We really should be organizing to fight the right wing, because they’re pretty unified.

It does feel like unrest is coming. I don’t want to live in a world with car bombs in the US, but I do want all the republicans dead, so.

I don’t know PBTA well but I believe so.

Basically, every scene and character can have ‘aspects’, which are things that are true about them. They’re free form. Sometimes they’re just there, like if you’re in a bar it might have “Bubbling with drunk banter” or “Loud Pop Punk Soundtrack”. Aspects can then affect what makes sense in the scene. “Loud Pop Punk” can make it easier to move without being heard, but harder to make a speech because no one can hear you, for example.

You can also explicitly create aspects. Turn off the jukebox and the aspect might change to “Weirdly Quiet Bar” or whatever. In a fight, you can use the “create an advantage” move. That’s for stuff that isn’t about taking them out of the conflict right now, but setting things up. Like pushing them off balance, disarming them, screaming “LOOK! A DISTRACTION!” whatever. If the roll comes out if your favor, you can create an aspect that’s true and can also be invoked for a numeric bonus on a dice roll. So if you pants the guy you’re fighting, he can’t run full speed to chase you because his pants are down. You can also invoke that if you want to kick his ass, for a bonus on the dice roll.

These are all free form and it’s up to the group to decide what it actually means. Most groups probably wouldn’t let you invoke “I’m literally on fire!!” as a bonus if you’re trying to sneak through a crowd.

Typically, as I understand it, you’re either trying to take them out of the fight or trying to create advantages for side of the conflict. On a dramatic success on trying to take someone out, you can also create a small advantage.

This is the best approach I’ve found.

Player says, “I make a sales pitch playing on Priscilla’s hatred of our common foe, and that’s why she should sell us these explosives for cheap” and doesn’t have to actually do a sales call. Roll the dice and decide if that means she buys in, makes a counter offer, or what.

Personally I find adding a lot of flavor that has no mechanical impact kind of distracting and tiresome in a different way. Like, sure, it sounds cool you slashed their ankles or whatever, but if it doesn’t do anything I need to discard that. I can’t, in most systems, then be like “ok he just got stabbed in the leg he’s off balance. I can take advantage of that!”. It’s just noise.

Some people have been like “You just don’t have any imagination!” but it’s not that. It’s that the flavor stuff is often actively not true, and it’s tiresome to hold two separate world states in mind at the same time. One where the fighter just stabbed the guy in the hand and threw sand in his eyes, and the other where he hit for 5 damage and his hand + eyes are fine.

(Contrast Fate, which explicitly encourages you to be creative about the scene, and lets you mechanically benefit as well.)

I think the “I move and attack” stuff can get boring, especially if it’s slow. Like, if the players are speedy about it then you’re basically playing a board game, and that’s fine. I start to lose patience when you get the “can i move here? oh i can only move 30 feet. what about here? oh that will provoke. maybe if i cast misty step? oh i can’t cast two leveled spells in a round. Can I hide first? Oh that takes my action? Sorry I usually play rogue. Uhhh I guess I just shoot them.” mode.

I also kind of really want to spend more time in systems where the talky parts have rules, too. D&D tends to be just "wing it’ and “DM decides”. If you’re at the noble’s ball and try to make a big speech to convince the duke to flee before your army attacks, there’s not really a lot of structure there. It can be fine to just “talk it out, man”, but that runs into the problem where my character on paper has CHA 20 but me in real life rocks a solid 10 CHA. Or the other case, where the fighter with 8 CHA has a salesguy for a player, and he punches well above his on-paper skills using his real life personality, where I’m sidelined.

Honestly, just removing all the social skills from D&D would normalize the system.

But there’s also games like Fate, that handle social conflict and sword conflict with the same rules. Stab someone? Roll fight vs whatever they defend with. Stab someone with your words? Roll Cruelty vs their Composure. In either case, if your dice come out on top enough then they don’t get to go on.

I think some peopel who want more RP would hate this, since it gamifies it. But I’d rather have it than the aforementioned “real life sales guy hogs the spotlight” problem.

