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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, it’s just too expensive. And it looked like that wasn’t going to be a problem at launch, as it had a very strong launch. But, obviously, that couldn’t be maintained. $700 is an obscene price to pay.
It really seemed like it had the US tariffs baked into the price, and also tried to bake them in everywhere else, too. I know both Sony and Microsoft tried to blunt the impact of US trade policy by punishing the rest of us, too. With sales crashing, I can only hope that we start seeing price cuts. I’m far, far from being above over-paying for my games – I bought a Wii U just for Mario Kart 8 – but I’m not spending $800 on Mario Kart World.
SilverGM Oh, that’s incredibly common on Reddit. People don’t read the books, so have no idea that the treasure tables exist, nor that the DC tables exist, that there are guidelines for monster creation, or even that there are pre-defined actions for things like feinting.
The flip side of that, though, is that a lot of the people that new GMs are talking to are hyper-orthodox about the game, and have the default position of “why even play this game if you want to do [thing that deviates by an arbitrary amount from the Golarion setting]?”
Oh man, I had a bootleg copy of SimTower that I could never get to run. Always wanted to play it. Never figured out how.
🐀WASABIISOFT No, most of us are using different websites.
SilverGM Yeah, but one hit per round is also a fairly good estimate, assuming you’re throwing primarily Pl-2 to PL+0 creatures at them.
I think that 1d4 would put it around Level 5, based on what I’ve seen.I wish we had more concrete guidance on item level damage and usage frequency, though.
SilverGM Looking through AoN, the only thing I’m seeing that comes anywhere close to this kind of power budget is the Resonating Crystal Boots, which are a Level 8 item and do an average of something like 9 damage against as many creatures as you can walk past.
Your item looks to do about 15 damage to one target, with no saves and the potentual of no one being within melee range. Just based off of vibes, I’d place this at a similar level. That said, I wouldn’t hesitate to give it to the party. I think giving players over-leveled items is one of the best things you can do to leverage the game’s strong level system.
Jürgen Hubert
Lemmy is better than Mastodon, for sure, but man do I resent the move the Internet made from bulletain boards to “content aggregators”. Topics fall off on Lemmy and Reddit almost as fast ad on microblogging platforms. They’re still geared towards new content, not ongoing discussions. 
I really don’t have qualms about the game prices. People have obsessed over the increase, but honestly, I don’t buy console games without deep consideration, and I play them for years. $90 CAD vs $120 CAF is meaningless on that level.
But I’m not spending $700 on a Switch. I didn’t ask for a portable. I have no need for the little screen, and I resent paying for the tiny microcontrollers that cramp up my hand. It’s less valuable to me for all of the portability elements, not more. Definitely not 40% more than I paid for my Switch 1.
Chris Trottier Oh, no, I know many of them are sincere. But the content is 100% for the entitled go-nowheres who are upgrading these women’s standard of living.
Also, what is even going on here? Who is this content for?
Aggrieved men. Dudes who think there was a world where just having a dick meant that women happily and enthusiastically cowtowed to them, and who feel robbed by not being born in whatever era they think that was. Guys who believe their birthright to being right was stripped of them by, I don’t know, DEI or something.
These guys will get caught in any thirst trap that services their ego in any way.
Bad DND Advice It’s a Viewer! It resembles, but is legally distinct from, a Beholder.
You’d think that, one of these days, economists would understand that they’re a descriptive social science, and not a predictive hard science.
Some day, maybe.
I don’t think people really understand how angry and mean they get when they encounter someone who doesn’t engage in the social rituals, signals, and norms that they take for granted, even online. I know I have many, many scars from having to confront the reactions people have had to me over the decades, even when I thought I was saying something friendly or kind.
If you don’t communicate on their terms, they treat you like you’re less than human.