I think a lot of people don’t get good information and then don’t connect the dots when they do.

There’s a lot of slop and mis/disinformation out there

I think I would take a different route, because big randomness isn’t fun for me.

Have you played Fate? It’s very good, and free. It has “stress” that’s kind of like hit points, but it also has this idea of “consequences”. When you take a hit but don’t have enough free stress to cover it, you can take a consequence instead. Stress is easy to recover, but a consequence sticks around until you get treatment.

As I said, I don’t really like big randomness. In Fate, it’s always up to the player if they want to take a consequence or not. Sometimes the alternative is the character just gets taken out. But if you do take a consequence , it’s up to the table to negotiate what it might be. Fall off a ledge? Could be a broken leg. Got stabbed? Could be an infection. Bothered by a ghost? Now you have a fear of the dark.

To port this over to DND , I’d add three “consequences” boxes on the sheet- minor , moderate, and severe. Each one could be used to soak one hit. The minor one could be 25% of their hp, the moderate 50%, and the severe 75%. When you take a hit that’s less than the box, you can mark the box instead of it going to hp. Probably tweak the numbers a bit since I just made those up. If you want to be even harsher, lower the max HP some, too.

This probably would be a mess, but I started typing it out and don’t want to just throw it away.

But I do recommend looking at how other systems do stuff for ideas, and stealing them

Also make sure your players are into whatever ideas you’re pitching.

I bought a couple games on epic when they were cheaper. I don’t think I’d do so again.

• the client isn’t as good. It’s slower, the way it paginates your games (I got a lot of free ones) is annoying. It really wants to show you store stuff
• less (zero?) Linux support
• don’t think it does the game recording steam does
• I don’t think it has the remote play together steam does

There’s probably other stuff I’m not thinking of. It’s just not as good a service.

Anyone entering through web development. If you’re self taught or did a “coding boot camp”, it might be the only language you’ve used. A lot of places use it for backend stuff now, too

I think my cat chews on plastic because he knows I’ll come running out and interact with him. I’m like, you could just meow. If you meow I’ll come, too. He is old and set in his ways.

I saw that one too and thought similarly!

I don’t know about “fine”. It has a lot of weird stuff baked in. Hoisting. Unexpected type coercion. Too many ways to loop over something and I always forget which one is which. “There’s more than one way to do it” is kind of a recurring problem, come to think of it. Several function declaration syntaxes. Dot notation AND bracket notation for objects.

Also it will forever bother me that object keys aren’t quoted.

const foo = "hello"; const bar = { foo: "world" }

That should be, in my mind, { "hello": "world" } . It’s not. It’s { "foo": "world" }

But if you want to do that, you need to do const bar = { [foo]: world }. Which looks like your key is an array with one entry, a string with a value of “foo”

You also end up learning a whole framework, with its syntax and idioms, every couple years. Angular. React. Redux. Whatever.

There’s also a lot of people who have never used anything else, and want to use javascript for everything.

Javascript is basically D&D. Wildly popular. Full of legacy jank. People try to use it for anything even though there are better or more specialized tools.

Republicans aren’t fit to govern.

Hey the SRD says tieflings “can speak, read, and write Common and Infernal.”

I’m reminded of that Sartre quote again

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

Well, if you want to have a conversation go ahead and read the rest of the post. Otherwise you’re just kind of jerking yourself off

At the very least form unions. That will help with stuff like wage theft, some people getting underpaid, BS firings, etc.

More aggressively, maybe some sort of collective ownership. Not this “options” bullshit where they never even vest for most people. The whole thing where management pays you $100 and sells what you made for $3000 needs to go. That $3000 needs to be more fairly shared among the people that made it happen.

But I don’t really know. I’m just some guy with entry level knowledge and a sense that the current system is wrong.

They could live more modest lives in more rural areas

Living in a rural area for many people is literal hell, on top of having an array of less obvious costs. The big one is going from not needing a car to needing one. Your rent might drop $500 but you need to spend a lot on gas, insurance, maintenance, etc.

