the noun "game" includes both physical components and ephemeral events, and rather than being imprecise language I think it keeps the uncomfortable truth that those two things are not as separable as we might like them to be
You're telling me an army of tiny animals, like thousands of really, really small animals, is what makes me sick, and that the way to stop them from invading is SOAP?
Tonight a mercedes made some aggressive lane changes/passes without using a turn signal. Then I noticed that the right side had a huge dent in it from an accident.
Then I noticed sticker on the back with mock counts of various kinds of pedestrians it had supposedly hit
What the hell dude holy shit
the sticker in unbelievably poor taste just like because of how many people are killed or injured by negligent drivers every day
but also then demonstrating through behavior that you definitely are ONE OF THOSE NEGLIGENT DRIVERS
The first genuinely honest ad for generative AI I've ever seen, from Microsoft / CoPilot
A mediocre white guy sees his non-white colleague getting praised for good work, he asks AI to *literally copy it*, and then he gets all the praise instead:
www.ispot.tv/ad/SoDi/micr...
sometimes I think a poster and I are on the same page with wry irony and then they'll respond with something surprisingly genuine-seeming and I worry my joke-post was interpreted as sincere.
the point of ttrpg is to have fun with people. bad rules get in the way of having fun. somewhat bad rules make having fun too easy.
a lot of the time fun is about having a bad time on purpose.
but the most important thing to remember is that you are having fun wrong and i hate you for it.
for all your fantasy plague needs!
start in the middle hex when your character contracts a disease, then each hour/day/week/month, roll a d6 and move in that direction! then check the color key to see how your character is doing
maybe if you get successful treatment, you can pick which way to go
Youtube Premium has a "download" feature which was enticing enough to make me try a trial run.
Turns out it doesn't appear to actually download the video onto your computer; it just seems to allow you to play it through youtube offline?
an absolute joke, lmao.
This is like how a subscription to Apple TV+ means you get to watch rate-limited 720p pixelated versions of the shows unless you use an Approved App which none of the devices I own are capable of running/logging into.
Not so much a service as a scam
This is a very me thing to say, but games are better when they are created for (and aware of) the specific material conditions of their play. More materialist games
Ryuutama is like, very intentionally built for its context (that is, the author is a professional GM at a tabletop cafe where parties are made up of rotating groups of players) and doesn't perform as well in different circumstances or among groups with different expectations but it's a joy to read
I'm really interested in this thing some rulesets do where they suddenly claim authority slightly outside their own scope. It produces incongruity sometimes; they're sort of liminal rules.
It would be a bad-faith reading to treat a "violation" Rule 0 of Farewell to Arms: Redux the same way you treat a violation of a rule in like chess, for example.
You might say that these are Exogenous rules (governing human-activity social disposition) which go out of their way to insist that they are Endogenous ones (governing player play-activity) and that's weird.
I'm really interested in this thing some rulesets do where they suddenly claim authority slightly outside their own scope. It produces incongruity sometimes; they're sort of liminal rules.
In all of these examples, the rules are attempting to use game-mechanical text to dictate something like what a player's attitude toward play should be. The result is, to me, pretty strange rules.
To be clear I understand and agree with the rhetorical aims in all of these examples: but taking the rhetorical aims seriously means weakening procedural/mechanical rules as useful game-structures at all.
I'm really interested in this thing some rulesets do where they suddenly claim authority slightly outside their own scope. It produces incongruity sometimes; they're sort of liminal rules.
Another is Farewell to Arms: Redux's Rule 0, which gives players blanket authority to ignore any rules **except** using them as "enactment or analog" of real-world atrocities. "War is never to be glorified."
Certain presentations of safety tools like the X card which are rules-like can produce odd situations where an enterprising player might have to refrain from appropriating the safety tool for game-advantage, which @samsorensen.bsky.social mentioned recently in Dead Letters.
I'm really interested in this thing some rulesets do where they suddenly claim authority slightly outside their own scope. It produces incongruity sometimes; they're sort of liminal rules.
I loved drawing some old school monochrome dungeon and hex map work for a zine Wicked North Games are pulling together. (wickednorthgames.com) . They asked for something simple, which I overshot slightly and had to be reigned in, ha ha. So much fun. #osr#dnd#ttrpg#dungeonmap#dungeoncrawl
tables for materials, kite shape & size. Players are meant to draw their kite.
then for flying weather and wind conditions, kites have a %chance to fly, once flying a stability roll to see how high it can go
I loved this movie to pieces and will make no attempts in convincing anyone else to watch it, as it being a massive flop is hilariously and thematically appropriate.
"snowpiercer is trying to say that class societ-" WRONG, snowpiercer is saying that it even in the worst circumstances that it kicks ass to be on a train