Taylor Lane Games
@ForestedDepth
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Writes and Publishes OSR-compatible content.
Joined December 2020
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This is a complete (non-OSR) game about being a gang of crazy supernatural weirdos trying to change the world and getting involved with the local politics of every other supernatural weirdo trying to change the world
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Noir works how it does because it is a post WW2 story
every male character is a recently returned veteran with PTSD & intensive combat skill, the cops & criminals would have proudly died for each other like a year ago so its super fucked up when they fight, those involved in
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All this would have been perfectly obvious at the time, but so unpleasant that no one would directly say it
Modern attempts to do neo-noir go weird because, generally, they don't acknowledge or even seem to understand that noir is primarily about the aftermath of ww2
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The weird thing about women is because the women didn't go to war, so a good relationship with a good woman represents a path back towards civilian life.
They're all drinking so much because they have PTSD
The protagonists are alienated & down on their luck cause they're vets
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it's fascinating watching Ted Chiang (my favorite SF author) deeply misunderstand the most impactful technological development of my adult life
it's not just that I disagree with him, but that he clearly didn't research it at all, and says provably untrue things
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Like 40 people followed me because of this, and they'll all be super disappointed when i never say another word about noir fiction ever again & go back to dealing with ttrpgs
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Explanation one: I didn't literally mean that no woman ever served in the US military in ww2. There were 10s of 1000s and I thank them for their service. However, the ww2 military was 95% male & women weren't allowed to be in combat roles till 2013. Far far fewer women were vets
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Been reading sumerian history.
It fits D&Desque fantasy way way better than medieval Europe.
1) technological near-stasis for 1000s of years
2) 400,000+ year long imagined histories
3) everyone really does have a specific patron god
4) every city built on top of ruins
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Explanation two: noir is named that because of a series of related stories by a handful of authors, many of which had "black" or "dark" in the title.
These weren't written till the 40s
Anything noirish in the 20s or 30s is proto-noir, before it was a named and explicit genre
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From what I've heard of Sumeria, you take rough-cut blocks and rub them together against each other till they wear apart any gap between them
it's not technically sophisticated, it just takes fucking forever
everything stupid is easy if labor is cheap
Friendly reminder that Ancient Egyptians inexplicably cut massive granite blocks with seemingly “laser-like” precision 🤯
Neither a razor, or human hair can fit between.
It’s 2024, and how this was accomplished remains a mystery.
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Why are so many "fantasy medieval" settings not actually feudal?
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Why do you like playing a thief?
What do you get from them that you don't get from playing any other class?
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Yeah, I was literally only bringing any of this up as a point about cyberpunk neo-noir that I wanted to go on the record about more explicitly
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What the fuck are you talking about.
Who do you think *invented* roleplaying games as a hobby? You think it wasn't invented by autists?
I'm not autistic, but I sure as hell pay attention to people around me. Stupid fucking magazine.
Tabletop game designers are teaming up with social needs players to make role-playing games more accessible.
📸: Javier Zayas Photography/Getty Images
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I hate the trope of the "adventurers' guild".
Guilds are formed by local, powerful, businesspeople to act as a cartel
Adventurers are wanderers with minimal social connections who do violence professionally
They are not going to form a guild
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Someone in my mentions is insisting that if I write a Mesopotamian game I need to hire Iraqi consultants. I don't know how to explain to them that Arabs are like a dozen layers of colonizing colonizers away from being Sumerians.
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This thread probably got more attention than it deserved & enough people are confident enough that I'm wrong (the counterclaim is: "that can't possibly be true, noir begins pre WW2") that I'm a bit worried that I spread misinformation
so... take this with a grain of salt
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You guys know that when you're fantasy worldbuilding you can just put France in and call it France, right? Use a map of France. Talk about how the Count of Tolouse's sorcery is without equal.
You are allowed to do this. No French person can stop you.
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The idea that neurodivergent players wouldn't be treated as the normal audience comes from the mainstream lifestyle brand types colonizing the hobby
We shared a few thoughts and invite you to respectfully share yours on welcoming neurodivergent gamers.
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Was it because the Fremen didn't have their own complete language based on speculations on thousands of years of evolution of Arabic with heavy English influences?
"In fact I dislike Dune with some intensity, and in that unfortunate case, it is much the best and fairest to another author to keep silent and refuse to comment." — JRR Tolkien
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Who the fuck believes this. Show me one person who doesn't think that D&D is for people with ADHD (like me!) and autism (like so so many of the people I've played with)
The STEREOTYPE is that we all have fucking autism. Fuck you. Why are you fucking lying.
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is there any reason, other than tradition, that the default setting for fantasy is pseudo-medieval rather than pseudo-early mesopotomia or pseudo-pacific islands or whatever?
