It really bugs me that “divisive” is used as the bad word. There are so many reasons for something to be “divisive”.

It’s like saying “don’t make people angry” but treating “punched someone in the face” and “a man held hands with his husband” as the same. They both made someone angry so they’re both bad!!

If people are divided on a topic you should figure out why, what’s true and what’s false and in between, and resolve it. Don’t just sweep it under the rug as a thing you’re not allowed to talk about.

A couple years ago at a bar I was talking to a guy, and he mentioned he’d started playing DND. I went, “oh cool. Which edition?”

He said, “what?”. He didn’t know there were other editions. He didn’t know there were other RPGs. I think about this a lot and try to remember a lot of people aren’t really deep in the hobby. They show up once a week to play a game with their friends, and that’s about where it stops. Which is fine. Totally valid way to spend your leisure time. But very different than where I went.

Ah yes. I believe the term for that is “fantasy heartbreaker”. Fascinating history, really.

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/9/

https://rpgmuseum.fandom.com/wiki/Fantasy_heartbreaker

This sounds like a personal hell to me.

I mean, it might work if your group is all kind of on the same wavelength to begin with. But if that’s the case, you could also easily start with a system you like and go from there instead of reinventing all the wheels.

A lot of people have only really played D&D and its close relatives. I like to describe that in this metaphor: Imagine someone who has only every seen the lord of the rings movies. They’ve watched them over and over, both cinematic and directors cuts. They know all the lore and all the minutia. And then they sit down to write their own movie. Maybe a sci-fi space mystery to change things up. And this movie? it has horses. Because movies always have horses, don’t they? They’re in like every movie. So when the detective is stuck in the burning theater, his buddy should ride in on a horse and save him.

So I 0%, maybe even some negative percent, want to have to sell a group on “RPGs don’t actually need six attributes” or “you don’t need to have separate rolls for to-hit and damage” for the first time in their lives.

Secondly, most people are bad at design. Sorry. It kind of follows from sturgeon’s law (“90% of everything is crap”). Most people don’t set out to make crap, but it happens anyway. Most people firing from the hip are just not going to make good systems. Especially if, as above, they’ve only ever really played one kind of game. So, no, I don’t want to deal with the guy who’s like “On a natural 1 you should drop your sword” who doesn’t realize that, because fighter types make a lot more attack rolls, they’re going to drop their swords way more often than you’d expect of the archetype. I am reminded of an unhappy time in an old, bad, D&D game where I fruitlessly tried to explain effective HP to the wizard. (Since D&D 5e stops counting damage at 0, there are some weird interactions between initiative, healing, and damage.)

Third, even if you avoid all of that, even if you have a group with a deep and wide knowledge of game design, you’re going to end up with an inelegant mess. Why does intimidating someone mean a simultaneous roll-off of increasingly large dice, but bluffing someone means drawing poker hands? Because those rules were added on different sessions, and Mike was really into poker and convinced people it would be cool. Wrestling someone you flip coins, but knife fighting you roll d4s. Sword fights use this complicated table Joe insisted would be fun, but magic is just a roll off. No thank you.

I’d rather just play Fate, which is already pretty loose about how to interpret conflict and consequences.

Pray to Saint Luigi for guidance.

It’s certainly not easy. But what saint Luigi allegedly did might become common if more people feel like their back is against the wall and there’s no peaceful way forward.

The hypocrisy, mostly. Conservatives go on about “waste”, and fire a bunch of people who were actually doing work. Meanwhile, this silver spoon’d asshole is making $800k for doing barely anything.

We shouldn’t put up with the rich anymore.

“I want computers to do my laundry so I can do art. Instead computers are doing the art.”

All of this AI stuff would be fine (or at least less bad) if we didn’t live in a capitalist dystopia where people might have their basic needs (food, shelter, etc) threatened so some rich turd can become a little richer.

Sounds like it. But the people who suffered from under funded education will never have that injury remedied.

The people responsible for this problem (I’m assuming Republicans) should face some consequences.

It’s going to bother me forever that, even if we do get some sort of new deal, the people who shit up the world will never really be made to pay for it. Like, one time Facebook tried to see if they could just make people sad by changing the feed algorithm. And yet no one hanged for that mass cruelty, and no one ever will. Energy companies pollute the air and water, lie about the facts and consequences, and then are never put up against the wall and shot. It’s unfair. It’s not right. Little new deal changes to raise minimum wage or provide mandatory maternity leave are good, but they’re not enough to account for the crimes and injustice.

The people who shit up the world should pay. In money, in time, or in blood. But if they skate free, that’s another insult and injury on top of everything else.

Except what Luigi allegedly did was net positive, and what Trump did was some combination of treason and corruption.

Your take is woefully lacking in context. Sometimes the same action is justified in s different scenario. Cutting someone open is usually bad, but when a surgeon does it in a hospital it’s usually okay!

You ever wonder if Republicans are actually aliens that are trying to terraform earth to be more like their own planet? (whatever that is. Maybe hell.)

Can’t be the first person to have had that idea

I believe this article misses the real reasons: labor isn’t paid enough.

Capital makes record profits but that isn’t being shared with the people who do the work.

If they weren’t punished they won’t learn much. Now if all the Republicans who tried this mini-coup were removed from office, that’d be a start.

Stop going to nazi bars.

unless they’re going to do some successful July 20 tier stuff, i’m not sure it’s going to save the day.

A lot of their supporters seem to be “keep the government out of medicare” tier thinkers.

Anyone who unironically says they want the government run like a business should not be anywhere near decision making power.

Businesses waste so much money. They fail all the time. Their priority is making money, not quality or service.

I got the D&D 3e books when I was a kid. I completely, deeply, uncritically loved them. Read them cover to cover. Spent a lot of time drawing nonsense dungeon maps and coming up with terrible ideas.

I remember I went to some game shop in some local mall and asked the guy for advice. He was like, “yeah i don’t know, but that guy’s into it” and pointed me to some customer who was a mega D&D nerd. He was surprisingly patient with my youthful excitement. I remember being like “So I can just… do anything in the game? I can be like, you kill the orc and his eyes are magic??” The guy was like … i can’t remember exactly what he said, but it was something like “You can, but probably don’t spend a lot of time on minutia. You probably don’t want your players spending 30 minutes checking every single trinket and orc body part for secret magic.”

I don’t really like D&D/its close relatives much anymore, but like many people it was my entry point.

Some feedback: the “hi I’m coi” thing at the top? I thought it was another LLM AI thing introducing itself. I closed the tab immediately, but then double checked when I read the rest of this post.

The social media links at the top, especially Twitter, are a negative for me. Fuck twitter and Facebook.

The big color buttons (that are not actually buttons) interspersed with text is a choice but it feels very bad-modern to me. If you’re going for more retro pre-shit, maybe take inspiration from https://evenbettermotherfucking.website/ or friends.