I’m the kind of guy who will look stuff up. I think it’s really important to admit when you’re wrong and the other person was right. Don’t move goal posts or claim you misunderstood. Just own it.

Like I was having a debate with my partner about if it was faster to go all the way up and over, or make a lot of turn-right then turn-left. I thought the ladder was faster because it approximates a straight line. She was like no that’s crazy. Eventually I found that’s called Manhattan distance and she was right, and I fully admitted defeat.

I’m ready for that style of language to be passé. But probably the next slang will also be unpleasant.

No disagreement here.

I realized when reading one of the other comments that my similarly sized complaint is it creates a lot of potential for problems at the game level as well as narrative when people make their characters in isolation. I kind of assumed that comes packaged with “and you all meet in a tavern”.

Like, everyone makes a fighter and shows up to session 1. The dm’s going to have a head scratcher thinking about balance, and some players might be annoyed they don’t really have a niche of their own. A weird party like that can work, but it’ll be a happier experience if folks talk about it ahead of time.

It can work, as clearly shown by your rather wholesome example and many people’s games. But it’s also leaving a very large surface area for problems. Unlike real life, you can just avoid that by making your characters together.

Maybe I should have said in my previous thread that while the “you all meet for the first time” is kind of cliché, there are more serious problems at the game level. And like it can work if everyone makes a fighter, but you can also make everyone’s lives easier if you discuss up front.

So as a senior, you could abstain. But then your junior colleagues will eventually code circles around you, because they’re wearing bazooka-powered jetpacks and you’re still riding around on a fixie bike

Lol this works in a way the author probably didn’t intend. They are wearing extremely dangerous tools that were never really a great idea. They’ll code some circles, set their legs on fire, and crash into a wall.

I think the best game I’ve done started as “it’s a DND world and you’re a band on tour”.

It started with a simple “the bridge is out on the way to your next show”, then there was a battle of the bands, a sketchy record label, and then the players organized a recall of the mayor that was in bed with the capitalists. That game went great places.

Yeah I don’t think I would happily play another “and then you all meet for the first time and work together” game unless it was like intentionally subverting the trope. It adds so many problems and suspension of disbelief problems.

Yeah I think DND 3e had some wacky stuff with templates. Big effective level penalties if I recall for most of them

Yeah I don’t really like the model where it starts basic and hard, and each failure makes it a little easier.

Feels like it would be more interesting if you started with high stats, and each successful run you had to remove or lower something. Sure, you won with 200 health but can you win with 100? Hades kind of had this alongside the upgrades as you go.

I didn’t like dead cells or rogue legacy that much because it felt like I would’ve won if I had grinded more, and that’s not what I want.

I feel like games are usually a mix of execution challenges and numbers challenges. In a pure action game or other games without progression (eg: chess) you win or lose from your decisions and input. But in numbers games, you win or lose based on the stats. There’s really no way cloud from the start of the original ff7 can defeat disc 3 bosses. The numbers just aren’t there.

Some rogue-lites feel like they’re trying to be execution games but have a less clear numbers check on top. Doesn’t always work for me.

I do really like the traditional rogue like Crawl: Stone Soup, though. No meta game aside from the occasional player ghost.

The bit about avoidance might be insightful. Some people have anxiety about reading and writing, and the LLMs feel like they’re helping. But as this post says, they’re not. They’re making the anxiety worse in the long term.

Many people legitimately are bad at reading and writing. You’ll won’t find a ton of them here, on a platform that’s mostly text, but they’re out there. Struggling though life, probably embarrassed. An LLM that purports to let them skip uncomfortably engaging with text probably feels like a godsend. But it’s a trap. It’s a tarpit they’ll get stuck in and never develop skills of their own.

I didn’t like the last few GMs decisions and calls, so I don’t play with them anymore.

Is it like the other ones where it takes several hours until you start finding interesting guns and get cool powers?

“Unilateral” GMing is completely necessary to the style of play and opens up player creativity and engagement in the ways I discussed in other comments.

I don’t think a unilateral GM and the mother-may-I it implies are the only way to get player creativity and engagement.

They want to test themselves against an organic, immersive world where their actions have consequences, good or bad. You cannot get that experience from collaborative storytelling games,

Maybe?

Imagine a scene where the players are trying to jump from one roof top to another to escape pursuit. It’s a pretty long jump, and there aren’t explicit rules in this game for jumping distances. The GM says to roll the dice. On a good roll, they’ll make it. The dice come up Bad.

In one mode of play, the GM unilaterally decides what happens. Maybe you fall and get hurt. Maybe you land in a pile of trash. It’s all on them, and you have to accept it to keep playing. The actions have consequences.

In the mode I prefer, the player has more of a say. Maybe they suggest they succeed at a cost. They can offer “What if I make it across, but lose my backpack?” and the group can accept it, or say that’s not an appropriate cost. They can also fail, and offer up ideas for what that looks like. The group achieves consensus, and the story moves on. The actions have consequences here, too.

That first mode, where the GM just dictates what happens and you take it? I hate it. I want either clear rules we agreed to before-hand, or a seat at the table for deciding ambiguous outcomes.

We don’t have to play together. Many people want to immerse in their character and any sort of meta-game mechanics (like succeed-at-a-cost) ruin it for them. Some people love metal and some people love jazz. Neither’s better than the other.

I probably shouldn’t have posted in an OSR thread knowing I dislike the genre.

I don’t understand how my coworkers are using windows. Like, they routinely have issues where it randomly reboots or gets sluggish. And it’s just flat out unfit for software development, unless you’re targeting windows specific stuff. They can’t even run our code locally.

Maybe some of the problems are janky security stuff to try to lock it down

Many complaints against prostitution also apply to trading labor for money/shelter in general. People just have a stronger emotional response.

Emotional responses are rarely a good foundation for policy.

Prostitution should be legal with safety regulations. All labor should have protections, unions, and such, to protect them from being abused by the wealthy.

Some specific things would probably remain illegal or disallowed, in the same sense that you’re not allowed to work construction without safety gear. People can wear condoms as easily as hard hats and hi-viz vests.

Completely understandable to establish borders to keep certain people out who might mean you harm or who might disrupt the peace of your community.

I mean, keeping ice out because they genuinely are a threat is cool. But some people would use this logic to keep out black people, because they falsely believe black people will disrupt the peace or mean them harm.

I mean, terrible GMs will be terrible no matter what system they are running.

True, but I think osr games encourage unilateral GMing, which encourages terrible behavior.

Hand in hand with this is, as the above commenter mentions, “rulings over rules” which emphasizes the GM making decisions about how player actions play out in the world rather than looking for mechanics in a rulebook.

It’s kind of funny but I really like how Fate is open ended, but absolutely hate it in OSR games. I think because OSR games often feel unilateral and top down from the GM, and I don’t enjoy that. Reminds me of teenage games where the DM would be like “you’re crippled now because the orc hit your leg” just because they said so, and your only options are deal with it or quit.

I also never play in the “I am my character!” mode. I’m more of the writer’s room style where we’re writing a story together, so it doesn’t take me out of the scene to be like “what if my succeed-at-a-cost roll means I get the window open, but wake up every dog in the house?”.

People are emotionally driven. Admitting something scary is more emotionally taxing than pretending it’s fake.

One of my friends still uses google hangout to talk with me. I’m the only person they talk to on there. I ask them every so often to switch to signal. It’s, like, trivial to install. it’s free. They won’t do it. It’s too much.

I do not understand ADHD depression brain and I want to be kind but I’m also like “just give me your phone I’ll do it”.