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It's interesting to contrast this with other critiques of 5e
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all modern space opera settings seem to end up looking like star wars, 40k, or star trek
it seems like 'earth and all her colonies' settings used to be common, but no one makes them anymore
dune is... confusing. Immensely popular, but it influenced nearly nothing
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The idea that they need accomadations comes from those types trying to cement their dominance by condescendingly saying that they'll deign to include the poor little autists.
This makes my blood boil.
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given that the medieval fantasy setting is more than halfway to just being a western in disguise, why aren't westerns more popular as TTRPGs?
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Frankly, it's normal people who struggle with TTRPGs. They're 200 to 500 page tomes that require pretending to be someone else (that's what masking fucking is) and deeply imaginative obsessive engagement.
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ttrpg players settled on the idea that social mechanics don't work only because ttrpg designers are rarely socially adept enough to understand what they are modeling
give me a social etiquette manual or mirror for princes or closest equivalent, I can make it into mechanics
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Yes. It *is* cultural. And we *have* that fucking culture.
People like *you* just can't see that, because you're not invented to games with the sort of people that you think you speak for
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But, in a twist that no one saw coming, the Knesset had just hours earlier voted 82-38 for Wales to declare war on Hamas. Given that Wales doesn't have an army, a navy, or independent foreign policy, it's not clear what effect Welsh entry into the war could possibly have.
BREAKING: The Welsh Parliament has just voted for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
The motion put by Plaid Cymru was carried 24 in favour, 19 against and 13 abstentions.
PC, Lib Dem and a number of Labour MSs backed the ceasefire motion.
📸 The lobby of the Senedd today.
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I really don't understand why y'all are running narrative campaigns over sandbox ones
sandbox ones are like 10x easier to run and 10x more fun to play in
if you're running a narrative campaign, rather than a sandbox... why? Why do this to yourself?
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BTW, the people saying this bullshit are making money off of "solving" the non-existent "problem" that they made up.
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In TTRPGs, why does combat get an entire second by second system where time is aggressively decompressed, but lockpicking gets a "roll a die, see if you succeed or fail" where time is aggressively compressed?
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The *average* RPG campaign lasts about 6 sessions. I can't find the source for this statistic, but I don't think anyone doubts it.
Yet, games are mostly NOT written to fit into 6 sessions or less.
Why?
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that's... not a far-future hypothetical.
That's a feature that ChatGPT has. I used it the day before yesterday.
Like I said, he just... hasn't even used this thing that he's reviewing. At all!
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You don't make AI art by writing one prompt and then taking the first output picture
You write many prompts, or even prompts to write more prompts, get many pictures out of each, choose a few very, make many AI edits to it, and then make edits to it by hand
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a friend of mine insists that if you can't easily answer the question "okay, but where do these people shit?" then your dungeon/hexcrawl/city/whatever isn't real enough in your head to actually work with in a sandbox campaign
he calls it "the shit test"
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Didn't TSR's downfall also happen due to poor business practices leading to mistracking supply and demand leading to underproduction of high-demand products and overproduction of low-demand products, leading to warehousing unsold products while leaving vendors undersupplied?
Nice! Ollie’s has D&D terrain tiles for like $3 a pop. WotC must sitting on warehouses of unsold stuff they couldn’t move
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@BretDevereaux
Bret, do you realize you're arguing with human pet guy? He thinks all the Romans lived in other smaller colleseiums. When told that Vienna wasn't in Italy, he had to look it up on the Dr Who wiki to confirm.
He has his own personal knowyourmeme page
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Let's imagine what a neurtypical-accessible TTRPG would look like
+ 30 pages or less
+ Campaigns are 1 session, ideally
+ You can explain it easily, probably because it mimics one or more pieces of recent popular media
Can you think of any games like that?
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Edgelord take, but: most TTRPG combat systems suffer from being written by people that have not been in potentially-lethal fights.
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A minmaxer is playing optimally within the rules of the game, responding to the incentives that its rules lay out.
If you don't like what that looks like, you don't like the rules of the game that you're playing.
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I think that the reason I hate hitpoints is that combat is the most zoomed-in, granularized, time-decompressed, ultra-detailed part of most game...
...but HP is so abstract that we genuinely can't agree on what its even supposed to be an abstraction OF
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A tough truth to hear is that a lot of TTRPG fans are bad at math.
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Overall, I just... kinda lost a lot of faith in Science Fiction; Ted Chiang is probably the best SF writer in the world.
It clearly doesn't actually help human beings grapple with technological or societal change. What is it actually good for?
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What's the deal with so many ttrpg players wanting their characters to be dark edgy loners?
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I'm honestly still pretty confused by their refusal to do Dark Sun
What part of a game where you start out as slaves to wealthy dragons who have destroyed the environment ISN'T amenable to a left-wing reading?
