I made a rogue bird-guy (aarakroka?) that built for strength. I really wanted to pick someone up with grapple and fly them off a cliff, but i never pulled it off.

Oh I’ve seen this joke before, slightly better, but now I don’t know which was the original.

It was like

Bard: I cast vicious mockery

Dm: cool. What do you say to him?

Bard: “You’re none of your best friends’ best friend”

Dm: …

Other players: …

Bard: So do I roll damage or…?

Dm: No… No, he’s dead.

One of the bars by me has a DND group in the back.

There’s a “community center” also near me that lets people hang out in the basement, and there are rpg groups that meet there

Oh yeah. Cars are bad on like every metric.

Socially they isolate people. You don’t interact with anyone when you’re driving except to get angry. The micro interactions you have on the train matter. Seeing people that aren’t just like you, also annoyed that the train is delayed, or just having a nice time with their kids, matters. More than makes up for when other people are annoying.

Economically they hurt. It’s much harder to just pop into an interesting looking shop when you’re cruising along at 40mph. All the space dedicated to parking could be used for other stuff- housing, commerce, communal space, whatever.

They make spaces less safe. Other than the direct impact (no pun intended) of people getting hit by cars, or crashing into stuff, a space that has steady foot traffic is generally safer. If everyone was in their car instead, you’d probably be alone on foot with no one to help if something happened.

They’re bad for the environment. Air pollution, micro plastics, whatever.

Drunk driving is way more dangerous than drunk “riding the train”.

The more non-car options are built out, the better it will be for people who need to drive for whatever reason.

Cars culture is trash and if we ever escape from it, it’s going to take years.

dangit i was going to make the same pun. well done.

I read about this concern (for the us) in like 2004 when I took a basic poli sci course in undergrad, and wrote a paper about how climate change is a national security threat. People knew. Most people don’t care or have no power.

My old pandemic D&D group was the best. They cared about everything. But I remember specifically one time they arrived at a large party. I was describing the scene- large tables set with food, small groups of people mingling, and off in the corner you see a man talking to a woman, her back is against the wall and he’s got his arm on the wall so he’s kind of trapping her there. She looks uncomfortable.

The players all beelined to those two to rescue the NPC from the guy. Oh, Pretty Paul. They hated him so much. Such a good villain. (Started as a riff on Handsome Jack, and it worked so well. One of the players wrote a song about how much they hated Paul)

Order of the Stick is so good, and has such surprising emotional depth for a stick figure comic about D&D.

Just be aware that the updates are intermittent.

I remember once my players spent like 15 minutes discussing how to get across a 10 foot long puddle of water in a cave.

Eventually I had to remind them that 10’ isn’t that far, and you can RAW jump your strength score in feet with a running start. They didn’t need to build a bridge or cut into the walls. They could also just go into the water, but I understand not wanting to submerge yourself in cave water when you don’t know what’s down there.

I think they said because she was a mutant, the clone lab won’t work on her. All the other party members are humans.

But like she’s a mutant the whole time, and it only comes up when she plot-dies.

(This is from memory, so I might be wrong.)

It’s a good game if you like old timey jrpgs. The dungeons are full on mazes.

Phantasy Star 2 has a named NPC die and it has a weird excuse why you can’t revive her at the clone labs, even though you could just fine up to that point.

Also when everyone else was like “omg no character has died in an RPG before” youth me was sitting there like “is phantasy star a joke to you?”

You can do non-monogamy without cheating. I know many people who do so.

There was a thread about cheating the other day and someone posted that they think cheating is… How did they put it… binary? Like there are social groups where everyone cheats and its normal, and then there are non overlapping groups where no one cheats.

Ah, I found it: https://lemm.ee/comment/20529741

I don’t think I know anyone who cheats in relationships.

If you can’t tell people are working productively remotely, you have no business being a manager.

As the title says, moderation is key. If the game is just “whatever is the most convincing right now” then I’m going to be annoyed that I sat down to play D&D/fate/gurps/whatever, and we’re mostly playing improv. It’s important to set expectations in or before session 0.

If I was looking to join a game, and the GM was like “We’re all about the rule of cool”, I’d probably ask for some examples. If it’s like “we let the [D&D 5e] wizard cast as many spell as he wants” then I’m not joining, because that’s going to fuck up the game balance. On the other hand if it’s like “we don’t really care about carry weight unless it’s extreme”, that’s fine.

Stuff in the middle, like “one time we let them use create water in the bad guy’s lungs to drown him!” can go either way, but I’m usually not a fan. Mostly if I ask myself “if this works, why doesn’t the whole setting revolve around it?” and don’t have a good answer, I won’t enjoy it. Like, if everyone could do lethal damage with a cantrip, or if the “peasant railgun” worked like the joke, or “we let the real life chemical engineer make napalm and mustard gas as a 1st level rogue for massive damage”, then that probably isn’t for me.

Oh, I didn’t know about this one. Thanks for the link. Adding it to my mental dossier on police bullshit.

Oh my gosh I didn’t realize the tweet was from Donald jr. I thought it was just some random internet idiot. This is worse somehow.

Had me eating the onion until the third paragraph

I mean, technically true in a “picture a spherical frictionless cow” kind of sense, but not something you’re going to find in real life. Most people are susceptible to corruption. Cops have a lot of power, and we all know the saying about power corrupting.

On top of that, I’m pretty sure much of the training they’re getting to be cops is bad. They don’t spend nearly enough time on deescalation, I think , for example.

The new daredevil tv show goes into this