You put ANYTHING in a DnD and you better be prepared for your players to fight it or fuck it and usually both

On the flip side, it’s somehow easier to get people to attend scheduled meetings.

I mean, they’d have to. There’s six movies, each a little over two hours long. Let’s say that gets you up to 14 hours. Then there’s the two Ewok movies. Assuming that they’re each two hours long (I can’t be bothered to check) that gets you to 18 hours. The Holiday Special is 98 minutes long, but even rounding that up to two hours that only gets you to 20 in total. Then what? Watch the cutscenes for Dark Forces 2 and Rebel Assault 2? There’s only so much Star Wars available.

I mean, they’d have to. There’s six movies, each a little over two hours long. Let’s say that gets you up to 14 hours. Then there’s the two Ewok movies. Assuming that they’re each two hours long (I can’t be bothered to check) that gets you to 18 hours. The Holiday Special is 98 minutes long, but even rounding that up to two hours that only gets you to 20 in total. Then what? Watch the cutscenes for Dark Forces 2 and Rebel Assault 2? There’s only so much Star Wars available.

GM/DM/Ref’ing makes you think about everybody’s experience at the table. Are they engaged? Having fun? Invested? Getting to do the stuff they’re here for? Feel safe and able to talk freely?

It should be the same for the chair of work meeting.

Fun comes from overcoming challenges which imply problems existed which implies inefficiency at turning money into more money. … Huh. Capitalism is just letting money munchkins min/max society for their own personal benefit.

I don’t like the concept of wargames. We don’t need war to do this, nor conflict.

I see this more as an astronaut training: it has to be a solution, at least in the mind of the person proposing the situation. It also cultivates a spirit to always search for a way out of the invident.

One rule we adopted is that when the responder doesn’t know, they have to say it. Once it said, they need to say outloud what do they search. Then the focus shifts to the audience, they have to find 3 different ways to respond to what the responder is searching (to know or to do). It is hard and so far it balances well the dynamic (it is OK to not know, it is important to recognise we don’t know, and it is funny to share how we can hack our way through the system (the 3rd way is pretty hard and is in general a hack)).

I now realize that perhaps I could write a blog post on this.

For links, see my response to the other comment.

concept of wargaming

Its the origin of the hobby and especially as a training model. Its how our culture(s) conceptualizes all conflict (in literary sense, including ‘vs self’ and ‘vs nature’). ‘Hes a fighter’ ‘soldier on’ ‘war on drugs’.

I agree it’s toxic as hell, but it’s deeply entrenched and i yhink needs to be acknowledged to be solved

Nop. The concept goes farrer is the past, from people inventing stories together to just people asking “what if”.

All isn’t from DnD. There was something before. DnD may be the first one to have been commercialized (and successful enough to be remembered).

The concept of professional training of gamed out simulated scenarios, i remember seeing this, separately from d&d, traced back to the same place.

Look I’m with you in spirit, but i think you’re missing the secret ending here.

I am talking of times with kids, in the middle of a story, saying that they would have discussed more with the dragon because the princess would have been boring (yes, it’s a sexist story in this example). This is also a source of role-playing.

True, but if you want to get that basic, nearly all human behavior is intuitive.

Perhaps. But it was only that war isn’t needed to imagine stories, even if those stories follow some rules.

I was expecting that you would say that not war but conflict is always present.