Also the social options might fall off a cliff. Humans are social creatures. I live in a city and I can walk to dozens of social activities, many of them free. Board game meetups, free music in the park, free museums with tours, free sport leagues, etc. Out in the countryside there just aren’t as many options.

If you’re queer or another minority, you might also have a worse time in the countryside. Maybe even fatally. A city is going to have a queer scene.

Also, there are likely more jobs in the city. Remote work and economic upheaval have changed things, but even so, most of those offices in Manhattan are full of jobs. There’s just more stuff where there’s more people.

Now, to your point, some people are certainly living in a $5900/mo apartment with a doorman and in-building gym that they can’t afford. They could move to a less “nice” place in south Brooklyn or Queens for less than half that, likely at the cost of a longer commute, and losing easy access to a neighborhood they feel a part of. There is a housing crisis though, and people are getting priced further away. That’s probably not going to be solved any time soon because capitalism doesn’t care and will happily eat itself.

Anyway. Long tangent but I’m extremely pro city so I spoke up.

I keep hoping this will spark some sort of anti-capitalist zeitgeist. But labor might be too scattered and individualistic.

Like, why are we all scrambling for a handful of jobs when the rich have so many resources?

The idea that players all make their characters in isolation and just show up on session 0 with them sounds like such a recipe for disaster. I know it can work sometimes, much like “just grab four things from the fridge and throw them into the soup” can work sometimes. But sometimes you get like gummy bear pizza bites with shrimp and mayo topping.

I think a lot of games that came after D&D figured out solutions to common problems, but D&D insists on staying kind of archaic.

The didn’t listen when the GM talked about Theme and mood and end up with a character who doesn’t fit with the party/canpaign

Hah, for a second I thought this was my own post because I wrote something very similar here. But yes, this is one that bugs me.

Reminds me of my first big success at work. There was a weekly report that people wanted generated - it showed how much like each operator had done, how much each warehouse had shipped, how many orders we lost from stock issues, etc. it was a low tech company, so they had someone going through the limited UI, looking up each thing one at a time, copying it into excel, and making the report that way. It took hours, and was error prone from stuff like mis-pasting or accidentally skipping a user.

Took a look at it and was like you could definitely automate this. Used some very primitive scripting to pull all the info out of the system’s UI and dump it into a TSV. Took like a couple minutes to run it, import into excel, and add the colors. But it was super janky because it was manipulating the UI like a user instead of, like, directly querying whatever underlying data store it was running on.

Still, management was impressed. I later learned no one actually looked at the report most weeks, so that took some of the wind out of my sails.

This is an ancient joke but they replaced the original pigeon with a blue thing instead. :confused:

Having a minor crisis realizing that 9th grade was far more than seven years ago for me. This is fine.

I think there’s also a pair:

• Takes the setting and theme very seriously. Reads the lore. Knows the details. Can tell you why the Lancea Sanctum and Invictus are traditionally allies
• Absolutely does not take the setting and theme seriously. Wants to play Barney the Dinosaur in your game of Vampire, and Punisher in your game about running a bakery.

I’m old and tired and generally am super tired of “wacky” ideas like the second one there. I feel like I’ve come full circle. As a youth, I thought like “let’s play vampires and struggle with humanity!” was cool . Then there was a bit where i wanted to flip it- “let’s play vampires but like go to theme parks and don’t do anything sad or deep!”. Now I’m back around to wanting to just play the theme as intended.

This is especially true if it comes up after session 0. Like, if you want to do a D&D game about running a BBQ shop, fine. Let’s do it. Let’s kill, cook, and sell some weird monster parts. But please don’t derail the whole game on session 3 when you insist on going back to town to cook the monster meat when it was clearly a random encounter and everyone else wants to continue the dungeon dive pitched in session 0.