It’s kind of annoying and distracting. It makes me think they have some emotional damage (don’t we all?) and then I start wondering what else is going to break under stress.

A sincere apology and owning fault is a power move. Apologizing four times because the chair made a weird sound when you adjusted it makes you look sad and impotent.

As more people are laid off, “I gotta go to work” becomes less compelling.

Maybe we should, like, storm one of these ice facilities, have our own bastille day.

I don’t know PBTA well but I believe so.

Basically, every scene and character can have ‘aspects’, which are things that are true about them. They’re free form. Sometimes they’re just there, like if you’re in a bar it might have “Bubbling with drunk banter” or “Loud Pop Punk Soundtrack”. Aspects can then affect what makes sense in the scene. “Loud Pop Punk” can make it easier to move without being heard, but harder to make a speech because no one can hear you, for example.

You can also explicitly create aspects. Turn off the jukebox and the aspect might change to “Weirdly Quiet Bar” or whatever. In a fight, you can use the “create an advantage” move. That’s for stuff that isn’t about taking them out of the conflict right now, but setting things up. Like pushing them off balance, disarming them, screaming “LOOK! A DISTRACTION!” whatever. If the roll comes out if your favor, you can create an aspect that’s true and can also be invoked for a numeric bonus on a dice roll. So if you pants the guy you’re fighting, he can’t run full speed to chase you because his pants are down. You can also invoke that if you want to kick his ass, for a bonus on the dice roll.

These are all free form and it’s up to the group to decide what it actually means. Most groups probably wouldn’t let you invoke “I’m literally on fire!!” as a bonus if you’re trying to sneak through a crowd.

Typically, as I understand it, you’re either trying to take them out of the fight or trying to create advantages for side of the conflict. On a dramatic success on trying to take someone out, you can also create a small advantage.

Maybe something that reflects on all the loss. Dead from COVID, chaos from government programs shutting down, allies betrayed, and a mirror in the center that says something like “you did this”.

I enjoyed the simplicity of old video game RPGs where the price of the item directly scaled with the value of the item. Armor for 1000gp was just straight out better than the one for 300gp.

This is the best approach I’ve found.

Player says, “I make a sales pitch playing on Priscilla’s hatred of our common foe, and that’s why she should sell us these explosives for cheap” and doesn’t have to actually do a sales call. Roll the dice and decide if that means she buys in, makes a counter offer, or what.

Personally I find adding a lot of flavor that has no mechanical impact kind of distracting and tiresome in a different way. Like, sure, it sounds cool you slashed their ankles or whatever, but if it doesn’t do anything I need to discard that. I can’t, in most systems, then be like “ok he just got stabbed in the leg he’s off balance. I can take advantage of that!”. It’s just noise.

Some people have been like “You just don’t have any imagination!” but it’s not that. It’s that the flavor stuff is often actively not true, and it’s tiresome to hold two separate world states in mind at the same time. One where the fighter just stabbed the guy in the hand and threw sand in his eyes, and the other where he hit for 5 damage and his hand + eyes are fine.

(Contrast Fate, which explicitly encourages you to be creative about the scene, and lets you mechanically benefit as well.)

I think the “I move and attack” stuff can get boring, especially if it’s slow. Like, if the players are speedy about it then you’re basically playing a board game, and that’s fine. I start to lose patience when you get the “can i move here? oh i can only move 30 feet. what about here? oh that will provoke. maybe if i cast misty step? oh i can’t cast two leveled spells in a round. Can I hide first? Oh that takes my action? Sorry I usually play rogue. Uhhh I guess I just shoot them.” mode.

I also kind of really want to spend more time in systems where the talky parts have rules, too. D&D tends to be just "wing it’ and “DM decides”. If you’re at the noble’s ball and try to make a big speech to convince the duke to flee before your army attacks, there’s not really a lot of structure there. It can be fine to just “talk it out, man”, but that runs into the problem where my character on paper has CHA 20 but me in real life rocks a solid 10 CHA. Or the other case, where the fighter with 8 CHA has a salesguy for a player, and he punches well above his on-paper skills using his real life personality, where I’m sidelined.

Honestly, just removing all the social skills from D&D would normalize the system.

But there’s also games like Fate, that handle social conflict and sword conflict with the same rules. Stab someone? Roll fight vs whatever they defend with. Stab someone with your words? Roll Cruelty vs their Composure. In either case, if your dice come out on top enough then they don’t get to go on.

I think some peopel who want more RP would hate this, since it gamifies it. But I’d rather have it than the aforementioned “real life sales guy hogs the spotlight” problem.

I suppose you this touches on how I’m in the US, where everything is skewed towards insane nonsense. It would be extremely unusual to find a conservative of any sort here that would support anything remotely anti-car, for example. Even if it would save money.

Not a fan. It admittedly can be an amusing toy - type something in and wow look what it did! But the costs are high, and our society isn’t a utopia where people don’t need to labor for survival.

Maybe if we were post scarcity it wouldn’t matter that much. But we’re not, and this AI stuff is going to hurt labor, benefit the ownership class, and probably be mildly bad for end users too.

They’re in favour of things like universal medicare/dental care, because those programs are shown to be a net benefit fiscally and socially.

I’ve never met someone who was “socially liberal fiscally conservative” who believed this.

They’re usually pro good things, but they don’t want to pay for them, so they’re not actually pro those things at all.

“Small government” and “private individuals will handle it” typically means it just won’t happen.

Some people are more or less followers, but we all have it to some degree. You’re more likely to believe a trusted source than someone you’ve never met before. If your best bud tells you a game is good, you likely give it more credit than some random guy on the street, or a guy wearing the t-shirt for a sports team you hate.

edit: I forgot i usually link this comic https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

it’s a very similar idea

I say this a lot, but all humans are heavily biased towards believing their in-group. For some people that’s basically all that matters. I feel like authoritarians, right wing authoritarians, are especially prone to this. Facts and figures don’t matter. It’s the emotional core of “fit in with the group” and “outsiders BAD” that’s driving it, and all the justifications come afterwards.

I don’t want to say anything like they’re like animals or subhuman, because this behavior is extremely human. We all do it to some extent. It’s just for some people it’s so dominant, and their in-group is so dangerously stupid, it’s a real problem for all of us.

Assuming they’re American: they’re an idiot. Sorry. They don’t understand how things are intertwined, and you can’t have social justice for free. If you let laissez-faire policies be, you don’t get socially liberal outcomes. You get capitalist dystopia.

Any plan that depends on “and then the common person develops discerning taste” is doomed to fail. Especially considering that even people who are usually picky might enjoy something basic from time to time

I was going to say something similar to that too. Specifically, the consolidation of power means there’s less smaller companies taking risks. You’d think a big company with Disney money could afford to be weird and experimental, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

I say this despite enjoying superhero movies

Others have touched on this but this also feels downstream from the capitalist hellscape. Most people don’t have a lot of spending money. Movies are pricey and a bad money:time ratio.

I bet if wages were up, more people would go to the theater. I don’t want to spend $40 to watch a movie and eat popcorn, but I’d consider it for $3.

I used to use RPG.net a lot. They have pretty strict moderation, which keeps the place from turning into some kinds of shit holes. But you also can’t tell someone they’re a fool, or all Republicans are traitors. Takes some getting used to, but is probably worth it.

Sometimes I think about the billions of dollars of wasted productivity caused by Outlook being so bad at rendering email.