An advanced technique: ask your players to make shit up.

Like, the players decided to go to the wizard university the wizard PC graduated from. So I ask him, “what’s their entrance hall like?” and let him just riff on it for a while. Players feel more engaged with the world, and it’s a little less work for me.

Warlock is trying to commune with his patron. I ask, “what is your patron usually like?” and the player is delighted to describe “the great sculpin” in detail. This then inspires me further.

Note that some players are very much “just tell me a story” and don’t want any input, and won’t like this. Some players are also shy and don’t think well on their feet. And some players are just really bad at staying on theme. But if you know your players , this can be a powerful technique.

I don’t think we should be posting such pornographic fictions in this community.

Is there a reason conservatives dislike congestion pricing other than spite?

Gods, they’re just the worst fucking people.

Musk seems like the kind of D&D player who would

• Build a horrible character (frankly impressive in 5e, which is pretty simple in terms of choices to make at the start). Like, a bard with 8 charisma, or a rogue with no dex
• Or, pay someone else to build their character, and then not know how to play it.
• And/or induce the other players to murder him (in the game)

I’m glad you liked the comic.

I read the tweet as saying “Actually learning about history, the good and the bad, is better than avoiding it to whitewash (pun intended) slavers and spare their feelings”

How did you read it?

This also reminds me of a separate post I saw about how social media, and tweets especially, is a really bad format for communicating. The length constraints and incentivizing being clever don’t make for fertile ground for ideas. Most people aren’t going to read an essay, sadly.

I also can’t imagine someone getting offended about people mentioning the Tulsa Race Massacre or the fact that the founding fathers held slaves.

Actual racists aren’t going to be offended by those historical facts, they just might argue that they were justifiable in some way. Which is obviously super fucked up, but it’s not like racist people are going to deny the fact that slavery happened or that black people got massacred by white people in history. They literally get off on that shit.

Many racists definitely do get offended by those facts. It’s because they’re coming at it from an emotional place, and the historical facts make them feel bad. Instead of dealing with that, they lash out. Not all racists are intentional about their racism.

I link this a lot, but it’s worth a read https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

Which is why the tweet seems so strange to me. Black people getting enslaved and massacred and persecuted? That slaps? I fucking hope not.

That wasn’t the intent of the tweet and that is a bizarre misreading of it.

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, "

“nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;”

Aside from being incorrect in the details, the rules as written don’t matter as much as the rules as enforced. The US constitution is not producing good results for many people.

Also trump isn’t eligible under the 14th amendment for the whole insurrection thing.

If we know where this “CEI” is headquartered and we know who their leadership is…

There will be a lot of pearl clutching. Some people will literally walk themselves into the gas chamber while saying “we have to be tolerant” and “well they won the election”

But also organizing is hard.

It was kind of wild going from D&D to games that don’t have tons of HP.

Players make different choices when they have a maximum of 7 health, and a random mook with a baseball bat hits for minimum 2, maximum “well if the dice keep exploding…”

Many things. I mean, you could hack a lot of stuff into Excel but generally

SQL has foreign keys and integrity checks. You can make it so like if you delete a user it automatically cascades to delete other rows like their addresses.

You can prevent someone from entering the wrong type of data in particular columns. This one’s an integer and that one’s text.

It’s designed to work on larger scales. Excel stops at 1 million rows per spreadsheet, unless my search just gave me AI slop.

You can do queries, for selecting as well as updating and deleting. You can join tables.

It’s much easier for other applications (such as a website) to talk to a SQL database

You can do transactions.

There’s a lot. That’s just off the top of my head.

There are some people who want to be wealthy to the tune of flaunting it, making other people figuratively or literally bow down to them. Those people should not be allowed to have power.

If I was somehow a billionaire, I like to think I’d be spending my money on socially useful stuff. More libraries. More infrastructure. Housing. Can an ultra rich person essentially run public housing and transit, at least on a city-wide scale? Probably. but the kind of person who gets to be ultra rich is probably an asshole.

One of the… quirks… of humans is that often we’ll feel one thing, but say another. So someone might say “I just don’t like that she’s so rich”, but what’s actually happening under the hood is they don’t like a woman having power. They might not even consciously realize this is happening.

