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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Video Games are a broad medium, akin to reading. Asking “should I get into books?” would be similarly difficult to answer.

    Also, be mindful of sturgeon’s law. 90% of everything is crap. For every “Taylor Swift” that was widely popular and successful, there’s 9 meh bands no one remembers.

    All of that said, it’s a wide and deep medium with a lot of experiences.

    If you like card games, there’re related genres. Deck builders are popular. Slay the Spire is popular. Cobalt Core is fun and not as hard. Monster Train is pretty good.

    Those are all also “rogue lites”, so you could make the leap from there to something like FTL.

    Lots of options.

    Probably don’t spend a lot of money up front. Stuff goes on sale on Steam pretty often.

    Probably avoid “gacha” games that are free to play or have “loot box” stuff. Those tend to be exploitive and bad.



  • Most people don’t know much, and don’t care that they don’t know much. Half of US adults can’t read at a 6th grade level. They don’t care about and probably do not understand complex topics.

    That’s it. They just want cat gifs, and that’s the end of the thought.

    I knew someone who was smart and successful and politically aware. She didn’t care about any of this. She was tired from work and just wanted the familiar ease or twitter. Trying to figure out which server to sign up for and finding content was too much work.

    A lot of people have executive dysfunction. Making a choice is hard.






  • Never used Facebook much. Nor Myspace before it. Seemed like it had some obvious pitfalls that everyone else was ignoring.

    Used Twitter for a little while, but it was just making me mad. Then horrible guy bought it, so I deleted the already abandoned account.

    Instagram also seemed like a source of feeling bad, so I never used it much.

    I left reddit recently. It had some good content but the ownership sucks. With general Internet search getting bad, losing reddit sucks. Like, I searched yesterday for how to disable a setting in some app, and landed on some AI slop website that told me to write a letter to my local news station.

    So this is all that’s left for me. It’s frustrating that most people don’t give a shit and will just move on to the next private platform. I had a friend who was generally smart and successful, but she just didn’t give a shit about this kind of thing. She wanted her easy entertainment, so she was on all the major platforms. Mastodon “didn’t have good content” so she didn’t use it.


  • One of the reasons I enjoy games with metagame currencies like Fate points or Willpower. I just don’t find it fun or interesting to lose due to bad dice most of the time. Especially if the bad dice just delay things instead of resolving them, like one time a D&D fight against some ghouls took like 45 minutes because no one rolled well. No tension or stakes. Just dice for an extra ten rounds. Absolutely flubbing a roll can be interesting, but I like when there’s more choice involved.

    “I rolled a 0 to grab the thief? No, that’s stupid. I’m a Royal Bodyguard I’m used to acting fast. I spend a fate point and bump that up”

    More generally “succeed at a cost” is just missing from D&D as a concept.


  • jjjalljs@ttrpg.networktoFaster Than Expected@sopuli.xyzId rather die
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    9 days ago

    People are emotional creatures first, and sometimes exclusively. All those facts? Don’t matter. Cars are familiar.

    I don’t know how to fix this. I mean, if you forced the issue and build walkability and other transit, then decades later these same emotional idiots would support that with as much fervor because it would be familiar.



  • When I encounter a GM who has like pages of lore, I’m always like “Would you rather write a book?”

    Stuff like this can be very good, but be aware there are some players who hate this. Some people just want to be told a story, and if you ask them to be too creative they’ll have a bad time. Sometimes it’s because they’re new and nervous, but sometimes that’s just how they are.

    Also some players just routinely have difficult ideas that don’t mesh with the group. Like everyone else is vibing on a serious dark modern day vampire political game, and they’re like “I want to be a ninja turtle from Mars with a reanimated dead fish for a head”. Like, what. Maybe some people enjoy “zany” off-theme stuff. Not me.

    Or the player that always wants to be themselves. Or an amnesiac.

    Gosh I’ve had so many players I didn’t enjoy.

    Anyway. Player input is also built nicely into Fate, both in campaign creation and scenes. I’m a fan. Spend a fate point and declare a story detail like “every Razer Space Technology office has a helipad with a chopper ready to go. It’s because the CEO is weirdly hands on and loves helicopters.”