Can you imagine if WotC had scheduled a proper, gritty new version of Dark Sun in time for Dune 2? But that would require them to cater to functioning adults who can deal with mature themes instead of unbalanced adults who cannot deal with anything beyond their safety blanket. *
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a writer friend of mine uses multiple competing programs like that to do most of her writing. She makes about $70k a year.
Again, this isn't a hypothetical, and he did no research.
I think he literally just heard ChatGPT described to him?
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i see a repeated thing of people saying "if gods definitely existed, then humans would treat them totally differently than any known human religion has" and I am pretty sure that the majority of people in every society have believed their religions to literally be 100% real
The thing is that if divinity exists for a fact in your fantasy setting, the thing people will have towards said divinity will be less akin to faith or belief and similar to brand loyalty
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It's interesting how Tolkien's orcs are a parody of *industrial society* but orcs in much of the fantasy inspired by it are a parody of hunter-gatherer society
I can't think of a single fantasy author who seemed to completely agree with Tolkien's view of technology
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It's sorta interesting how much stuff that gets thought of as 'traditional Native American' is post-contact
Look at her, with her horse and her wool
There's a lesson here about the ways that we misremember the past, though fuck if I can articulate it
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Why haven't I ever seen a TTRPG system that has mechanics for answering "what is the party's reputation, how do the PCs actions effect it, and/or how does it effect how the world treats the PCs?"
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The greatest trick D&D 5e ever pulled was convincing the world that it wasn't high crunch.
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@MorlockP
what you're actually seeing a map of is *elevation*
there's a very long argument that some serious people believe that rising obesity rates are caused by a water-borne chemical pollutant, which would --obviously-- flow downhill
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I don't think most players actually read lore
So, why is it so popular in ttrpgs?
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what you do think of the idea of mechanics that let players declare that they know a just-introduced NPC and/or introduce an NPC that their PC knows?
(this is meant for a citycrawl sandbox game)
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My OSR hot take is that every D&Desque game is 3 games:
+ a city game
+ a wilderness game
+ a dungeon game
And that deficiency in 1 or 2 of these is generally due to optimizing for a 3rd, and trying to treat the other 2 as being weird instances of that 3rd
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Whatever games you thought of aren't bad because they're NT-accessible. I can think of some that are good, actually.
But they're not typical. They're not what most people in these spaces are drawn towards making or playing.
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Wtf
Yeah that... has to be intentional
These Orcs are named Maria, Gonzalo, Enrique, etc and I would honestly feel pretty uncomfortable having them worship Grummish?
Like, I'm sorry, but I know Hispanics. I would not feel comfortable portraying Hispanic Orcs as Orc-like
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Time spent telling everyone that some WotC product is bad, or that some MCU movie is bad...
is time NOT spent telling people that some indie art that they've never heard of is good.
You won't make a dent in the corporations, you might appreciably help out an indie artist
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The only reason dwarves have "dark vision" (a nonsensical phantasm dreamed up by diseased minds) is that WotC is too cowardly to admit that they echolocate, like dolphins (they are closely related to dolphins)
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how much does ttrpg book layout actually matter to you?
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Yes. I have explicitly heard people make that exact argument. Most famously, Slavoj Zizeck.
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I'd rather publish all my stuff entirely w/o art. But people demand that TTRPG products have art in them. Then AI art came, but some people bullied everyone into never using it in TTRPG products. So I'm basically being asked to pay an artist to avoid getting cancelled
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So, I've been reading this book, "Fief". By Lisa J. Steele.
It sets out to be a TTRPG-relevant guide to the workings of your average medieval manor-village, and it is PERFECT at that.
Almost every page of this is roleplaying gold, but here are some highlights:
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People apparently want my opinion on this, so:
you can totally have mythic underworld dungeons where the monsters don't have a clear food source
but it's impossible to use outside-the-box solutions on them -- if the orcs don't have a food source, you can't starve them
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I just had to yell at a player repeatedly to get them to level up their character, which they were refusing to do because they would "rather just play" and "found this part boring"
weirdest form of problem player I've ever seen
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Big companies seem to want you to be fans of LotR, not Tolkien; Star Wars, not George Lucas; any IP, any reboot, any sequel, not the creator that made the original.
Big companies can own IP. Big companies can't own people, only rent them.
Draw your own conclusions.
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Assuming 6 mile hexes, a basically medieval english agricultural system, and generically premodern urbanization, every ~500 non-farming people in a town implies a full hex of hinterland feeding them.
Please keep this in mind. A city of 30k implies 60 hexes of peaceful farms
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It requires an unacceptable degree of seriousness
Q: Why do people (generally) not play sci-fi tabletop RPGs? Why has the recent resurgence in gaming kind of overlooked the genre?