We all do this to some extent. We feel things, and then reach for explanations. Preferably socially acceptable justifications. Someone might say they don’t like a neighborhood, that it feels tacky and unsafe, but you’d have to do some digging to unearth “because black people live there”.

At the same time, there are people who know their belief is socially unacceptable, so they’ll intentionally reach to reasons the other people might accept. So you’ll get someone who hates women saying things like “i just don’t think her music is good”, or “she seems bossy”, or other lightly coded phrases.

This is all really confounding because it’s very difficult to tell the difference between that first category, the second category, and a third category of “legitimately doesn’t like her music.” Sometimes there are signs, like they’ll say “I just don’t like that she has so much money” but then never, ever, comment on similarly rich men. (I’m not saying this is you, specifically. But if it is, maybe give it a think.)

Also most people are, frankly, fragile little cowards that can’t accept a threat to their ego. Faced with admitting “I did a sexism”, they’d rather lash out and blame everyone else instead of giving it a think and trying to be better.

The oatmeal did a comic on this, or at least a closely related concept: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

I kinda like this idea that the players will be so responsible and active over their own entertainment that they’ll pick something to actively do to make something happen

This is the dream.

Sometimes I get players that have ideas, but then they’re like “oh that sounds too dangerous, nevermind”, and I’m like “it’s not going to be much of a game if we don’t take any risks”

It’s probably partly my fault for making the dangers clear to the players. I wanted them to have an understanding of the risks and factors!

Like one time, the players were told another faction would only help them with their problem if they dealt with a vampire that was in the local cemetery, and his little cult. This was a game of Mage, where even starting tier characters have a lot of strong options. One of the players just was like “you’re asking us to punch Cthulhu in the face! I don’t understand what you want us to do!”

I was like … there are so many options. Your character can literally control flame, a major weakness of vampires. You also have a strong alliance with a paramilitary group. You can go during the day. You have 3 other party members. One of them can open portals. Like, to places where it’s daytime. Trust me, you can win a 4 v 1 fight. Maybe deal with his cult first if you don’t want civilian casualties. Or maybe talk to him and see if you can negotiate.

But she just wanted to spin her wheels and complain. Worst player I’ve ever had, honestly.

There’s some ambiguity in English here.

I think it’s okay to be neutral on Beyonce. I think it’s okay to prefer silence over her music.

Some people are weirdly active in their dislike of her. That seems strange to me. Like they have an active, motivating dislike of her.

(Unless you’re coming at it via “no ultra wealthy”, then I kind of get it, but I feel like people who got wealthy from performing music are lower on my list of problems than other ultra rich)

I usually just kept a list of what the various factions are up to. If the players were like “ok let’s go see if we can convince Priscilla to smuggle the uranium with her drug stuff” I have a rough idea of what she’s up to and if she’d help, or help at what cost.

I want to play again with a group that comes up with reasonable plans that play to their competencies.

I think a lot about how in a modern day magic game, the players wanted to contact another (NPC) group. They learned the NPCs were like double warded against magic, but spent a lot of time trying to punch through the wards to teleport to them. After two expensive, failed, attempts I was like “do you want a clue?”. They were like yes. I was like “if you just want to talk to them, why don’t you try calling them on the phone?”

I want to play again with a group that comes up with reasonable plans that play to their competencies.

I think a lot about how in a modern day magic game, the players wanted to contact another (NPC) group. They learned the NPCs were like double warded against magic, but spent a lot of time trying to punch through the wards to teleport to them. After two expensive, failed, attempts I was like “do you want a clue?”. They were like yes. I was like “if you just want to talk to them, why don’t you try calling them on the phone?”

People are just big emotional children, and if you suggest they shouldn’t eat so many burgers they don’t evaluate the facts, pros, and cons. They have a feeling and then blame you. And probably go on about how vegans suck.

I’m not a vegan but I try to eat less meat because come on.

Yeah. I think DUI and other laws are generally good ideas. I don’t care that much if someone wants to do coke, but I really don’t want drunk drivers or people nodding off on heroin operating heavy machinery.

There also should be a lot more social programs to help people quit when they want to. And probably more honest education about how yes, even you can get addicted.