Any plan that depends on “and then the common person develops discerning taste” is doomed to fail. Especially considering that even people who are usually picky might enjoy something basic from time to time

I was going to say something similar to that too. Specifically, the consolidation of power means there’s less smaller companies taking risks. You’d think a big company with Disney money could afford to be weird and experimental, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

I say this despite enjoying superhero movies

Others have touched on this but this also feels downstream from the capitalist hellscape. Most people don’t have a lot of spending money. Movies are pricey and a bad money:time ratio.

I bet if wages were up, more people would go to the theater. I don’t want to spend $40 to watch a movie and eat popcorn, but I’d consider it for $3.

Sometimes I think about the billions of dollars of wasted productivity caused by Outlook being so bad at rendering email.

Also frustrating: how end users don’t care. You can explain how Uber mistreats employees or Airbnb causes rents to rise double digit percentages, but they’ll just be like “oh but it’s convenient”.

Twitter is a Nazi bar but “it has such good memes!”

If people cared just a little more, things could be so much better.

If you think ‘voluntary’ is acceptable for anything important you want corporations to do, you have no business making decisions about real life. If it’s voluntary, they’ll only do it if it benefits them.

That’s really bad. You might get other people sick with what you have, but if they’re immune compromised or otherwise vulnerable they could have a really bad, possibly fatal, time.

Apply it to healthcare, science, finances, and the world will become a better place, especially in healthcare.

That’s all kind of moot if we continue down the capitalist hellscape express. What good is an AI that can diagnose cancer if most people can’t afford access? What good is AI writing novels if our homes are destroyed by climate change induced disasters?

Those problems are mostly political, and AI isn’t going to fix them. The people that probably could be replaced with AI, the shitty “leaders” and such, are not going to voluntarily step down.

Ah, I always liked Three Panel Soul. Shame it doesn’t seem to update anymore.

Oh, I believe you that it could have worked. Many people seem happy to go with easy even if it’s worse in many ways. Sometimes that’s fine and the trade-off is worth it. I don’t compile all my software from source.

Making DND more like a video game seems really sad to me, and I wouldn’t want to take the poison pill. But I guess that’s like looking at the Internet and longing for when it was free hobby stuff while most people just want Facebook.

I like to think people would be like “wait, this sucks, we can’t go off the rails?” but I think most people’s expectations are lower. They’d be happy with DND as board game.

Yeah, that still sounds terrible. Something about the game anchoring the players imagination to the easy assets is just upsetting to me in a gut deep level.

My old in-person group, we’d just use coins and stuff. The pennies are zombies and the quarters are necromancers. I feel like any time spent fussing with the platform itself instead of the game is a negative, and Sigil sounds like maximum fussiness.

I don’t think I’ve even heard of this.

Experience D&D in stunning 3D with Sigil, an immersive 3D virtual tabletop (VTT) for Dungeons & Dragons fans that is integrated with D&D Beyond. Powered by Unreal Engine 5, Sigil provides intuitive world-building and mini-making tools, and a connected 3D gameplay experience for the whole party.

This sounds like a huge waste of time. I need to go make textures and models for every thing i make up? or I’m stuck using preset stuff, crippling imagination?

i am inclined to agree. the final fantasy 7 remake was surprisingly gentle about not having stupid missables. You could miss stuff, but it was recoverable without starting the whole thing over.

i had a whole argument with someone on here a while ago where they insisted i just had “fomo” because i didn’t like this sort of surprise consequences. Foreshadowing is cool. Unpredictable is, to me, unsatisfying.

I highly recommend using a guide if you’re not extremely chill about missing stuff.

I also realized partway through I really dislike pathfinder 1e, so i just started cheating, and then lost interest.

True. Kingmaker, if I recall, had a lot of weird “aha! You didn’t return to this particular forest on this particular day, so now you don’t ever get to meet this key character! No, there wasn’t any foreshadowing!”

That was kind of annoying.

Foreshadowing helps a lot.