holy shit dude, that fucking sucks but congratulations

Maybe Stop Being a Dick About 15 years ago, I worked for a tiny little startup in the connected car space. The startup manufactured a little device that you could plug into your car's OBD2 port and use to connect to your pho...

Do you guys remember when I wrote this post, and multiple people responded to it, saying they found it valuable and wanted to use it in their teaching methods? @sethdmichaels.bsky.social I think you were one of them.

www.leahreich.com/maybe-stop-b...

“A whole civilization will die tonight” is the most vile thing a US president has ever said, certainly during the post-1945 era when they’ve had the power to kill civilizations with the dropping of a bomb. I’m staring into the darkness. May this not be one of the most fateful days in human history.

The President of the USA declaring that "a whole civilisation will die tonight" is not something that arrives out of a vacuum. It is precipitated by the widespread international failure to hold USA, Israel, and their allies including the UK, accountable for their actions for many decades

Let me say this plainly: Iranian children have as much of a right to live and thrive as American children.

Their babies MUST be as precious to me as my 6 niblings and my baby grandnib are IF I want them to have a future.

If I want a future for my kin AND humanity, I MUST act like it.

So must you.

That is another conversation entirely. And yes, largely I enjoy going through that specific era is because of how experimental things are. But that has nothing to do with nostalgia. And I certainly don't agree with "everything being so sterile". Just have to dig deeper to find things you like.

This can be contrasted with games like Blades/PbtA/Fantasy Flight, which have theoretically more elegant systems but integrate them into the narrative at such a high level that everyone kind of needs to grasp what's happening (both "legally" and not) to feel like a fully-empowered participant.

... which is functionally how most people do, and have, played regular D&D anyway (and is, indeed, based in that insight)

The idea is that the heavy lifting of resolution is done by intuition, with even existing mechanics serving as a kind of tiebreaker you can look up if nobody's sure what what happens next...

Challenge in RPGs is relative—which is one reason I tend to argue, amicably, with characterizations of D&D as less accessible than apparently simpler games—but mechanically, most OSR games are less complicated than modern popular story games.

His hair instantly tells you "this is not a man who regularly feels shame"

Character I'm running in a Stars without Number game had "Good Question" under his Home Planet section on his sheet, because I didn't have an answer at the time. That spiraled out into a character essentially dedicated to never giving a straight answer about his own backstory, until very recently.

Picture of the character Lorne Malvo from the show Fargo. He's got a bowl cut. It looks terrible.

It might be difficult to teach players this, but RP in games doesn't have to come from "I am a Lawful Evil Goblin Wizard," it can also come from asking "who would even wear this fuckass haircut" and then picking it and playing to find out

That's obviously built on solid insights, but also strikes me as inadvertently restrictive as a school of design. Roleplay is not strictly a creative process: it is, in TTRPGs and CRPGs, often interpretative! You get a sense of how the character looks and feels to play, which steers future play.

The CRPG design ethos tends to be that character-building choices, since they naturally are reflected in gameplay, should speak instructively to the player and designer. The player's choice does, mechanically, what everyone bests understands it should.

An RP technique that's been popular in tabletop, and kind of neglected in CRPGs, is giving players options to pick that are specific but unexplained instead of generic. Like instead of "Origin: Mean Streets" it's "a city watchman gave you a scar once," and you decide why (then or later)

based on those Glassdoor reviews, shit would have been straight The Lighthouse

It's kind of making me appreciate some of the subtleties of The Genitorturers, which seems like an embarrassing opinion to have no matter how you slice it. this is why I do not talk about music.

"This is goth for people who think goth is too subtextual," is what I thought to myself, and now I'm kinda wondering if that's just what industrial has openly, obviously been for my entire life

I've never actually watched Nine Inch Nails stuff before and my feeling, as a taxpaying adult, is that it's the artistic equivalent of pulling 115% into a parking space. You were headed somewhere promising with this, but now you're just short an engine block

For what it's worth, I hate VTTs generally but this campaign hasn't sufffered for it. I would argue it's way more fun to play a game like this than, say, 5E over a zoom chat because the vibes are looser, the goals are more direct, and the combat isn't bogged down by too many status effects

(By that I mean the system, not that illustration. The illustration is sick)

The oxygen feels better on the DCC side of the space because while it's possible to take the game seriously, you cannot take yourself seriously because you play this game

You know, I'm a fan of the OSR—not because it's better than other ways of playing RPGs, but because it offers unique insights into them that apply to every genre—and I frankly wish more OSR players realized they could talk about these games without coming off like the fucking Eltingville Club

People talk about art that's so bad it's good, and how you can't make something like that on purpose. But you can. The catch is that you can't aim higher and you can't aim lower, you just have to aim straight at the forehead, hard as you can

If they live long enough, they get to pick a class level. Then you basically just go on gonzo fuckfest after gonzo fuckfest. Every adventure is full blast weird, funny, twisted, fully unselfconscious cheese. It's good stuff

A skeleton being attacked by a pitchfork while a butcher, baker, and candlestick maker lurk in the background

You start out by rolling two to four characters. They are basically villagers from Beauty in the Beast who decided, fuck it, I'm just gonna go fight evil with whatever prop I happened to be holding at the time. You've probably seen this; it's from DCC.

Like do you want your starter adventure to be poking around a gray dwarf ruin looking at cobwebs and dodging dart traps or do you want to fight THESE fucking guys. COME ON.

Been in a great Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign the last few years.

It's a retroclone of the Basic D&D set, but acknowledges that the game's period-accurate tone was like 50% kickass, 30% funny on accident, and 20% funny on purpose. DCC doubles down on every category equally. (look at this shit)

I have a variant where I roll the whole thing flat with a rolling pin, which melts the chocolate and makes the bread kind of crispy. I call it a "croque mistake"