Wandering Adventure Party

Kichae

Bo was looking for a long term contract, and long term contracts usually have lower AAV. We know that the Phillies offered $200M for 7 years, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Jays offered similar. This is what Bo had told people he was looking for.

He then turned around and signed a 3 year high AAV deal. He just decided to pivot and play a totally different game than the one he’d told everyone, without telling the other teams he’d engaged with. I don’t think we can blame anyone for not making better offers when he seems to have made a very sudden change in his decision making process.

Kichae

Aaron To get into a high enough position within the system to have any meaningful control over the system means having participated in the system to such a degree that the system itself has repeatedly rewarded you.

People who want to change systems do not get rewarded by those systems. People who get rewarded by systems are not incentivised to change them.

Kichae

SilverGM Exactly! It seems, though, that far too few GMs feel like they have permission to go outside the posted guidelines with purpose.

Kichae

James Indeed. The good news is, though, that there isn’t any system here underpinning the site/app/network (because it truly is a network of different websites – I’m not even using a site that’s running Mastodon!) that’s actively but secretly trying to figure out what the dysfunctional parts of your psyche are so that it can hand-feed you those things. There’s just the local feed (posts by other Forkiverse members), the global feed (posts by those of us on other websites), and the home feed (posts by the people that you’ve chosen to follow). If you can avoid the temptations of your own demons (and learn where the block and report buttons are on your app/site), then hopefully you’re in the clear and can find interesting people to talk to.

Kichae

James Honestly, much of this is just the energy of novelty. Jumping on board with something, seeing that there are others there doing something, feeling part of it all, and having a place to actually explore for the first time in a little while.

When I first landed here, the mania was palpable. There were hundreds of others coming over too, followed a couple of months later by tens of thousands. There was so much buzz, so much energy, and this real drive to feel like I was a real denizen here that it did start to feel compulsive.

But then that drive calmed down. I began tending to my feed, and got more and more familiar with the usernames and PFPs that kept popping up, and it all got a lot more comfortable and healthy. When there isn’t a constant stream of engagement bait being thrown at you, you get to have actual conversations with real people who actually see what you say, and not just agitators and “allies” down in the muck of the comments.

Kichae

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.

Kichae

I’m never going to learn. I come across this kind of obtuseness painfully often in rpg discussions, and I’m always – and I mean always – caught off guard by it. I just expect TTRPG fans to be into things like world building and the deeper questions of setting, and they keep telling me that the only thing they’re cognizant of is stat blocks and rules interactions.

To the point where I’ve been told that everything but grid-based combat and roll resolutions is just empty set dressing.

I’ve come to, but seem incapable of holding on to, the conclusion that most TTRPG fans just want an XCOM game they can bully in order to get their way.

Which is a shame, because Jürgen Hubert has a lot of interesting things to say on RPG settings, and the stories that inspire and underpin them, and having almost everyone completely talk past the prompt was disheartening.

Kichae

Kera Vortiwife

i just blocked someone for saying “if you don’t want to play board games in your rpg just go do theater”

This is the kind of take that triggers my monthly crash out on r/Pathfinder2e. Usually in the comments of a post complaining about the various bits of the game that support things other than gridded combat.

Kichae

DressToKILT I started using a keyboard on Android that doesn’t have autocomplete, and it’s honestly wild A) how bad my typing is on a touch screen, just in general, and B) how the only meaningful difference between this and my previous keyboard with all of the bells and whistles is that it doesn’t catch small typos like “og” (vs “of”) or “ro” (for “to”). At some point, the autocorrect decided that my typos were purposeful and needed to be saved, and it started “fixing” my correctly spelled words with my previously saved typos, somehow.

So, overall, a neutral transition.

Kichae

sorcerers have a superhero origin

This is Oracle erasure.

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