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Is there a reason that so many ttrpgs treat magic as a thing that only some PCs are allowed to do?
It seems like an odd design decision, when you could have every PC have access to cool powers, instead.
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That also seems likely
@ForestedDepth
My guess it's the message. Tolkien's work is underpinned by hope. Herbert is deeply more cynical.
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what's the funnest magic system in any game you've ever played?
If the answer is "D&D", "Ars Magica", or "Mage: the Awakening" tell me the funnest answer that isn't those
no knock against them, it's just that I've heard them before
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where do horror TTRPGs most commonly fail?
because most of them do fail to elicit horror...
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I, at one point, went through a phase of hating D&D
if you love TTRPGs, it's easy to hate D&D for sucking up all the oxygen in the room
but there genuinely are elements in D&D that work and have led to its enduring popularity, and they aren't just the marketing budget
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a lot of the romanticization of desert landscapes and people is only possible due to the romanticizers not fully understanding how unpleasant being in such a heat for even 5 minutes is
English guy: "Arizona looks so pretty in pictures"
Me: "shutupshutupshutyourmouth"
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3e was such a maximalist edition.
I don't think we appreciated enough at the time just how many ideas it had. We were blindly by how poorly they were executed.
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@archon
@dieworkwear
yeah, i mean, basically. If you're wearing a HUD and cyberpunk wear, and someone makes fun of you, just point out "it's 2024. Why are you dressed like it's 1974?" and they won't have a comeback
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What's the TTRPG that is least like D&D that you've had fun playing?
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there are IQ tests for nonhumans
this isn't even about AI
does Ted Chiang just not google things to see if they're true before he gets them published on a national platform...?
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Hey, what would you title an RPG set in the modern world, in which every city has like 50 groups of insane secret magic weirdos in it trying (and, largely, failing) to control the city (and, perhaps, the world)
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This will be a thread. For each retweet that this tweet gets, I will add one (non-politically) controversial statement about TTRPGs to the thread.
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Why do I know the political opinions of at least 70% of the big posters on TTRPG Twitter?
This isn't a judgement on any particular person or even any group, I just don't get why it comes up so often.
Doesn't seem very relevant to elf games.
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why aren't there more fantasy ttrpg's that take inspiration from late medieval or early renaissance italy?
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hey, how come there isn't a half-wizard half-fighter class in most vaguely D&D games? There's a half-druid half-fighter class, a half-cleric half-fighter class, etc
I dunno, is this a stupid question? I never see it get asked.
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I played harn ONCE
the GM stopped play to give a 30-minute in-character monologue about how medieval laundry worked
when I asked him to stop, he responded in character about how the NPC couldn't once started, & then he kept going till after I physically left the table
@ForestedDepth
About the only one I can think of that really doubles down on this is Hârn by
@ColumbiaGames
.
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friend of mine ran WoD
she'd give every vampire a personality
she is a very odd person, so to her "a personality' = an obsession they'd built their life around
for example: the extremely frustrating cowboy vampire, born in the 1970s, who loved 1940s cowboy movies
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Are there any gangster ttrpgs that are mostly just about racketeering and running your illegal businesses, rather than heists and shootouts?
I wanna play, like, real gangsters
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A major & longstanding flaw in TTRPG discourse is that a large amount of people act like any suggestions or advice are coercive orders.
Not sure where it comes from?
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Vague idea:
Xp for gp only levels you up as a thief
Xp for monsters only levels you up as a fighter
What of magic-user and cleric?
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I'm hosting a game jam in March for people who want to make supplements for OSR games
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I think that it's really stupid to complain about optimizers as a Bad Player Type.
They're literally just playing the game, rules as written. If you don't like the behavior that the game rewards, that's not a problem with the players, that's a problem with the game.
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@majorscrub
I don't think so
Attempts to ban alcohol started with... I wanna say 3rd great awakening? Late 1800s. Early feminism and a particular brand of Christianity?
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My advice to most GMs is only:
this game has no story. Story is what you tell about the game, after it's over. Your job is to choose an interesting world and simulate that with brutal honesty.
Being a good GM is actually very easy. Being a good player is hard, and much rarer.
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genuinely why were wheelchairs invented so late. What about them made them impossible to build before the mid 1600s and not common till the 1800s?
is a thing with bearings? or like. what was going on here?
i am seriously asking. Why was "put wheels on a chair" hard to do?
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@eigenrobot
I mean. They've been a sovereign country since 1947. It's not like they unbanned it when they had the chance.
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I've lived a zero prep FM lifestyle for years. I'm honestly pretty incredulous that full grown adults with jobs and familes are doing hours of prep per session. Are they REALLY, or are they exaggerating?
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