I accidentally made a rom-com subplot in one of my games… Twice… And the players loved it both times.

The first time there was a divorced smith lady who sort of had a death wish, and the timid tavern owner who had a massive crush on her. Of course the players wanted to set them up.

The second time, the players had to infiltrate a masquerade ball. Sadly I’m starting to forget the details. I think there was tension around meeting them while masked and, like a rom com, trying to figure out what they thought about the PC. And then they tried to get the NPC involved in their heist, because they just happened to have a skill they needed. And of course it wasn’t a clean heist, and the NPC had some trauma.

Mergers and acquisitions should be a lot harder than they are. Maybe even prohibited in nearly all cases.

Those people aren’t a good match for you (or maybe anyone).

Meanwhile Canada is removing bike lanes for more car support, and the US elected a deeply anti-environment party.

Their first pathfinder game was so excruciatingly guide dang it I never finished it, and never even considered this game. I kind of assumed it was the same way, where there’s stuff like “Ah, you didn’t return to this unmarked forest on day 7, so now you never get a wizard”

Oh, now I remember having an argument on here with some asshole who insisted I just have “fomo” over this. Sign posting and foreshadowing are only to appease fomo, I guess.

Sometimes I feel like I want to play a game that I’d run, but then I realize that’s the cliche “Go write a book”

Some people probably know them in real life. Like, you might have a friend who’s like “Yeah this [slur] wouldn’t update her mod so i posted [hateful thing] on her insta”. You could talk to them. People listen to their in-group more than randoms online.

But then again, the worst sort of people probably mostly have the worst sort of friends, and reinforce their bad behavior.

Video Games are a broad medium, akin to reading. Asking “should I get into books?” would be similarly difficult to answer.

Also, be mindful of sturgeon’s law. 90% of everything is crap. For every “Taylor Swift” that was widely popular and successful, there’s 9 meh bands no one remembers.

All of that said, it’s a wide and deep medium with a lot of experiences.

If you like card games, there’re related genres. Deck builders are popular. Slay the Spire is popular. Cobalt Core is fun and not as hard. Monster Train is pretty good.

Those are all also “rogue lites”, so you could make the leap from there to something like FTL.

Lots of options.

Probably don’t spend a lot of money up front. Stuff goes on sale on Steam pretty often.

Probably avoid “gacha” games that are free to play or have “loot box” stuff. Those tend to be exploitive and bad.

I get the impression that some people have such decision fatigue, asking them to do something seemingly trivial is akin to asking someone without limbs to pick up a spoon.

People’s brains don’t work good.

Most people don’t know much, and don’t care that they don’t know much. Half of US adults can’t read at a 6th grade level. They don’t care about and probably do not understand complex topics.

That’s it. They just want cat gifs, and that’s the end of the thought.

I knew someone who was smart and successful and politically aware. She didn’t care about any of this. She was tired from work and just wanted the familiar ease or twitter. Trying to figure out which server to sign up for and finding content was too much work.

A lot of people have executive dysfunction. Making a choice is hard.

“would you rather have nothing to eat, or poison?”

If you eat nothing, maybe you can figure out a better solution with your remaining time. If you eat poison, you’re probably going to be too sick (or dead) to improve things.

Trump is poison.

Also Biden did improve some things, so it’s less “nothing” and more “some crackers”. Sure, a full meal would be better.

t’s not stupidity, it was a clear option between something the American people know does not work, and something that might work.

There is no reasonable expectation that Trump would “work” for anyone outside of some very wealthy and grifters. So, yes, voting for Trump is stupid.

Accelerationists can fuck off.

Satire is dead. Unfortunately, this guy somehow survives despite his best efforts to get sick.

Never used Facebook much. Nor Myspace before it. Seemed like it had some obvious pitfalls that everyone else was ignoring.

Used Twitter for a little while, but it was just making me mad. Then horrible guy bought it, so I deleted the already abandoned account.

Instagram also seemed like a source of feeling bad, so I never used it much.

I left reddit recently. It had some good content but the ownership sucks. With general Internet search getting bad, losing reddit sucks. Like, I searched yesterday for how to disable a setting in some app, and landed on some AI slop website that told me to write a letter to my local news station.

So this is all that’s left for me. It’s frustrating that most people don’t give a shit and will just move on to the next private platform. I had a friend who was generally smart and successful, but she just didn’t give a shit about this kind of thing. She wanted her easy entertainment, so she was on all the major platforms. Mastodon “didn’t have good content” so she didn’t use it.

Yeah I don’t think anything will change until disruptive protests happen. Like, republicans resigning from office because they’re afraid.

Unfortunately, the far-right has almost all the money and guns, and a lot of bootlickers. And no one wants to throw their life away by shooting some red hats senators or billionaires.

When I encounter a GM who has like pages of lore, I’m always like “Would you rather write a book?”

Stuff like this can be very good, but be aware there are some players who hate this. Some people just want to be told a story, and if you ask them to be too creative they’ll have a bad time. Sometimes it’s because they’re new and nervous, but sometimes that’s just how they are.

Also some players just routinely have difficult ideas that don’t mesh with the group. Like everyone else is vibing on a serious dark modern day vampire political game, and they’re like “I want to be a ninja turtle from Mars with a reanimated dead fish for a head”. Like, what. Maybe some people enjoy “zany” off-theme stuff. Not me.

Or the player that always wants to be themselves. Or an amnesiac.

Gosh I’ve had so many players I didn’t enjoy.

Anyway. Player input is also built nicely into Fate, both in campaign creation and scenes. I’m a fan. Spend a fate point and declare a story detail like “every Razer Space Technology office has a helipad with a chopper ready to go. It’s because the CEO is weirdly hands on and loves helicopters.”

as an almost maximally privileged person (cis straight etc), i want my whining fellows to shut the fuck up. Just stop. Stop taking up all the god damn space. Just be quiet. It’s okay not to be included in every scene all the time.

Your point about not assuming people are straight by default is valid. But I mostly just want some cis-het folks to stop embarrassing me by being fucking insufferable.

A dark souls kind of slow paced combat game, but built for co-op. Except I don’t have any friends who are on the same skill level and schedule.

More broadly, I really want more games that you can play co-op in where the players are vastly different skill levels, but it’s still fun. I don’t know how to solve this.

I can imagine like a game where one person is playing dark souls and the other is playing candy crush, and they interact somehow. Like making matches in one give estus in the other, and killing bosses gives stuff.

Basically I want to play games with my frienda that don’t play the same games, somehow.

I don’t think I understand what you’re talking about. Perhaps some examples would help.

I do think some people hold themselves to too low of a standard, though. There’s a song I like that has the line "I don’t want you to romanticize falling the fuck apart ". I think some people are just like “well, I ghosted my friend and didn’t do my tasks at work and didn’t feed my cat but life is hard am I right? No other way I could be. Time to go drink alone and watch TV”

I failed calc2 and am gainfully employed as a mid/upper level software engineer.

One guy at work really saved the day because he’s good at math, and made a very slow process much faster because he knows … uh… vector math? He did magic with numpy