Kichae

You were a fan of Larry, well here is his cousin Darryl, and his other cousin Darrey.

Is… is there some reason to read “How to do X without Y” as some kind of value judgement against Y? Because, like, some of us just can’t do accents. I can’t even do my own regional accent, and never have been able to. There being a resource for someone like me doesn’t really invite this “fuck you” attitude you’re bringing, dude, and frankly, it feels like you’re saying it to people like me when you’re coming after something that seems targeted at me.

Careful, you’re risking summoning the Pathfinder Pedant Demon with that one.

I don’t know, I this phrasing seems quite evocative to me. Tremble means to waver in tone or power, gravel means to hoarse or growling in a low energy fashion, and words colliding means for words to flow into one another in a fluid and informal way. This all makes speech sound less confident, and less educated. Meanwhile, neat speech is formal, and clipped speech has clear start and end points to words, and so clear distinctions between neighbouring words.

* Laughs in Pathfinder 2 level scaling.

Touche. I guess what I should have more rightly said was, given the level of contribution users have shown themselves willing to make, it’s too small to be a job.

But in the end, I believe people aren’t willing to pay because we look like other spaces where they don’t have to pay, and we gate nothing behind paywalls. Most people don’t pay for services on the Internet, they pay for special privileges and to stand out. And if basic talk and text service was freely provided by volunteers, they’d milk those volunteer organizations dry, too.

Weirdly enough, community might actually be enough, but the Fediverse doesn’t really have much in the way of communities. As I think you yourself point out elsewhere, the Fediverse is lacking the connective tissue of shared ideology, goals, or even interests. It’s also both too large to create the familiarity that binds people socially, while also being too small to sustain itself off a donation model that makes sure there are professional admins and server mods. It’s too big to be a hobby, and too small to be a job.

Aping the aesthetic of commercial social media is a significant issue here, because form follows function, and the function of commercial social media is not community, but convincing end-users to be content generators. People on Reddit and Twitter are accustomed to an endless stream of input generated by nameless, faceless entities that they don’t give two shits about, with some celebrities and internet-famous people interjecting from time to time. That requires tens of millions of users fighting for fleeting attention from fickle consumers. We have tens of thousands of people who – as far as I can tell, based on the types and volume of posts – are mostly interested in consuming, not fighting for attention.

These are not the people who fund these kinds of endeavours. Neither group is – the content generators are no more interested in paying to get attention than the content consumers are to give it. So, without the firm social ties that motivate keeping the lights on, there is only burnout for the few who are willing to materially support the place, and gradual decay for everyone else.

Touché! A truth I have really started to take for granted.

You’ve triggered my trap card. I’m going to do the special interest info-dump now. Apologies in advance.

It’s good. It’s written a little weird – it uses inheritance, like computer programming, which can be a little more difficult to wrap you head around than it needs to be if you’re not at least a little familiar with coding, and it’s written as if it’s doing everything possible to shut down rules lawyers, so whatever doesn’t read like API documentation reads a bit like legalese – but the actual system is nice.

It’s highly balanced, which is an awful word that its fanbase doesn’t seem to understand, but it means that it totally shuts down winning in character creation, and shifts the power game to one of tactics rather than build. The result is that much of the discussion about the game treats it as if it’s exclusively a tactical combat game (because most discussing the game are crypto-power-gamers), rather than a fantasy RPG, and the most enthusiastic players push back hard against any kind of reframing. But it has a ton of support fo roleplay focused tables, and it pares down easily for casual tables.

Plus, you know, it’s free! And it’s fairly easy to convert from 3.x/PF1, meaning that there’s a whole generation of content out there for it beyond first party offerings, for just a little more effort than standard prep.

Yes, exactly. Consistency is important, because it builds and reinforces trust. The GM just saying “nah” is the other side of the player showing up with a homebrew bullshit build.

I get a lot of pushback from the Pathfinder 2e subreddit for promoting the idea that the system is really great for character-driven, fiction-first tables, because everyone just looks at the number of rules and goes “it’s so obviously a gameist system, why would you ever try to run it as anything else?”, and the answer is it’s a fantastic physics system. The rules provide clarity and consistency where it’s really useful or important, and are easily ignorable where it doesn’t matter.

Thankfully, no one at my table knows what a bugbear is. And that’s also just not the way English tends to work. A bearbug is clearly a small, hairy beetle.

Well, I was going to have the party meet an owlbear, but a bugbear it is, now.

My mom makes these bierocks. I make just the filling (they’re good without the cheese, too, if anyone’s got insides that hate milk sugars or proteins).

There are less kiddie bierock recipes out there, too, if ketchup doesn’t appeal.

https://www.food.com/recipe/stuffed-hamburger-cabbage-buns-runzas-or-bierocks-50809