Musk seems like the kind of D&D player who would
I’m reminded of the abyssal words in Elden Ring’s expansion. There are signs that tell you “Don’t let them see you!” and “You have to hide and run!”. You find an area with some tall grass and some creepy eye-monsters. And sure enough, if they see you they come running at you. They’ll knock you over, grab you, and explode your head.
Clearly you’re supposed to sneak by them.
But…
You can also parry their attack, and then just kill them.
Or just fucking book it and run past them, but that’s way harder.
That seems fine to me.
It was kind of wild going from D&D to games that don’t have tons of HP.
Players make different choices when they have a maximum of 7 health, and a random mook with a baseball bat hits for minimum 2, maximum “well if the dice keep exploding…”
Among other problems, people knowingly spread falsehoods because they feel truthy.
The problem is people. We’re all emotional but some people are just full on fact free gut feel almost all of the time.
Match should be broken up. But apparently some people learned nothing from history and some people don’t care as long as they make money
Many things. I mean, you could hack a lot of stuff into Excel but generally
SQL has foreign keys and integrity checks. You can make it so like if you delete a user it automatically cascades to delete other rows like their addresses.
You can prevent someone from entering the wrong type of data in particular columns. This one’s an integer and that one’s text.
It’s designed to work on larger scales. Excel stops at 1 million rows per spreadsheet, unless my search just gave me AI slop.
You can do queries, for selecting as well as updating and deleting. You can join tables.
It’s much easier for other applications (such as a website) to talk to a SQL database
You can do transactions.
There’s a lot. That’s just off the top of my head.
Ehh. They haven’t really abused their position. They’re popular.
It would be something else if they were buying up competitors like Facebook and Google do. Part of how they maintain their dominance is buying out anyone that competes. Notice how Google kind of sucks nowadays? They’re not really competing on merit anymore.
But at the same time, steam could turn around tomorrow and be like “mandatory $39.99/mo subscription fee” and it would have an outsized impact on the sector.
I kinda like this idea that the players will be so responsible and active over their own entertainment that they’ll pick something to actively do to make something happen
This is the dream.
Sometimes I get players that have ideas, but then they’re like “oh that sounds too dangerous, nevermind”, and I’m like “it’s not going to be much of a game if we don’t take any risks”
It’s probably partly my fault for making the dangers clear to the players. I wanted them to have an understanding of the risks and factors!
Like one time, the players were told another faction would only help them with their problem if they dealt with a vampire that was in the local cemetery, and his little cult. This was a game of Mage, where even starting tier characters have a lot of strong options. One of the players just was like “you’re asking us to punch Cthulhu in the face! I don’t understand what you want us to do!”
I was like … there are so many options. Your character can literally control flame, a major weakness of vampires. You also have a strong alliance with a paramilitary group. You can go during the day. You have 3 other party members. One of them can open portals. Like, to places where it’s daytime. Trust me, you can win a 4 v 1 fight. Maybe deal with his cult first if you don’t want civilian casualties. Or maybe talk to him and see if you can negotiate.
But she just wanted to spin her wheels and complain. Worst player I’ve ever had, honestly.
It’s really frustrating how many things are bad because some assholes are making money off of it. Saint Luigi, please bless up in these trying times.
This is a revelation I think more people are going to need to realize. There’s no referee coming. The rules aren’t magic. Ultimately, the only things that matter are physics and might. If enough people just decided fuck it, all the multimillonaires gotta die, no cosmic force is going to call a timeout.
I usually just kept a list of what the various factions are up to. If the players were like “ok let’s go see if we can convince Priscilla to smuggle the uranium with her drug stuff” I have a rough idea of what she’s up to and if she’d help, or help at what cost.
I want to play again with a group that comes up with reasonable plans that play to their competencies.
I think a lot about how in a modern day magic game, the players wanted to contact another (NPC) group. They learned the NPCs were like double warded against magic, but spent a lot of time trying to punch through the wards to teleport to them. After two expensive, failed, attempts I was like “do you want a clue?”. They were like yes. I was like “if you just want to talk to them, why don’t you try calling them on the phone?”
I want to play again with a group that comes up with reasonable plans that play to their competencies.
I think a lot about how in a modern day magic game, the players wanted to contact another (NPC) group. They learned the NPCs were like double warded against magic, but spent a lot of time trying to punch through the wards to teleport to them. After two expensive, failed, attempts I was like “do you want a clue?”. They were like yes. I was like “if you just want to talk to them, why don’t you try calling them on the phone?”
I guess it’s part of my massive privilege, but I join all my work calls in my bath robe and don’t blur out the background. I don’t give a shit, and if you do you shouldn’t.
Facial expression and other body language sends a lot of information. It’s useful.
A lot of kids were taught to read badly. There’s this whole “whole word” and “cuing theory” approach to reading that doesn’t work very well. https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
Apparently 65% of fourth graders aren’t proficient at reading (as of the linked source from 2022)
A good Christian would let people stay in their house, though. If they were robbed, they would still have treasure in heaven.
More Christians faith is paper thin at best.
I don’t buy eggs, so not directly.
I won some stuff in a church raffle when I was a teenager. Nothing remarkable - i think a suitcase.
I also won some sex toys from a charity raffle for repro rights, but some past partner took them. Not sure who, but I don’t have them anymore.
Thinking about it for the first time now, it is funny how those are two very different contexts.
An advanced technique: ask your players to make shit up.
Like, the players decided to go to the wizard university the wizard PC graduated from. So I ask him, “what’s their entrance hall like?” and let him just riff on it for a while. Players feel more engaged with the world, and it’s a little less work for me.
Warlock is trying to commune with his patron. I ask, “what is your patron usually like?” and the player is delighted to describe “the great sculpin” in detail. This then inspires me further.
Note that some players are very much “just tell me a story” and don’t want any input, and won’t like this. Some players are also shy and don’t think well on their feet. And some players are just really bad at staying on theme. But if you know your players , this can be a powerful technique.