Wandering Adventure Party

@pseudonym @magethepodcast
Still, having *settings* start to become open and not just systems is a noteworthy thing. The fact that the free setting doesn't come *with* a free system doesn't strike me as being that big a deal.

@erikcats
Clearly this human kitten is an excellent servant.

"Maybe people don’t really want a return of the Hays Code. Maybe they’re exhausted by a deluge of stories that amount to "it’s good to be the king" and crave other ideas about what life could look like.

"Hollywood is run by captains of industry, who are the real world equivalents to amoral protagonists, certainly when it comes to labor issues. Perhaps they don't want audiences to believe it’s possible to defang those with the most power."

Should amoral characters pay for their crimes?

Audiences might be unintentionally pining for the days of the Hays Code, or maybe they're responding to something else.

(buttondown.com)

@jollysea @anderstallvik
(While Heroic <-> Subsistence *sort of* touches on that, it's still not exactly the same; "subsistence" could be a mad scramble to rake up gig jobs, and "heroism" could be being the support someone else needs.)

Personal Stakes <-> World-Saving (is this a tale of trying to get medicine for a kid in a sleepy village, or trying to stop cosmic keystones from being destroyed and isolating the universe from the power of the four elements?)

2/2

@jollysea @anderstallvik
A couple of obviously missing scales from my POV:

Doing <-> Being (do you hatch from adventurer eggs to act upon and react to the world nonstop, or are you introspecting and socializing in a coffee shop? Distinct from Violence <-> Peace mainly in that on one hand, constant action isn't necessarily *violence*, just *doing things*; and on the other hand, just because you're introspective and social doesn't mean you're not having to deal with a violent backdrop.)

1/2

@deinol
Well, eating *regular* darkmantles via boiling them was a thing in the early part of my current game, but I'd personally wonder if eating *fiendish* ones would carry a risk of some kind of evil compulsion to try to strangle an innocent in the next 24 hours...

@bedirthan
Sadly, I suspect the reason personality traits went away in 5.5 is that they don't neatly fit into any sort of *prepackaged* D&D experience, like big adventure hardbacks or Adventurer's League.

@valthonis
Plus HyperCard was actually *meant* to make programs out of, whereas the Web was really just designed to provide hyperlinked reading material and had the apps part grafted on later.

@Annacats
C is for Cow Cat!

@Printdevil @Taskerland @devilsjunkshop @vdonnut
I note that people collectively deciding Discord was "safe" as an alternative to the open web a decade ago didn't exactly help either. No, your program's documentation does *not* belong behind a login, even a login "everyone has"!

@Printdevil @Taskerland @devilsjunkshop @vdonnut
Which is kind of my point. If people are scared into taking their stuff down and isolating themselves for all time, the corporatocracy has won.

@Printdevil @Taskerland @devilsjunkshop @vdonnut
Seriously, a lot of good art has vanished from the Web on account of DeviantArt embracing "AI" and just general fear of art getting digested by diffusion model scrapers.

Oh, *and* there's how "AI"-generated, SEO-optimized articles of nothingness exist on the Web at all, taking top billing from even once-popular indie websites.

@Printdevil @Taskerland @devilsjunkshop @vdonnut
Yeah, I definitely miss those kinds of websites, and the ability to just trip over them by going to page two of search.

As far as not getting indexed, Google enshittifying is only part of the problem. Another part is that "AI" turned the default use case of scrapers from "yay, my webpage is getting indexed by a search engine!" to "OHSHIT THE CORPOS ARE STEALING MY STUFF BLOCK IT BLOCK IT"

The trouble with auto-generating your ad emails' subject lines based on common search surveillance data: sometimes you get results like "Best Spring Allergies".

@Printdevil @Taskerland @devilsjunkshop @vdonnut
Eh, I think you were more right before, about how social media killed that kind of thing because of a lot of people being in it for an audience first and foremost. Google Search enshittifying came later, after the "magazine" websites disappeared or turned into review and press release farms.

@Taskerland @Printdevil @devilsjunkshop @vdonnut
Basically, what I'm imagining is something like what (to take examples from another hobby) The Unofficial Squaresoft Home Page and LunarNet were like before they turned into the forgettable streams of JRPG press releases and reviews known as RPGamer and RPGFan. Basically, there was once a genre of "magazine-like" websites back in the 90s, complete with stuff like letters columns and random articles on specific subtopics.

@Printdevil @devilsjunkshop @Taskerland @vdonnut
Sounds like the sort of thing that could theoretically have made the leap to small indie webpages, if people had decided to stick together and make a hub instead of everyone making their own independent Geocities page for their individual campaigns.

@matt_1060 @Annacats
You beat me to this guess!

@randomwizard
Yeah, that 4e turned out that way does seem like it has a lot to do with why it didn't manage to overcome its initial hurdles enough to last. Same power structure with the exact same proportions for all classes regardless of power source (with that only starting to change in the *least* starting with PHB3), every class within a given role having very similar powers.

@randomwizard
One of the things I like about D&D 3.5 in particular: they were willing to be more daring in their experimentation in creating new classes. Did it always work? No, but there were frequently interesting results.

PF1 was less daring, at times to an immersion-breaking fault, but tended to be more consistent as a result.