Softball, maybe. But going from D&D to Fate or PbtA is like changing to football or fencing. It’s very different. Trying to get someone who’s playing Baseball to take up soccer is tricky. D&D is baseball. Pathfinder is softball. Easier transition.

This is very often a thing people believe! Especially if the other system they’re looking at is like Pathfinder (similarly complex) or some close D&D relatives that have a different set of arbitrary numbers. Like, in this game a 15 strength is +3! We have 50 feats with similar names but different behaviors! They might not even realize that not every game has six stats, or long lists of “feats”, or anything even like “feats”. And a lot of games (most of them?) don’t have weird tables and mappings.

Like if you’re playing Fate Core, and you want to burgle, you just your burgle score. One number.

But I think a lot of the time when people present that kind of resistance, it’s coming from an emotional place. Telling them facts isn’t going to do much. They might feel embarrassed about not being good at the new game. They might feel bad about spending $80 on the D&D books and unusual dice when the new game has a free book and just uses d6. That kind of stuff. Unfortunately, most people aren’t really introspective enough to surface those feelings quickly and accurately. (I include myself in “most people” there, sadly.)

I had a guy in an old group that once with full sincerity said “The best thing about D&D is we can just try out different house rules, and if we don’t like them we can change something out.” Like, my guy, that’s not a unique property of D&D. If anything, D&D is harder to homebrew because it has oddly specific rules and assumptions.

I haven’t played Pathfinder 2e but my understanding is it had a lot more choices at the turn level and character build level. that’s good if you want that, but I think for a lot of people the shallowness of 5e is a plus. There are other games that would also be a good fit if you’re not looking for deep tactics or builds, though.

Some people never really learned DND either, but kind of get carried along by the group. I feel like you could switch out systems on those people and they wouldn’t do any worse.

But I get it. Some people are more casual. Some people have executive dysfunction. My current strategy is to find people who want to play what I want to play, and it’s working okay. Still makes me a little sad that DND is so mega popular, but okay.

I think it’s an error to treat “I play DND” the same as “I play RPGs”. It’s like “I play baseball” vs “I play sports”.

There are too many reasons to succinctly list why people might be sticking to DND.

In my experience, you’ll have better luck finding players who want to play something else rather than trying to convert DND players.

Well, I wasn’t having much fun with DND.

There are degrees of fun.

But those bots don’t have any intersection with my network, so their trust score is low.

If they do connect via one of my idiot friends, that friend loses credit, too, and the system can trust his connections less.

The trust level is from my perspective, not global.

A lot of my games sort of take place in the same universe, even when they’re different systems or settings.

Like an old DND campaign had the players visit a wizard university, where they met many NPCs. One of them was Reg. He’s kind of a chill party dude. Loves playing wizard pong (it’s like ping pong, but with mage hands)

My current game is a 2050s corporate dystopia using Fate. Heavy inspiration from World of Darkness and Shadowrun.

And Reg is here. He fully believes he used to go to wizard school, but something happened and now he’s here. He’s pretty chill about it, though. Last game, a werewolf was going berserk and Reg was like “Dude. Fucking metal.” The werewolf gave him a knock-on-your-ass high five and Reg lived.

Sometimes people’s priorities, needs, and desires are bad.

The way I imagine it working is if I notice a bot in my web, I flag it, and then everyone involved in approving the bot loses some credibility. So a bad actor will get flushed out. And so will your idiot friend that keeps trusting bots, so their recommendations are then mostly ignored.

My characters often end up exasperated by how idiotic and chaotic the other _characters players are. That checks out.

“So the walls started bleeding, a thousand voices cried out in pain, and a sinkhole into the unseen depths opened in the kitchen.”

“Right.”

“And you, a normal human with no magical powers or special equipment, you jumped into the sinkhole.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“It was there!”

“And then your character died, as one would expect from a hundred foot drop onto stone. And now?”

“I don’t understand. What else was I supposed to do??”

People get weird about food combos. i’m like, just let people enjoy shit. Especially if you’ve never tried it.

Yeah I think it’s impossible to treat people with dignity and respect indefinitely while also hoarding wealth like a dragon.

I remember seeing memes about this. I think it was the “boss throws guy out the window” template.

• “How can we keep our guards loyal? Drug them? Bomb collars?”
• “Maybe you could pay them and treat them with dignity and respect”

Personally I think we should start a campaign of jury nullification and “if you’re an EMT, and they’re a billionaire, let them die”, but I’m just one guy.

Oh yeah I think I read about Zucker building a bunker in hawaii. Hopefully he dies before he can enjoy it.