Kichae

Sand dune on desert planet looks like sand dunes found in desert. More at 11.

flavonol@lemmy.world Many, I imagine.

I spend… too much time on the Pathfinder 2e subreddit, and it is so painfully clear from how quietly obsessed that space is with class build optimization, that the idea of fighting for anything but a decisive, 100% kill outcome (on either side) is unimaginable to most people there. I think the most recent thing I saw could be summed up as “what’s the point of Hexploration if the outcome is just moderate difficulty fights?”

Even the idea of non-combat encounters or worldbuilding encounters are becoming alien to modern TTRPG fans, it seems.

heythisisnttheymca@lemmy.world The PR person he fired has charisma.

iamthetot > would you be okay with a player lying (fudging) a dice result to facilitate a result that they found more fun?

Thank you. No GM is going to accept their players declaring a bad roll to be a good one, instead. Cheating players is one of the more common GM complaints. I’m not sure why GMs seem to think that’s a one-way street.

> When I have DM’d there’s often a difference between the intended difficulty of an encounter I create versus how it actually works out in play.

Players are allowed to flee. Enemies are allowed to mock them and walk away.

I’m not sure why basically ever single discussion I ever see about GMing seems to live in this world where the only options in combat is “PCs die or NPCs die”, and the only workaround is to pick and choose when you’re playing a probability game.

mr_noxx@lemmy.ml Honestly, I agree with the others. I don’t know why we’re playing dice games if we don’t want to adhere to the dice. The dice create the uncertainty and variation that the play at the table responds to.

The more honest and transparent solution to players being at risk of dying is roleplay or narrative transition. Enemies don’t need to be doing coup de graces, and going down in combat can mean capture rather than death. But if it’s only fun for everyone if they’re winning, then why not play something else where losing is never an option?

themoken@startrek.website Some want to play XCOM without dice, and get really pissy when the dice say “no”.

bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works You and your friends might want to explore the idea of social gravity in neurodivergence.

mirshafie@europe.pub Yes, and… is this propagating anywhere in any meaningful way?

This image is 80% of my personality.

But also, when did every single PNG on the internet become a “meme”? Feels like I’ve been seeing this a lot, lately.

iamthetot I’m in the middle of getting a forum going to keep track of my home PF2e game and organizey thoughts and ideas.

Maybe we should talk.

Gods, I’m so tired. My supplemental health insurance is about to run out, so my physiotherapist has given me a gym routine focused on rehabbing my slipped disc, and so I’ve gone from going to the gym 2x per week with the PT to 6x per week with my wife, and…

I’m so tired. Everything is stiff and achy. And I’m finding myself doing less toe walking, which is also making me feel kind of off balance.

Oh yeah, it’s real bad out there right now. RTO mandates and a tech sector that’s shedding workers like dandruff is making things feel really scary. Plus, I get to watch the half of the company that didn’t get laid off all announce their promotions on LinkedIn, because that’s also where the small handful of jobs that I qualify for are posted.

It’s been a month since I was laid off. The first few weeks, I was too busy updating my resume and looking for new jobs to apply for to really feel the emotional impact of it all. But now the resume’s looks good, and the number of jobs out there in my field have dried up. Especially the remote ones, which are kind of necessary for me, since there are exceptionally few businesses in my city that deal with my field.

modernangel@sh.itjust.works They shape 100% of the storyline. The campaign is the story of their activities in the world.

They don’t shape the world, though, unless they do things to intervene in the current world lines of the people and institutions in it. At the start of the campaign, I scaffold the major political players in the world,and sketch out what their goals are, and how they’re trying to achieve them. I estimate how long it takes them to get to places of import for those goals, and track that in a calendar. I leave hooks for the players to pick up and engage with those things from time to time, but if they’re not interested, those entities just continue on unimpeded.

Meanwhile, everywhere they go, I dig into books of tables to come up with some NPCs with problems that need to be solved, side quests that can be activated, and locations that can be explored. They’re just names on a page until the players pick up the hook, but if they do, then the party does things to encounter and activate new political players who end up on the board. I then do the same thing after the fact, and add them to the calendar.

Their story is 100% theirs. The opportunities to shape the world’s story are there. There’s no “storyline” for me to bend around their gravity.

A lot of the people developing early fantasy RPGs were probably deeply influenced by the American western as a film and TV genre. It was really, really hard to avoid in the 50s and 60s, and it functionally provided the blueprints for other adventure-based genres. The western provided the setting of the frontier, and frontier towns were all too often depicted as being deeply isolated and under siege by the “savage wilderness”.

Because indigenous people were usually framed more like wild animals than people whose living room you just plopped yourself down and started squatting in.

So many of the adventure modules seemed to be built around this idea of the frontier, or the hinterland, or of being on the edge of civilization that they didn’t need to have a theory of settlement patterns. They were explicitly showing us what things looked like where the civilization networks wore thin and broke down.

But they also just sort of acted as one of the blueprints for later modules, and later settings. And when your setting is entirely made up of frontier modules, you end up with a setting where there’s no civilization.

> sorcerers have a superhero origin

This is Oracle erasure.

> In the world they would be hated and feared as the person who started fires as a child or drowned a local cow.

Would they, though? Or would they end up in an upper class that controls world leaders from back rooms while looking like flashy celebrities in public? Because the takeaway from the real world is that racists hate on people they see as less powerful than them, and sorcerers are categorically not that.

jjjalljs@ttrpg.network Yeah, the ideas that “I’m not interested in receiving a message, therefore the things I consume have no message” or “this product was inexpensive, therefore the creator has no message” are pretty wild.

Sometimes the politics being presented are invisible to the author, and sometimes they’re not. In either case, they’re communicating real messages about the world, what the creator believes is acceptable, and what they believe is not. Not seeing those messages really just means that you thoughtlessly agree with them.

Which says more about the consumer than it does the producer.

Presumably, they expected it to sell 0% more than their projections.