Wandering Adventure Party

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.

GenZ is the first generation to grow up with modern, centralized, large social media. The earliest GenZ kid was 7 when Facebook launched. The forums, chat rooms, BBSes, and discussion groups of the 80s and 90s were such wildly different beasts. Meanwhile, the internet of today isn’t radically different than it was after Facebook became popular.

Fish Id Wardrobe “We need to support other fediverse platforms”

“But other platforms haven’t gotten support in the past”

Why TF do you think I’m saying we need to support other platforms, then? We don’t need to convince Mastodon to change, because the Mastodon folks have made it very clear that they see the ecosystem as beholden to them, and not the other way around. They’re not good actors. We need something better, made by better people, and then we to convince people to use it over Mastodon.

Fish Id Wardrobe Or, you leave Mastodon behind, and try to build a better garden that attracts people away.

Fish Id Wardrobe Yeah, Mastodon kinda does what it wants, and gets away with it due to market share. It picks and chooses what it wants to implement, and struggles to play nicely with many other AP platforms.

Even just as an end user of not-Mastodon, it’s really annoying.

Jürgen Hubert

As for selling the Fediverse, we could do that in a more targeted manner. Identify the needs of specific groups of people, and then tell them which specific software, which specific instance is most suitable for their needs.

One of my long standing pain points with the fediverse as is is that no one seems to be able to look beyond “let’s spin up a general purpose microblogging website that exists solely to interface with all of the other general purpose microblogging websites”. The biggest promise of the fediverse is that you can have your pre-corporate internet style topic-focused community, and you can look over the fence at other things you’re interested in. This actually addresses a missing niche, while “8000 generic twitter-like fiefdoms” does not.

But if it’s not just aping the look and function of existing, generic, mass-market social media, with all of its dark patterns included, then people seem to turn their noses up at it. And I just don’t get it.

Fish Id Wardrobe “- we can’t improve how it works to make it more friendly (unless the new management at Mastodon behaves very differently than before)”

Why not? There are other fediverse projects out there. At the very least, we can look for and support ones that are trying to actually improve things.

That was the prettiest goal I’ve seen in a long time. #GoHabsGo

S. John Ross I’m gonna need you to describe what, exactly, is inflationary about it. Because the only thing I’m seeing here that’s even remotely inflationary is your aggressively haughty dismissiveness.

S. John Ross The idological thing feels very real and accurate to me, it’s just that the idologies aren’t “D&D” or “Blades/Apocalypse”. From what I’ve seen, it’s “tell me how to resolve this” vs “let me decide how to resolves this”. And while this often gets broken down as “rules-light” vs “rules-heavy”, or “rulings” vs “rules”, so many people play crunchier games like D&D in the latter way (and I play PF2e in the latter way) that it doesn’t quite break down in the prescribed way.

But treating a very systematic game like Pathfinder 2 as a playground has caused me to run against the grain of that community so thoroughly that I can’t help but view it as being made up of people who don’t see tools or toolboxes, but orders and mandates. And I think those are the idologies at play here. The ideology of “high trust” tables vs “low trust” tables.

Hex Kit is good, and they have/sell add-on tile sets.

I also like Wonderdraft, which is also a one-time purchase.

I used mostly Normal and Hard DCs for their level

How have you been handling environmental challenges, in general? Chase obstacles shouldn’t have DCs that are explicitly scaled to the party level; instead, they are tied to the obstacle’s level (which means the DCs might be implicitly scaled to the party level, if the challenges are on-level for the party).

I just ask because this is something I see a lot of GMs do that causes problems, they scale all DCs with the party, even for things that should have static DCs. And if I were free-wheeling an unprepared chase scene, I, personally, would be leaning on the Simple DCs table, not Leveled DCs.

Poor Ezren, eaten alive by rats on his first day on the job.

I just didn’t give my table the choice. But I had it on good authority that they weren’t going to leave the table if I changed the system.

What about seeds or legumes?

1. Canada

2. Network effect, and lack of ‘anchor’ accounts (i.e. celebrities, taste-makers, etc.)

Ok, ok… Hear me out.

Steamdark!

I like to include some sort of pressure release valve on extreme encounters, some sort of solution that either has the enemies abandon the fight even though they have the upper hand, or some sort of trick or tool that will allow the party to escape, but that only becomes available or makes itself discoverable after the party is deep into the encounter.

Something that says “you lost, but you got lucky”.

When you’re a social media company, fascists are good for business, and active moderation is bad for it. So long as people keep seeking their community from profit-seeking entities, they’re going to keep running into the Trumps and Elons of the world.